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Crafting Systems
duront
Member Posts: 1
Which MMORPG has the best crafting system?
Comments
Horizons: Empire of Istaria.
I personally think A Tale in the Desert has the best crafting system followed by horizons and eve.
I keep hearing about Horizon's legendary crafting system. Could someone who is familiar with the game please explain a little bit about it, specifically why it is so superior?
Same for ATID, if possible. The only MMo I've gotten involved with heavily enough to bother with crafting was UO, so if you use that as a reference point for clarity, I'd appreciate it.
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Listen Asmodeeus, seven years ago, Ultima Online didn't even have those pathetic "quests" that you refer to or those "professions" of ninja, samurai, necromancer, and paladin. Nor did it have any of the neon crap, or bug mounts. It didn't even have any "combat moves." You turned on attack and jousted with simplistic swings. It was a better game then. if you can't guess why then just uninstall the thing and move along. - Crabby
Doesnt really matter in horizons case. The game bombed....
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Listen Asmodeeus, seven years ago, Ultima Online didn't even have those pathetic "quests" that you refer to or those "professions" of ninja, samurai, necromancer, and paladin. Nor did it have any of the neon crap, or bug mounts. It didn't even have any "combat moves." You turned on attack and jousted with simplistic swings. It was a better game then. if you can't guess why then just uninstall the thing and move along. - Crabby
A tale in the deserts crafting system is the best on the market, pretty much becuase it's the core of the game.
Its ALL crafting, with some side puzzles throwen in.
Now don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the beta. But if your looking for action packed combat, this isn't the mmorpg to look at.
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Listen Asmodeeus, seven years ago, Ultima Online didn't even have those pathetic "quests" that you refer to or those "professions" of ninja, samurai, necromancer, and paladin. Nor did it have any of the neon crap, or bug mounts. It didn't even have any "combat moves." You turned on attack and jousted with simplistic swings. It was a better game then. if you can't guess why then just uninstall the thing and move along. - Crabby
you start with nothing
you find some flint at the side of a river
you knap the flint against some more to make a crude knife
you cut some wood with this knife
you build a plane out of flint blades and wood
you cut the wood into boards
you make the boards into a brick rack
you collect grass and dry it out to get straw
you mix mud with straw to get wet bricks
you place the bricks onto the drying rack
you collect 500 bricks
you build your house.
And then your ready to play. Thats just the tutorial
scientology
SWG. Specifically, SWG Bio Engineer. It started off as a crap crafting class, but it evolved into a really unique experience with the ability to create totally unique creature traits and put them into a multitude of skins. The rest of the crafting system isn't too bad either.
I have tinkered with the EQ2 trial, and it's crafting system looks very interesting. Too bad they don't let you get off that island in the trial. It really got me interested, but not quite enough to quit what I am currently playing. I would have liked to see the real cities and housing and such.
I wasn't that impressed with Horizon's crafting system. I thought SWG had a better system (and that was without throwing in the bio-engineer).
Horizons hands down.
Crafting in Horizons went far beyond making armor and weapons.
You had a whole series of crafting arts dedicated to building houses and repairing structures around the game world which impacted and changed the game world.
"We feel gold selling and websites that promote it damage games like Vanguard and will do everything possible to combat it."
Brad McQuaid
Chairman & CEO, Sigil Games Online, Inc.
Executive Producer, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes
www.vanguardsoh
From the games I know :
STAR WARS GALAXIES
a complex, challenging crafting system with multiple professions, resource gathering, resource quality levels, a merchant system .... easy to learn, hard to master. Great money maker too.
The crafting field can be as cut-throat as any PvP you encounter in a game (not that SWG does not have all of that too). But the weapons you wear here are crafting tools, stacks of resources and ad screaming droids.
Have fun
Erillion
PS:
YEah .. bio engineer. Mix modern cloning with medieval alchemy , stir it with field trips to stick needles up the .... of the most rare and dangerous animals you find on 10 planets ... let it simmer for multiple generations enhancing the required traits ... and stuff it into a skin from anything from a bunny to a dragon ... e voila .. bio engineer magic.
Don't let Erillion fool you. Crafting in SWG is very tediuos and an exercise in patience.
EQ2 is the best system I have experienced because of how involving it is. However, the actual crafting is great but not the whole process. The gathering of resources is very time consuming as it is in EvE. Well, in EvE you might get attacked and ransomed. Horizons was a mix of both as the resources has specific spawn locations and are not juxtaposed to the mobs so it is pretty safe in some areas. The rare materials are random though and mimics a real vein. It's up to you to judge which you enjoy the most.
Games, from my experience, in which you can advance in crafting without combat:
The key ingredient to any good crafting system is that it must be completely soloable for all recipes.
If you have to be dependent on group mob drops to make the best items, then it sucks.
The best items should require rare ingredients that may drop from high level mobs, but these mobs should be soloable, albeit difficult to solo.
I prefer a system where many of the ingredients are harvested as in Horizons and WoW. It's a lot more fun and realistic to add steps for locating, harvesting, processing the materials, instead of just receiving them as mob drop loot.
In WoW, several tradeskills are dependent on each other for certain recipes, and each character can only choose 2 primary tradeskills, usually 1 gathering/harvesting/processing and 1 combining, but since you can have multiple characters per account/per server, and you can mail items between characters online and offline, it is still soloable, and you can be self sufficiant.
SWG allows macroing which ruins tradeskills IMO. It's simply a form of cheating.
EvE online does involve combat to harvest materials since NPC's spawn and guard asteroid belts where the ore is mined, and the high quality ore is in O.O space where you will be constantly attacked because of open PvP. I don't mind combat with NPCs when tradeskilling but being ganked constantly by other players when tradeskilling sucks.
EQdead and EQ2 both require group mob drop ingredients for the better recipes which means you are forced to group as a tradeskiller, which is lame.
"We feel gold selling and websites that promote it damage games like Vanguard and will do everything possible to combat it."
Brad McQuaid
Chairman & CEO, Sigil Games Online, Inc.
Executive Producer, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes
www.vanguardsoh
You couldn't fully macro SWG crafting. If anything, macro crafting in SWG made it more challenging since you had to time your clicks when the right window was open. I never bothered to macro craft in SWG because I like to be able to go at my own speed and stop when I wanted. Besides, you could go almost as fast if you just lined your windows up with the buttons you needed to click on in the same place.
Not saying SWG crafting was perfect though. It was still too tedious. The resource gathering was great, and the fact that items were unique and you could make factory runs of a good item was neat. And the fact that resources have their own stats that change somewhat frequently adds more variables that other systems can't touch. But it was still kinda boring except for the bio-engineer crafting which involved crawling up to some of the most dangerous creatures in the galaxy and then poking them in the butt with a needle. Almost makes me want to go back and play SWG again.
most manufacturers put buy orders on the market, which are filled by either low sec miners or via npc loot reprocessing.
I havent played any of the other games mentioned, just though i'd correct the misconception that crafting in eve forces you to collect the items necessary - thats the job of the player based economy (high sec manufacturers provide almost 100% of the demand for low end minerals, without which new players would find it a lot harder).
The three improvements i'd make to Eve's system would be some form of customisation (attributes traded against each other - though steps would have to be taken to prevent everyone simply maxing damage), providing customers with a choice of who to buy from (tagged merchandise, actual stores - though that may come with full player run stations) and having some form of unhealable degredation of products (and a second hand market).
It really is quite incredible to see entire fleets, player owned structures, missiles and individual shells all player-crafted (well, not all, but 99.999999%)
---sig---
PvE in general is pretty lame, if you think long and hard about it. You are spending your time beating a severely gimped AI that would lose to a well trained monkey. Best not to think too long and hard why you are wasting time playing games in general actually...
I concur .. EVE is a very good game, especially for an adult that has no time or inclination to grind.
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SWG allows macroing which ruins tradeskills IMO. It's simply a form of cheating.
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I am a crafter for almost 1.5 years now and have never used a crafting macro. Almost all crafters I know dont use crafting macros. What use is a "macro" when you still have to click anyway ? Unless you use a third person mouse click macro ... and that has gotten some people banned already after SOE did some checking.
I am faster doing freestyle crafting as compared to a macro. Anyway ... a macro would only be interesting during the grind phase to master a crafting profession ... which is a time between 2 hours and a week. The next 1.5 years a macro does not help you in any way ... if you want to make a lot of something, make a schematic and let the factory do it while you sleep.
If you want to collect resources with a macro ... have fun with it. I plug down a perfectly legal harvester and this one collects things 10 times faster than I could ever do ... and I am free to do other things. Once a week I come back and empty it. And if an angry mob is nearby ... I kill it if I have fighting skills ... or make a high speed pass for my harvester, which is usually enough to not get killed. Or get a buff and laugh the mob in the face.
There are so many false rumours about macroing in SWG ... I wonder where they all came from.
Have fun
Erillion
as many have said it really depend on what you want.
Horizons system is perceived as the best cause you can actually change the item being produced, using different styles of handles, blades and stuff for your weapons for example. the amount available rises with your crafting level. In addition there were techniques that let you add different qualities to your items, so pretty complete. Sadly i caouldn't, for my life, stick with that game to get to the good parts of it (begineer crafting is nothing special as you get 2 blades and 2 hilts and no techniques at all).
EQ2 system is very involved for the player as a crafting sessions is like a combat, you against the item quality. Problem there is that at high level you were so specialized you could practically do nothing by yourself... i heard they changed something now, though, but i still suppose that you still specialize in either armor or weapons for example and you will never be able to make the other over a certain (20) level.
SWG do not permit visual customization(at least it didn't, i know you can paint your vehicles now but that is not exactly what i am speaking about) like Horizons but do permit custom items to be made. the best part of it, though, was the actual act of resource gathering. Finding really good quality mineral was a galaxy spanning quest (if you wanted, you can find decent minerals on any planet probably) and the gathering process was all automated by your mining stations. (that was really cool even if time consuming. each station requires money(few) and energy(not so few), you can built/buy different type of mining installations, from small to big, and different type of energy generator machines. Then you have factories to mass produce your stuff and so on... a nice chain.. if you have the time for it, best part of the game).
WoW and UO system are quite similar in the basics. get the resources, mostly from the environment, create the item, enjoy. Easy and simple. WoW has the added bonus of modernization and removing of the frustrating part, like losing all your work for a failure in one crafting operation.
Better yet, WoW crafting has something useful from the get go. Those disposable items that are useful and easy to make... like sharpening stones, leather kits, bags or what not.
The rest i won't speak about
"If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime"
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SWG do not permit visual customization(at least it didn't, i know you can paint your vehicles now but that is not exactly what i am speaking about) like Horizons but do permit custom items to be made.
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For some items coloring (and various patterns) is in the crafting process .. especially for droid engineers and tailor. The shipwright profession (my favorite crafting) allows to tune the look of a ship by adding this and that part ... some fighters look much deadlier with certain engines and boosters :-)
For vehicles, ships and droids the customer himself can later change color (and sometimes texture pattern) with paint kits and texture kits they can buy off the market.
The new combat revamp brings full customization to (at least) the armorsmiths as they can finish the armor from prepared parts in front of the customer (if they want) , adding various parts to make every armor look unique.
The proposed smuggler changes will allow custom slicing in front of the customer, also with possible visible changes to weapons (e.g. larger power cells, barrels etc.). But thats not finalized yet.
It has already been in the game since start that for non-mass produced products certain rare loot drops can be used to enhance weapons to near legendary status if used by the crafter. However, that loot is so rare that it can easily take an experienced loot hunter a week or two to get those parts. And use decay meant that such items did not stay in circulation forever.
Have fun
Erillion
A Tale In the Desert is nothing but crafting from the little time I played it.
I enjoyed crafting in EQ2 until I got to the point where I was dependent on other higher level crafters and at the time there weren't enough around. I like the idea that if you didn't have the best materials you couldn't create the best items. Sometime you could get hurt using the machinery. Sometimes you were unable to concoct potions, and you lost the materials. Which all makes sense!
I think WoW's crafting is too simplistic. As many believe, the whole idea of WoW is to make things easy. Well crafting is easy, so easy everyone can do it. So easy, as the other poster said you can make your own alts and be self sufficient. This is perfect for you, bad for the community. Then, if you decide not to manage a bunch of alts and stick to one character, then you have the problem of there not being many things to craft.
Of these 3, I would pick EQ2 as the best crafting system.