What if Crafting was the ONLY way to get items?

Emergence

Let's pretend in a world of PvE and Questing, all you ever got as a reward as gold, experience, and possibly resources to use in crafting (or not, your decision).

Now let's say in the game world, player crafter and NPC shops were the ONLY way to get gear. There is no "finding" gear on mobs or treasure chests. There are no raid loots or PvP items. Everything is player-crafted or NPC-store-bought.

All items decayed as well, via use and breaking. Repairing is a player-only skill. NPC's don't repair.

 

 

What do you think the game would be like?

What do you think the community would be like?

Pros? Cons?

bastionix

Originally posted by Emergence

What do you think the game would be like?

Dead lol. I don't believe enough people like crafting or that they can crafting exciting enough.

desaster02

there is such a game already its called Xsyon

Raven

Lineage 2 used to be exactly like that minus the item decay, at the start and until they recently added common items, drops were so rare, I dont think I have ever saw a full drop from a mob from prelude to C1, everything had to be crafted.

I cant comment on the decay but I can tell you that a game where crafting is the most important, and lets face it you could be lucky if you had a full drop but it was like winning the lottery, you were VERY VERY lucky, that realistically you had to craft, this added mechanic added a lot to the inter guild and alliance relations.

Back in the day when L2 was released not only did you get common materials but some rare materials and parts could only be farmed inside some what could be considered hard dungeons, I remember having to travel with my guild to the end of Giant's Cave to get Full Plate parts as that is where it dropped. Because of this guilds had to create crafting systems, and relied a lot on members putting stuff on the guild bank, because items were not soul bound it meant when someone got a new piece, the old piece from that person was passed down to the next in line, so someone having an item meant a whole array of people got an upgrade.

Bosses dropped special jewelery as well, there was this boss in this dungeon Cruma Tower called Core, it wasnt particularly hard but it required that you had a rogue with a particular level of lockpicking and some coordination to go in, he did once in a while drop a necklace, and this relic had to pretty much be shared by a whole alliance, so it was quite an interesting event when a lot of people went in and you were given this item that very few people had.

Where this system goes wrong, is gold farmers, NCSoft was weak at stopping gold farmers when L2 was in its infancy, and they inflated the economy and flooded the market with raw materials, which made people turn to them to buy materials for crafting instead, and then buying gold from their website for the same effect creating a vicious circle, so doing this sort of thing really does require a lot of security put in place and an iron fist on these ppl cheating the system.

Still the system is the same in Korea and it is still the second biggest P2P in the world right now, most of the stuff in game still needs to be crafted and a lot of people do it.

kingfelix

I think you pretty much described Ryzom. 

 

Anyway, I don't mind finding items on mobs if it makes sense, i.e. a bandit might have a sword of piece of armor but finding a battle axe inside of a boar is pretty ridiculous. However, I do think that the best items should always be crafted by players.

jeorat

The original Star Wars Galaxies ruleset was like this (no idea how it works post NGE/whatever). You needed a set of resources to craft items, and the quality of resources affected the quality of the completed item. Resource quality shifted every few days making searching for and harvesting resources a subgame for itself. Personally, I loved this system :-)

Emergence

Does anyone know if Vanguard had quality of resources affect quality of items?

I loved crafting in Vanguard.

ScribZ

Originally posted by desaster02

there is such a game already its called Xsyon

 Partially true, everything in game is crafted with no loot/gear drops true, but the initial OP had NPCs in his idea. Xsyon doesn't have those at all. But yeah the idea is great actually and the more of these games like that the better. Hook the players by making them feel important and needed in the world instead of dangling carrots in front of thier face to try and trick them into staying. It really is the better way to go.

Loke666

A game like that would have to have very little grind, you should probably get crafting levels more or less for free as you get the regular ones. It would also have to include the option to use different skins or color when you craft so not everyone looks the same.

As for item decay it is not a huge problem as long as you can repair an item infinitive times. If you can't the game can't have the same focus on items that most MMOs today have.

This would work excellent in a game with high focus on skills and attributes. A game focused on gear would probably not be as good.

It do make sense that only player or NPc can forge armor, they actually have to fit and the more advanced armor the more customized need it to be for a certain person.

With weapons it isn't quite as logical but I guess you could have mobs with natural weapons (like dragons, chimeras, manticores and so on) and mobs with really crappy stuff, no one would take a gnoll spear or orc sword unless forced to since it is inferior in any ways.

I think that the game could still be very fun. Best would be use the mechanics from one of the many P&P games were a character more or less can use the same gear the entire time while the character improves a lot, like Runequest, Warhammer fantasy RPG or ARS magica. Sandbox or themepark actually matter little.

To take a game like EQ or Wow and just add this would however not work at all. Those games are far to focused on items and gear drops.

Warmaker

Originally posted by bastionix

Originally posted by Emergence

What do you think the game would be like?

Dead lol. I don't believe enough people like crafting or that they can crafting exciting enough.

Narrow minded.

You don't have to craft to attain the items even if gameplay made all items in-game available through crafting.  Ever heard of in-game economy or anything related to that?  Certain people don't like crafting.  That's a given.  Certain people DO like crafting.  That is also a given.  And they're the ones that will put the time and resources to produce whatever in-game goods that the community wants.  They're the ones that will will put the time in to try to sell their stuff at competetive prices to earn their money.  Competition and all that.

The system can work.  It's practically been done before.  And it was done well with crafting being just as essential to the game, player-run economy, and the community.  Just as important to the game as combat is.  The only problem is that everything these days follow the old bait & carrot technique of "cool lewts" while crafting is implemented in a half-a**ed manner.  As if the devs simply had to put crafting in but didn't really want to.  It's no wonder so manyt crafting systems suck these days, hence the half-a**ed remark.

Kyleran

I have no objection to a crafting only based economy, as long as there's a mechanism in place for me to earn enough cash to pay for crafted gear without actually having to craft myself.

Someone mentioned Lineage 2 earlier, great game but the economy was borked (perhaps by the gold farmers, but perhaps not so much) in that it was designed so you had to have two characters, one that you leveled with and one that you crafted with.

Since leveling a character was a full time job due to its severe leveling curve, many people didn't want to do it so they turned to botting or gold buying to avoid the pain of doing the crafting as well.

So the trick is to make sure there's balance, best gear can be crafted, provided the best crafting materials are drops that the player hunter/gatherers are out collecting.