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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Another part that I like is that you could level up your character via crafting. If it is as intensive a process as the wiki talks about would be nice that you could focus purely on crafting and not have to worry about spending hours crafting and THEN also go xp to level up your toon.
Just cause I forgot to add it, I tend to do as much crafting as I can in games. Love making items (gear and food) that actually benefit players to wear/use them but too often at top levels it's just not really worth the effort to craft items because they are beaten out by npc dropped items or, in the case of food, the benefits just aren't worth the cost of making them (both in terms of time to craft as well as cost of parts).
I can buy an item from player with other profession, or I can put craft station in my workshop, add ingredients, then create work party - invite player with needed profession to do the crafting work (and pay for the work). And other player can have small online and doesn't need to mess with buying ingredients and selling the product - he or she just does crafting work and receives the payment.
Also cool thing is that I can craft stone road blocks and put them instead of dirt to build stone road. Later players can replace stone road with asphalt road. This fits node system - to advance node to lvl 3, players need to craft and actually put stone road on the ground, so good road doesn't appear automatically.
In typical MMO I spent first 30 minutes crafting, then doing battle activities. But in ArcheAge I can harvest and transport packs all evening.
When it comes to crafting, I rather enjoyed the "mini game" idea that both of those games had. They were very similar to each other, with the exception that in FFXIV, you did not need to go to a crafting area, you WERE your own crafting area, and would pull out your dishes and start sauteeing something right there on the spot. I also LOVE that bosses in AOC will drop raw goods needing for crafting great sets. I also really like the ESO Motif system that allows you to craft gear in the style of other races. I would think that would be an amazing addition to AOC, especially for those RP players that are sure to be attracted to this game.
I hope my insight has helped
For crafting, I would have to point to another Indi MMO called Township Tale. I love being able to customize my weapons, armor, and gear to extremes by having the parts of the tools be individual entities to where you can mix and match them to create various things.
I hope this can be used to the betterment of Ashes
The ability for crafters to craft for someone else using a broker window (customer inputs mats + gold for paying the crafter) and the crafter never handles the item itself. Also the fact they could list themselves in a book somewhere where people can contact them when they are online.
Also the fact the end game gear was crafting prefered. Boss only dropped mats and u were able to craft + enhance equipment
-Mr. Sam Walton
If I'm not fighting then I'm gathering/crafting. If it's too simple, I fear most will get bored. It needs to be and feel...important.
Out of the dozens and dozens of MMO's I have played over the past 20 years one crafting system stands out above all of the others in my opinion, and that is the one EVE online incorporates. Few major key philosophy points that the EVE system is built on that I think would work wonderfully in Ashes of Creation:
In closing, I feel like crafting is commonly neglected in many MMO's. In my opinion crafting can be a fun and engaging system large portions of the player base can participate in and enjoy if it is implemented correctly.
Insted, I'd like to focus on the process of making stuff. I really love the idea of crafting minigames, but the problem with them is that they can be easily exploited using bots. So instead of having a minigame that influences the quality, I'd prefer a very simple one, that makes for variety. Instead of list of recipes, there could be slimply something akin Minecraft's shape-based crafting as a first step, where processed resources are put, and then the player would pick a set of actions that (s)he wants to make on ceratin processed resources. I imgine picking actions as something similar to Fortnite's destroying mechanic, but instead of having only one place for a critical hit, it could have multiple, each associated with diffrent action. In the end, it could look like a simple deck-building card game.
As for skills, they could divide into skills that can make crafting either easier (automation skills), faster (mass-production skills) or better (action "quality" skills).
This could make crafting challenging and in-depth, fun and engaging, as well as easy to grasp and not frustrating.
<EDIT>
Also, more time required is a MINOR concern when it comes to higher difficulty. If the only thing that makes things harder as you progress is more time needed to progress further, then you mostly make things more frustrating.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's bad to progress slower the higher you get. What is bad is when your progress is based only on patience.
What I was thinking is that you could extend this further into a Renown system. So instead of a skill crafting mini-game for better stats on crafted gear that becomes redundant to do, the game could unlock higher levels of stats and even more advanced crafting tree items based on a global or node-based Renown score for the crafter. So if a Crafter makes a sword and/or board for the lead tank for their guild and the tank leads an expedition or raid to beat a certain boss achievement or x amount of lower level dungeons all of their equipped gear would give Crafting renown per/mob killed or x thresholds of PVE/PVP fighting performed back to the crafter.
This would incentivize crafters to perform work and get their goods out to the masses at good price points, and also help them specialize and advance in their craft while not having to participate in the raid themselves. The better their guild performs or the players that equip their gear perform, the further and faster along the crafter could advance in their Crafting profession and specialized tree.
That would probably require complex data to be generate the experience from one player back to another based on their activities performed and items equipped, but think it would be a neat way to develop a symbiotic relationship and help crafters stand out in the world. The unintended consequence being guilds and alliances could refuse to equip outsider/unfriendly player items to only advance their friends or guild mates profession.
But if the price is right?.....and the boss doesn't know....
FF11 always had rumors about things like day of the week, moon phase, and the location you craft at affecting results. Unfortunately these rumors turned out to be false, but it would be cool to see a game implement these environmental factors for real.
The thing I care about most is crafting specialization. I hate when everyone can craft everything themselves. Crafters should have to rely on other crafters to acquire materials outside of their specialty, either through cooperation or through the auction house.
I would like to see some thought put into constructing crafting mechanics that prevent the use of crafting alts/mules. For example, in order to earn "crafting energy" to craft high level items, you could be required to spend time slaying monsters or completing quests to recover said crafting energy. Additionally, consumable crafting catalysts could be drops from boss fights that are character-bound. These mechanics would ensure that characters that are actually being played are the ones doing the crafting.
Typically I don't find myself investing a lot of time into crafting in MMOs because it is so boring/lack luster. I truly want to be crafting so something more engaging would be wonderful.
I am looking forward to whatever you come up with and will continue to give feedback. If the wiki is to be believed, there are a lot of potential, unique, crafting professions and I think the more there are, the better.
ESO crafting does have some interesting system eg. the research system.
For myself my focus has typically been on pve content and what will best help me/group with raids and dungeons. That extends to potions, flask, etc. this causes there to be a great value on a guild to have a stock pile of many resources. This then translated to "percentage of time, in crafting activities" would be about 5-10% of game time in a week timespan. I would typically dedicate 1-2 days(8-16hrs) purely to gathering and crafting supplies for our guild or group. I would like this number to be higher as I thoroughly enjoy crafting. Making gear from crafting more viable(understanding that is already the plan) would help with this so I think that is a good direction.
Gathering:
- Wide variety of materials to "farm" different types of wood, ore, herbs etc.
- A progressive system unlocking different types of materials at greater levels. Having this separate from character level.
- Becoming more proficient at gathering any given type of material increases yield eg. from 1 drop per ore deposit to 2 or 3. Increased chance to have a higher quality material to be looted.
- Being able to gather everything at a basic level. I like being able to master 1 specialty but if a group or guild needs more of one type of material and its a "non specialty" material would like to be able to help farm it up. THIS IS ONLY FOR LOW QUALITY MATERIALS the idea is not intended to say "everyone should farm EVERYTHING regardless of rarity" I would like a guild/group to have their "wood guy" or their "ore gal" for the more rare materials.
- High level gatherers being able to loot specific high quality items from open world or instanced bosses only available to those who are a certain Gathering level or higher. eg. end game boss drops some rare crafting materials but if you have a really high specialty gatherer in the kill group then it will also drop a "ultra rare" or "legendary" crafting material.
Processing:
- Progressive system that reduces the time required to refine materials the more you do so. As with crafting as you become more proficient you will get more material at higher proficiency levels.
- A strong reliance on gatherers to supply you for the more rare materials. A Processor should have a friends list, or guild, full of gatherers to buy/trade materials from to make the higher end crafting mats to sell/trade to the crafters.
- Location based processing boost. If I have a freehold to process wood having the time it takes to process lowered if that freehold is near a woodland or jungle area. (I think something like this has been mentioned but only stated here to support the idea)
Crafting:
- Allowing every equip-able slot to be craft-able i.e.. gear/jewelry/mounts etc.
- As stated above with the other 2 systems.....Progressive system.
- Allowing crafters to repair high end items that also require the high end materials from the gatherers then processed by the processors.
- Though I know some don't like the "random role" when making gear, having a bonus stat or effect that is very rare does make for some exciting moments while crafting. "Oh S**t it rolled with + whatever stat" this to me is only fun if it is very very rare as if it too common then it will just become expected to be had on everything and not just a really awesome role. I do not like "random stats" of our main stats. We should know when crafting the item if it will be Strength or Agility for example.
As was stated in each of the crafting areas a progressive system that gives the player goals to reach and a direction in which to take their given craft to achieve the highest level in each given "Mastery". I believe some of the best gear in the game should be achieved from pve and pvp but can also be created with different stats or abilities THAT ARE USEFUL. This should also come with a commitment to a certain gear slot or material type from the crafters. i.e. I got my Steel Helm person and my Longsword person that I am able to contact when needing that type of item to be made or repaired.
Thank you for reading my long post and these were just some thoughts on crafting as a whole
1) Random vs. Targeted
2) Quantity/Rarity of Materials required
3) The temporal dimension both in terms of crafting items and time required to reach max rank specialization
For example, in Shadowbane, which was solely a sandbox player-driven world building MMO, the crafting was done through city buildings. Totally RNG gear could be rolled through GOLD only. It would take several hours (depending on ranks of buildings) to produce items. Later on, with expansion content, they introduced "mines" which provided valuable specific resources needed to craft better gear. Again, these items required gold + other mats + hours of time. It was cool that if your forge rolled all crap for example, you could recycle the items for like 70% refund of the gold cost and start over with new batch.
PERKS: Allows small inner councils in guilds to manage resources and provide gear for guilds and general purchase to broader world population through merchants.
CONS: Crafting can be gated behind access to buildings and guild leadership.
Alternatively, Dark Age of Camelot featured a very interesting crafting system that was much more about individual commitment and guild help usually to pump resources into a designated crafter for whatever specialized skill, which became increasingly difficult and time consuming to reach the top ranks.
PERKS: This sort of puts the burden of crafting top tier gear on a few individuals overtime, which has the perks of making player agency really meaningful,
CONS: but also has the drawback that casual players would never reach max tier crafting capabilities.
Of course we all know WoW crafting which is much more casual player oriented, allowing people to obtain max rank rather quickly and efficiently through both guild and just general play.
Personally I think its fun to have a mix of "gambling/rng" crafting with a low barrier to entry which may produce something cool, but generally provides either low-level mats for larger items, or just produces garbage that you can recycle with some penalty, but it's also important to allow dedicated schematic based crafting which may require scaling levels of difficulty to acquire both in terms of player skill but also the materials obtained from the world to use. In other words, the best experiences with crafting in a sandbox requires "chase items" and "reputation" to be built up overtime, but also not so much gated access or esoteric knowledge to be inaccessible by most players. Low level and new players should be able to farm entry-level materials that will always be required for even the most advanced crafts and therefore feel connected to the economy even if they aren't obtaining legendary ores and body parts or something from the biggest and hardest content.
edit: i should add that the main goal is to create political, social, and economic tensions such that player actions matter which creates the opportunity for shifting alliances, trading partnerships, etc.
I also like that in EQ2 that you have recipe books so you can see what you are able to craft and the list of materials needed and what crafting table is needed.
I like the ability to salvage unwanted items into usable materials; also like long-term durability loss and if a crafter repairs it, it restores more durability than if an NPC makes the repairs.
I do not want to it to take a long time to actually make an item as some have said like days or longer.
Formerly T-Elf
I dislike in wow just farming (running) in a circle looking for a nod to appear to mine
The biggest reason why i have struggeled so much to even Start crafting in the first place, is usually one die following problems:
1. they don't seem to offer anything for a casual Player (need a Ton of time and resources to do anything that is somewat impactfull or usefull)
2. Tutorial is boring... / or doesen't prepare for later crafting gameplay
3. You need to invest 10h+ of Tutorials, guides, Tricks, etc. before you can properly Start trying out crafting
What i find esspecially irritaiting is when you can only choose 1 proffesion, you can't change it and habe no idea if you like the game play to begin with...
I would like for ashes to have some kind of appreanticeship option where some NPC would show you the basic and maybe one or two advanced mecanics. That way you could try out the different Proffesion before commiting to anything you might dislike a few days later.
I was really excited by the initial release of FFXIV in 2010. Not only did it treat each craft as its own class and allow you to switch between all of them, but you were able to repair other players gear as well as start the game with a crafting class. Unfortunately when the game effectively died and was re released in 2012 as FFXIV:ARR crafters lost the ability to repair other players gear and you were required to start as a combat class.
I am pretty strongly against limiting ones choice of crafting classes and making craftaholics like me own 6 different toons to craft one set of armor. I am the kind of person who will spend 8 hours in game doing nothing but crafting.
FFXIV's crafting and gathering systems are still some of my favorite. I can honestly say that I built my own in game house and feel like it is an achievement instead of just a task I had an npc perform.
In summary the things I am hoping to see in ashes are as follows
-The ability to repair the gear of other players
-No limit to the amount of crafting and gathering classes a single character can perform
-Being able to be primarily an artisan and secondarily a warrior.
Some games have adapted to the most recent version of crafting which is where people can craft items from any skillset and keep to themselves without engaging within a "global" market and an environment of trading goods.
In EQ2, where I spent most of my time in the past, there was always a need for food and drink. They provided temporary regeneration buffs (food for HP, drink for Mana) that were important enough in an open-world PvP environment that you didn't want to go without them but not detrimental enough that you couldn't survive. The aspects that kept this alive beyond the "typical" end-game of crafting was that there were always new recipes to be learned from various end-game content (raid bosses, dungeons, PvP, etc) that kept the craft alive. Each hero could only have 1 single crafting capability but they were able to change their skill at anytime with a single hiccup; you had to start at level 1.
An additional feature I appreciated in a game I have played more recently, was that if you were gathering/mining/etc for the resources you needed those actions also gave you a portion of experience towards your relevant craft; thus giving those actions more meaning than just buying the resources you needed from the market or other sources.
Finally, I do like having to have some level of skill to craft that also bring in some additional interactions while performing the task at your "station". For instance, maybe I am a carpenter making a table (wood *pun intended* be made from cut wood and nails *blacksmith made?*) so I would need to hammer the nails in to get the table together - try and incorporate a facet of skill where your time is adjusted based on the outcome of your own individual skill or the condition of the item varies based on your ability to do the task. This provides a mindful task to accomplish a meaningful interaction within the game at all levels of interaction making it more "fun"!
To bring this all full circle each crafting skill had a purpose throughout the whole length of the game whether it be leatherworkers making bags, metalworkers making boxes or mining tools, carpenters making furniture or lumbering tools, jewelers perfecting gems, etc... and there was always some level of demand for each craft to ensure the market stayed alive and well. Obviously some of the crafts were a bit more lucrative than others but that is the nature of having a profession right?!
The main cons were obviously:
- Really hard to get into in an established economy of crafters, because the AH is flooded with items (which is bad) and crafting without specific bonuses wasnt worth it without these.
- Extreme Pay to Progress
Crafting should have distinctive elements to it that are valuable throughout the entire game, not just early patch cycles (like WoW), therefore it needs elements that are in steady need. Furthermore another aspect that really distuingishes crafters are specilizations of specific professions (for example Hammercrafting, different cloth-crafting etc.).
What is also extremely lackluster in many mmorpgs is the aquisition and discovery of new crafting recipes. Just learning everything from the same trainer feels barebone.
I did like the idea of discovering recipes through trial and error of different world elements, because it increases the depth of the crafting system. Let's say you find a new herb in the open world or in a cave which you currently have no use for. How about trying to mix this up with different materials to get an unknown outcome and unlock a new recipe.
Generally speaking, the more depth & mystery there is to good crafting systems (from the aquisition point of view of recipes), the more depth it has, be it through quests that tell you about yet unknown materials, mixing these materials up with known materials & unlocking new paths with it.
Example: How about you just crafted a new hammer with new ores you've found in a new snow area. Further down the line you're discovering a boss near that ecosystem that drops a specific boss material. Why not try to mix this up with your newly created hammer to amplify it and see if it works (or not?).
I believe this could add a lot of depth to ashes of creation, which core design is based around changing ecosystems through the node system, leading up to many possible unlockable trees.
It is perhaps fine if everyone dabbles in some low-level or low-complexity (say, up to 2 ingredients) crafting, or maybe low-level recipes can be realized with NPC blacksmith/alchemist/seamster, but the high level stuff does not have to be a part of natural progression. This would allow for the crafting system to be more complex and engaging, since it won't have to be simplified to appeal to everyone, including people who wouldn't do it otherwise.
Now, for games examples, some of which were already mentioned.
Good examples:
Monster Hunter World - Crafted armours and weapons visually resemble parts of monsters / other materials used to craft them, much more so than in any other game I've played.
Ragnarok Online - In this game, Alchemists and Blacksmiths were entirely separate classes (something that was done way more in old MMOs); Picking this class didn't mean you only craft and can't fight - it meant you have a choice between fight-oriented builds well on par wtih other fighting classes, and more crafting-specific ones. The very top crafters usually were a product of a whole guild / alliance helping them with levelling, crafting materials and buffs for the actual crafting sessions, rather than it being a single person effort. Crafting wasn't a side pastime of everyone and their grandmother, it was something you had to actively choose and work towards. In addition, both classes had thematic abilities on the battlefield: for example only blacksmiths could repair broken armour and weapons on the go, which made them invaluable in a fight regardless of build choices.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance - very immersive minigame for alchemy (and also for sword sharpening).
I understand that in MMORPG minigames might get tedious if you want to craft hundreds of items, so perhaps they could be only applied to the highest available level of crafting. For example, if your crafting level is 5 - you can auto-craft lvl1-4 recipes (because you mastered them by now) but still have to do various minigames (they can be different for different items) for lvl5 stuff. For the high-end crafting this means that for max level crafters only the top of the top will require the minigame, and you don't expect to craft that stuff too often. In this case, success at the minigame could affect the quality of the result, making crafting an actual skill.
And of course, this classic snippet from Sword Art Online Abridged, already posted earlier
Bad examples:
BDO - Crafting is the main way to earn money aside from silver farming, and unlike the latter - can be done in AFK mode. So like it or not, you gotta load up your game overnight and get on with that cooking.
In BDO, nobody is a crafter because everyone is a crafter.
Edit:
Seeing how some comments touch on resource use and equipment upgrade parts of crafting, I will add couple thoughts on these as well.
For resource use, I think it is important that the most useful items should not be only crafted from the rarest / higher-level resources. This is especially important for items that are needed in high numbers. If a good mix of resources (i.e. including resources from low-level monsters) is required for the best potions or arrows - this will make higher-level players go hunt such monsters, which will help to avoid "level-locked" areas (both low-level and high-level players will be interested in the area, with different goals in mind), which will in turn improve community mixing. This will also allow for gold trickle down from higher level players to lower level who naturally obtain these resources.
For upgrades (by which I mean the direct +1 +2 +3 etc. kind of upgrades), while RNG and item destruction is a fine solution to provide some excitement and item sink, I believe that the lower the chance for upgrade - the less an upgrade should give. For example, if every attempt at upgrade has a 50% chance to fail - then the improvement you get when upgrading from 0 to +1 should be twice higher (an example ratio) than improvement you get when upgrading from +1 to +2, 4 times higher than +2 to +3, etc.
With such arrangement, it will still be useful to upgrade to the max, however there will be no neccessity to do so. Systems like in BDO, where extremely high upgrades give people incredible advantage over someone with low upgrade gear, it is a neccesity to upgrade to extreme to simply stay competitive. BDO does it so they can sell cash shop items that help with upgrade chance. There's no good gameplay reason to do that, only cash shop greed.
As I see it, if you are lucky enough and got a +5 sword on the first try - you can enjoy slight edge; If you already got all the gear you want and still have money to spend - you can spend them on upgrade attempts to get that slight edge (which is better than no edge). That is more than enough for this system to be a successful money sink, without turning into a dreadful RNG treadmill.
What I'd like to see from a crafting system is that it is entirely/mostly discovery based - maybe you might find some recipes/blueprints around the world, or maybe players might make and sell them themselves after discovering a recipe. Unfortunately what often happens is a wiki with all the recipes eventually pops up. Having a discovery based systems still adds an aspects of awe when you find something new or unexpected - especially if some recipes are a bit hidden, maybe with hints given in updates or quests.
I loved GW2s crafting, though it loses it's flair after a while when a lot of the stuff is pointless/obsolete, and there's multiple aspects (like the mystic forge) that degrade it. I REALLY like Archeage's gathering/farming systems though, the grinding there was enjoyable.