Very few games actually have a good crafting system...very few.
Currently I would have to say Vanguard Saga of Heroes has the best, though there are a few older games that might compete with it.
Vanguard needs to be brought back to life. The game was designed to be upgraded to the unreal 3 engine, which is possible if Sony decides to invest money and marketing into it. A stand alone expansion would be a good idea. Or a reboot of the franchise itself. Most of the work is already done.
I would say Vanguard but I found it to be very tedious after awhile.. Though I did enjoy being able to group harvest a single resource node and I wish more MMOs did that.
Best crafting system ever was Asheron's Call but that is 10 years past its prime.
VG has a good but tedious crafting system (all crafting is a mini-game)
DFO crafting is meh at best. I expect the devs to eventually roll out some improvements to the crafting system. The basic mechanics are in game they just need to flesh them out quite a bit.
for once it seems that most people are more or less agreeing with each other - the suggestions mirror each other, kind of interesting, I think.
also the reflection of the value - a number of games do have some interesting crafting, but they have little impact on making a profit.
take LOTRO e.g. - the crafting is a bit boring, but it is different. The one I really like if farming. But otherwise it is just a bar you watch growing. Some items though can be better than loot or rewards, but nowadays those are also just grind items which guildies give away to lower level players.
SWG is still good in as much, as some items just can not be found or bought from NPCs. Harvesters, or components for them, certain foods, etc. In that aspect the interdependency on the player driven economy still exists, idiotic pricing aside.
And that is the problem in the end - even if crafting makes sense because it can give you an advantage for you gear for example, it is often tedious and boring and the prices for such items, if valuable, are horrendous for casual players. For average or hardcore it doesn't matter, because they often have more cash than they ever need.
Vanguard, hands down. It's not even a contest. Move along, folks.
Too bad the game is dead, which is pretty much a mystery to me because it's an awesome game IMHO. Every time I read on forums about why people thing vanguard sucks, I think to myself, "Err... this guy can't possibly have played vanguard".
Not so much relevant to the discussion of crafting, which I've never really been that interested in, but I really miss the resource gathering mechanics from SWG. Shifting resources with varied weaknesses/strengths that you had to manually hunt down to a hotspot, where you would set up your own little mining camp consisting of extractors, power generators and possibly a small house to hold the resources and a vendor to sell them. I've always preferred to be the resource-gatherer rather than the crafter. I like the interdependancy and social bonds the role fosters. I was a miner in UO and still spend a significant chunk of time mining in EVE too.
I couldnt agree more. If crafting was viable again, I would go back to SWG.
I don't think Fallen Earth has a good crafting system at all. It might, if there was a little bit of diversity and if it had something that even slightly resembled an economy. Fallen Earth crafting is just annoying at best. You have to wait long periods of time to get anything and the materials are just a pain to manage and gather. There are alot of materials, but only a few are rare and they are very rare. People like to tout it as one of the best crafting games around. IMHO, it's probably one of the worst crafting games around. Everyone and their brother is a crafter.... so going crafter just gimps you.
I guess it depends on how you play the game. With my character, I pick up most of the stuff I come along. Sure, sometimes I don't feel like it and ride past, but all in all, most stuff I see I take along. And with that, I rarely don't have the materials to craft stuff. Sure, every now and then I miss something, but that happens very rarely.
About the "waiting", I don't get that. You wait in games like WoW for stuff to finish crafting, since you can't do stuff in the meantime. In FE it runs in the background or even while you are offline. Not to mention you can log out at a workshop to increase the crafting speed further.
And sure, there are lots of crafts. But that doesn't bother me. Most of the stuff I craft for myself, and if I don't need something I take it apart. Every now and then I also sell stuff in the AH, and most of the time someone buys it. I don't see a problem with that.
That your character gets weaker when you craft: it's your own choice. If your characters needs intelligence only for crafting, and you put tons of points into it, then you decide to later on have less AP for other stuff. It's not like in WoW where everyone can be a perfect crafter and a perfect fighter. I like that diversity.
So, as said, FE has for me the most enjoyable crafting system of all games I played. But that's my opinion, and you have another one, which ain't a bad thing.
I know this is an old thread, but I've been thinking about this lately so I looked for a post about this and found one already established.
On topic though, I've played a bit of SWG, but I never got into the crafting, although from what I've heard it was pretty nice having the players control things. The only other experiecnces I've had with mmo's were all the "make this to lvl and sell to an NPC, then make this and sell to an NPC. Finish with this epic gear only to have it replaced with a drop a week later." (Yes, I'm talking mainly about WoW here since that was the most recent thing.)
My favourite crafting in any game I've done, however, was in UO (Ultima Online for the younger crowd). In one word, awesome. Collecting materials was roughly the same, save having to go to some areas with mobs in it that weren't friendly. The best part about it was what you made was roughly random with stats (granted it was kind of annoying if you were aiming for a certain stat, but it's the luck of the draw). Lets go with blacksmithing, you would use different types of ore if you wanted different resistances (ie. one for frost, another for fire etc.). Later on you would also get runic / fancier tools that you would use like any other smithing hammer, but it added bonus stats that you couldn't control, but sometimes would make some awesome gear. Because of this, players would set up malls where you would go and just browse gear for a while at all the options (I don't like shoping, but in a game I can stand it). That and people would pay other people to have thier npc's be placed inside other people's malls so they could get thier wares shown.
The best part though was after you crafted something, you had two options. You could sell it to other players or npc OR you could smelt your crafted items back down into ingots. The higher your skill lvl, the more ingots you could get back from it and be able to craft even more with another chance to lvl up/chance at crafting a wicked item. They did this with leather working and tailoring as well, you could just cut up your item with scissors and make another piece of gear. I wonder if they'll ever implement this crafting in a newer mmo... crafting seems like an after thought now adays.
Are there any games with an alternative graphical interface for crafting than the normal view of gameplay + progress bar??
I am only asking because I absolutely love designing games that work in 2D. You can do so much, and your mind is so free to do so much more!
Instead of seeing the same screen as always, watching your character pound an anvil while a progress bar fills up (talk about uninteresting graphics...)
How about a completely different screen? Where you take your mouse and move it around to different objects, with animated cogs and gears, anvils and furnaces, showing you a first person view of the crafting process?
Why limit it to only a progress bar??
What about a mini-game all to itself??
If being a developer means being quiet, mature, well-spoken, and disconnected from the community, then by all means do me a favor and believe I'm not one.
Rift is doing a pretty good job with crafting since I now know you can break down the things you crafted into mats, but I do miss the player houseing in UO and I guess Vanguard (since I haven't played it).
Star Wars Galaxies was the best, hands down. You could create unique items and make a name for yourself on your server. You could have your own store and decorate it with your goods. Its complexity started with gathering the necessary components with the best stats. Sometimes you had to scour the planet for the best resources, or even leave your world and explore others to find the best. If it was mining, you had to manage your mining equipement. If it was collecting hides, bone or meat you had to know what animals lived where and the quality of stuff they typically dropped. Once you were actually crafting, you could add extra things to increase the stats, or use various components that had the stats you needed to create the best item. And then there were experiment points you could throw in there to make it even better and unique, though it was a bit of a gamble.
At times I think I loved my crafter as much as my adventurer. I loved making stuff for myself, decorating my house, building my own equipment, mining gear, vehicles, etc. It was also fun having my own store, but it did suck up some of my adventuring time.
The only game that even seemed remotely as complex was maybe Ryzom, but I never got to deep into the game as a whole. It was similar in some ways to SWG though in that stats of gathered items mattered in the final product.
For a deep, immersive, entertaining and unique crafting system though, SWG had it all.
I'll probably get flamed for this, but I find the FFXIV crafting, the mini game aspect of it, actually a bit fun and more interactive then the click and wait of WoW and far better than the annoying mini game EQ2 crafting tries to pull off. Not sure what it is, but it is ONE aspect of FFXIV I actually like. It reminds me of a watered down version of Vanguards crafting which is pretty good too.
Rift is doing a pretty good job with crafting since I now know you can break down the things you crafted into mats, but I do miss the player houseing in UO and I guess Vanguard (since I haven't played it).
Rifts crafting is as bad as Wows and most other games.
Vanguards is the best around now, SWG used to have a better before the NGE. APB also had a fine system and in some ways it was superior to any other.
Crafting should be about designing stuff, not grinding points and making loads of useless stuff. This is the part of MMOs that are easiest to improve, and I hope someone do soon.
For me be a toss up between Fallen Earth and Ryzom. Ryzom for being able to affect the end stats and choose what HP/Mana/Etc modifiers you want. Fallen Earth for the really nifty fact that you can craft while you adventure or even while you are offline.
Ah, ever so many concepts in Ryzom that I'd like to see in a AAA game...
SWG is probably the best. The crafting was a game in itself, unlike most MMO's, where it's more like a reward system for clicking on nodes.
SWG was awesome, and still in in many respects (I know.../ducks)
But a deep crafting system is dead without a great player riven economy to support it, and this is where SWG's crafting system sits now... utterly neutered by the sloppily tacked on loot driven economy (and lack of item decay).
Star Wars Galaxies was the best, hands down. You could create unique items and make a name for yourself on your server. You could have your own store and decorate it with your goods. Its complexity started with gathering the necessary components with the best stats. Sometimes you had to scour the planet for the best resources, or even leave your world and explore others to find the best. If it was mining, you had to manage your mining equipement. If it was collecting hides, bone or meat you had to know what animals lived where and the quality of stuff they typically dropped. Once you were actually crafting, you could add extra things to increase the stats, or use various components that had the stats you needed to create the best item. And then there were experiment points you could throw in there to make it even better and unique, though it was a bit of a gamble.
At times I think I loved my crafter as much as my adventurer. I loved making stuff for myself, decorating my house, building my own equipment, mining gear, vehicles, etc. It was also fun having my own store, but it did suck up some of my adventuring time.
The only game that even seemed remotely as complex was maybe Ryzom, but I never got to deep into the game as a whole. It was similar in some ways to SWG though in that stats of gathered items mattered in the final product.
For a deep, immersive, entertaining and unique crafting system though, SWG had it all.
The crafting 'endgame' of SWG might have been complex and greatly varied but the skilling up part of crafting was atricious. It was a pointles grind with a lousy UI designed to make you stop crafting before you got to the interesting parts though sheer boredom and the fact that your mouse hand would cramp up from all the useless clicking.
Before SWG I used to be a devout crafter but after experiencing trying to skill up my crafting in SWG my favourite feature of the WoW crafting system was the Create All button.
I used to think SWG was the best crafting system available and it might still be, but there is a rather obscure MMO which has an even better crafting system. It is called dawntide and is currently in open beta it has roughly 15 crafting professions ranging from leatherworking to masonry. You can build armor and weapons but also jewelry houses boats mining tools enchantment clothes the lot. The only downside is that it is still in beta, but the craftingsystem is finished as far as I can tell it is only the combat the is still in the works.
Besides all the crafting professions there are also several kinds of resources. Although there aren't as many resources as in SWG they do affect the quality of your product and with it its damage/durability.
Comments
Not a big crafting fan, but Vanguard had the best i have seen.
Very few games actually have a good crafting system...very few.
Currently I would have to say Vanguard Saga of Heroes has the best, though there are a few older games that might compete with it.
Vanguard needs to be brought back to life. The game was designed to be upgraded to the unreal 3 engine, which is possible if Sony decides to invest money and marketing into it. A stand alone expansion would be a good idea. Or a reboot of the franchise itself. Most of the work is already done.
Vanguard hands down have the best crafting system to date. Too bad the rest of the game is kind crappy.
1: Anarchy Online = wise and very complex system 999 points
2:Fallen Earth = Fun 100 points
Generation P
I would say Vanguard but I found it to be very tedious after awhile.. Though I did enjoy being able to group harvest a single resource node and I wish more MMOs did that.
UO I guess was the best I have played yet.
Best crafting system ever was Asheron's Call but that is 10 years past its prime.
VG has a good but tedious crafting system (all crafting is a mini-game)
DFO crafting is meh at best. I expect the devs to eventually roll out some improvements to the crafting system. The basic mechanics are in game they just need to flesh them out quite a bit.
No contest at all for crafting/housing/city building SWG had the best of any MMO's (Pre-cu)
for once it seems that most people are more or less agreeing with each other - the suggestions mirror each other, kind of interesting, I think.
also the reflection of the value - a number of games do have some interesting crafting, but they have little impact on making a profit.
take LOTRO e.g. - the crafting is a bit boring, but it is different. The one I really like if farming. But otherwise it is just a bar you watch growing. Some items though can be better than loot or rewards, but nowadays those are also just grind items which guildies give away to lower level players.
SWG is still good in as much, as some items just can not be found or bought from NPCs. Harvesters, or components for them, certain foods, etc. In that aspect the interdependency on the player driven economy still exists, idiotic pricing aside.
And that is the problem in the end - even if crafting makes sense because it can give you an advantage for you gear for example, it is often tedious and boring and the prices for such items, if valuable, are horrendous for casual players. For average or hardcore it doesn't matter, because they often have more cash than they ever need.
Vanguard, hands down. It's not even a contest. Move along, folks.
Too bad the game is dead, which is pretty much a mystery to me because it's an awesome game IMHO. Every time I read on forums about why people thing vanguard sucks, I think to myself, "Err... this guy can't possibly have played vanguard".
I couldnt agree more. If crafting was viable again, I would go back to SWG.
I guess it depends on how you play the game. With my character, I pick up most of the stuff I come along. Sure, sometimes I don't feel like it and ride past, but all in all, most stuff I see I take along. And with that, I rarely don't have the materials to craft stuff. Sure, every now and then I miss something, but that happens very rarely.
About the "waiting", I don't get that. You wait in games like WoW for stuff to finish crafting, since you can't do stuff in the meantime. In FE it runs in the background or even while you are offline. Not to mention you can log out at a workshop to increase the crafting speed further.
And sure, there are lots of crafts. But that doesn't bother me. Most of the stuff I craft for myself, and if I don't need something I take it apart. Every now and then I also sell stuff in the AH, and most of the time someone buys it. I don't see a problem with that.
That your character gets weaker when you craft: it's your own choice. If your characters needs intelligence only for crafting, and you put tons of points into it, then you decide to later on have less AP for other stuff. It's not like in WoW where everyone can be a perfect crafter and a perfect fighter. I like that diversity.
So, as said, FE has for me the most enjoyable crafting system of all games I played. But that's my opinion, and you have another one, which ain't a bad thing.
Let's play Fallen Earth (blind, 300 episodes)
Let's play Guild Wars 2 (blind, 45 episodes)
I know this is an old thread, but I've been thinking about this lately so I looked for a post about this and found one already established.
On topic though, I've played a bit of SWG, but I never got into the crafting, although from what I've heard it was pretty nice having the players control things. The only other experiecnces I've had with mmo's were all the "make this to lvl and sell to an NPC, then make this and sell to an NPC. Finish with this epic gear only to have it replaced with a drop a week later." (Yes, I'm talking mainly about WoW here since that was the most recent thing.)
My favourite crafting in any game I've done, however, was in UO (Ultima Online for the younger crowd). In one word, awesome. Collecting materials was roughly the same, save having to go to some areas with mobs in it that weren't friendly. The best part about it was what you made was roughly random with stats (granted it was kind of annoying if you were aiming for a certain stat, but it's the luck of the draw). Lets go with blacksmithing, you would use different types of ore if you wanted different resistances (ie. one for frost, another for fire etc.). Later on you would also get runic / fancier tools that you would use like any other smithing hammer, but it added bonus stats that you couldn't control, but sometimes would make some awesome gear. Because of this, players would set up malls where you would go and just browse gear for a while at all the options (I don't like shoping, but in a game I can stand it). That and people would pay other people to have thier npc's be placed inside other people's malls so they could get thier wares shown.
The best part though was after you crafted something, you had two options. You could sell it to other players or npc OR you could smelt your crafted items back down into ingots. The higher your skill lvl, the more ingots you could get back from it and be able to craft even more with another chance to lvl up/chance at crafting a wicked item. They did this with leather working and tailoring as well, you could just cut up your item with scissors and make another piece of gear. I wonder if they'll ever implement this crafting in a newer mmo... crafting seems like an after thought now adays.
Second Life. If you master its crafting system you can even get a job in RL.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
Are there any games with an alternative graphical interface for crafting than the normal view of gameplay + progress bar??
I am only asking because I absolutely love designing games that work in 2D. You can do so much, and your mind is so free to do so much more!
Instead of seeing the same screen as always, watching your character pound an anvil while a progress bar fills up (talk about uninteresting graphics...)
How about a completely different screen? Where you take your mouse and move it around to different objects, with animated cogs and gears, anvils and furnaces, showing you a first person view of the crafting process?
Why limit it to only a progress bar??
What about a mini-game all to itself??
If being a developer means being quiet, mature, well-spoken, and disconnected from the community, then by all means do me a favor and believe I'm not one.
Rift is doing a pretty good job with crafting since I now know you can break down the things you crafted into mats, but I do miss the player houseing in UO and I guess Vanguard (since I haven't played it).
Star Wars Galaxies was the best, hands down. You could create unique items and make a name for yourself on your server. You could have your own store and decorate it with your goods. Its complexity started with gathering the necessary components with the best stats. Sometimes you had to scour the planet for the best resources, or even leave your world and explore others to find the best. If it was mining, you had to manage your mining equipement. If it was collecting hides, bone or meat you had to know what animals lived where and the quality of stuff they typically dropped. Once you were actually crafting, you could add extra things to increase the stats, or use various components that had the stats you needed to create the best item. And then there were experiment points you could throw in there to make it even better and unique, though it was a bit of a gamble.
At times I think I loved my crafter as much as my adventurer. I loved making stuff for myself, decorating my house, building my own equipment, mining gear, vehicles, etc. It was also fun having my own store, but it did suck up some of my adventuring time.
The only game that even seemed remotely as complex was maybe Ryzom, but I never got to deep into the game as a whole. It was similar in some ways to SWG though in that stats of gathered items mattered in the final product.
For a deep, immersive, entertaining and unique crafting system though, SWG had it all.
Hmm... maybe I should have tried crafting in SWG instead of just adventuring.
Here are all of the best. In order based on personal experience. Anything else is generic rubbish.
1. Star Wars Galaxies
2. Vanguard
3. EVE
4. Ryzom
5. Fallen Earth
6. Darkfall
7. Istaria
8. Anarchy Online
9. WURM
Really hard to say which is best but UO, Eve, FE, Istaria, Ryzom have good crafting systems with EQII and LOTRO getting honorable mentions.
Problem is crafting will never be taken serious until item destruction comes back.
I'll probably get flamed for this, but I find the FFXIV crafting, the mini game aspect of it, actually a bit fun and more interactive then the click and wait of WoW and far better than the annoying mini game EQ2 crafting tries to pull off. Not sure what it is, but it is ONE aspect of FFXIV I actually like. It reminds me of a watered down version of Vanguards crafting which is pretty good too.
Rifts crafting is as bad as Wows and most other games.
Vanguards is the best around now, SWG used to have a better before the NGE. APB also had a fine system and in some ways it was superior to any other.
Crafting should be about designing stuff, not grinding points and making loads of useless stuff. This is the part of MMOs that are easiest to improve, and I hope someone do soon.
Ah, ever so many concepts in Ryzom that I'd like to see in a AAA game...
SWG is probably the best. The crafting was a game in itself, unlike most MMO's, where it's more like a reward system for clicking on nodes.
SWG was awesome, and still in in many respects (I know.../ducks)
But a deep crafting system is dead without a great player riven economy to support it, and this is where SWG's crafting system sits now... utterly neutered by the sloppily tacked on loot driven economy (and lack of item decay).
The crafting 'endgame' of SWG might have been complex and greatly varied but the skilling up part of crafting was atricious. It was a pointles grind with a lousy UI designed to make you stop crafting before you got to the interesting parts though sheer boredom and the fact that your mouse hand would cramp up from all the useless clicking.
Before SWG I used to be a devout crafter but after experiencing trying to skill up my crafting in SWG my favourite feature of the WoW crafting system was the Create All button.
I used to think SWG was the best crafting system available and it might still be, but there is a rather obscure MMO which has an even better crafting system. It is called dawntide and is currently in open beta it has roughly 15 crafting professions ranging from leatherworking to masonry. You can build armor and weapons but also jewelry houses boats mining tools enchantment clothes the lot. The only downside is that it is still in beta, but the craftingsystem is finished as far as I can tell it is only the combat the is still in the works.
Besides all the crafting professions there are also several kinds of resources. Although there aren't as many resources as in SWG they do affect the quality of your product and with it its damage/durability.
[mod edit]