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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
02/04/25 Feedback: Alchemy
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
in Artisanship
I don't like current Alchemy. I'll explain using an Alchemy implementation I do like. This is not a request to make it more like the one I like.
Disclaimer: I actually have some beyond-basic accreditations in Chemistry so I'm obviously biased.
My favorite Alchemy is obviously https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Alchemy
But it's flawed, and used to be worse, and Ashes' reminds me of when it was worse.
Most games can't genuinely offer the joy of 'developing new chemical processes', so they rely on 'know what to combine, and combine it'. This means I source some materials, think about what they could be used for, and make the thing. If you make the thing too commonly used, this won't be as fun.
If you make its uses too rare, it will be no fun. The main early Alchemy things in games share a common theme.
FF11 (Amateur) - Ink (from squid and such), glue (from animal bones), Beeswax, Antidotes, Deodorizer
The theme here is 'Preparation'. You are preparing to do something else in Alchemy or another craft later, or preparing to keep yourself safer out in the world.
This is why Potions and Salves don't fit as well though they should exist.They're not really situational in most games. They're not preparation. They're either helpful or not.
If you (as a player) make things that are for 'Preparation', you have some idea of how much of these it makes sense to make. You don't over-commit to spending your energy on them unless there is a market for them. In a small Node, people would 'let you know when they need them'. The other half of your effort goes toward your own 'Stockpile'. Stockpiling is important here.
In the early days of FF11 they kept with this theme for the next Artisanship tier (Recruit) but didn't have much to put there. We got Mercury ('Stockpile') and Echo Drops to cure Silence ('Preparation') and that was it, basically. Nearly everything else reasonable was added later. It was basically a horrible slog through these except that you knew what to go out and get, if you wanted to. Many people did. Alchemy was just converting 'items obtained by fighting/fishing' into 'Preparation/Stockpile' for a long time, and then, they expanded it to give the feeling of 'being the link between one type of playloop experience and another'
Without that feeling (lacking in Ashes for multiple reasons), Alchemy feels a bit suffocating. Fortunately there was Poison Powder and related ideas.
Then you could make a Fishing Lure or two. Why is this Alchemy? Who knows. It was a way to use your Stockpile though. It didn't even really let you level, because you leveled by trying to do things with a higher skill requirement than your current, but the thing that gives Glass Fiber is above the thing you use the Glass Fiber for.
So we have "Incidental items" + a few common other items + knowledge = 'Preparation' or 'Stockpile'. Ashes is actually doing pretty well there, if we define that as 'at least as good as the original dry FF11 Alchemy that many forgave them for'. I follow the same feeling when I think about a playloop now in Ashes.
But not only does Ashes have too few clear 'reasons to stockpile', it also seems to lack 'incidental items'. Alchemy feels good to me when you encounter a 'problem' in the world, and then think 'this would be easier if I had X to deal with it'. Not 'I need X or I can't do this'. Then you look into your information/book/codex/whatever and find 'ah this will solve it, how do I make that?'
Then you look into your stockpile and see if you have the stuff, or you go to the market to get the stuff, and you make it, and then you're prepared, either to use it yourself or to sell it to the next person going that way. I think the hard part is walking that design tightrope between 'I want to have this' and 'I actually need this'.
Instead, right now I get (assuming I do my own Herbalism which I was trying to 'avoid' doing so as to not get too much into the 'habit' of it and avoid just being another automatic datapoint of 'these two things go together'):
"Go out and gather flowers, which are either abundant or cross-discipline, pay money to stockpile them as powder with related names, hope for some use for the powder"
and then:
"Powder is used for an obvious thing that you should technically just make more of and everyone else will also think to make more of."
Ink is similar on Ashes' side.
But if I'm not an Herbalist for some reason, I literally can't gather 'random rare herb opportunistically', eventually. And then, reasonably speaking, I have to pay other people for theirs (which is fine). Which means I need to make money by selling the results, or by using them to get advantages/avoid meaningful disadvantages.
Where this falls apart is that by tying this so closely to Herbalism so far, you have one type of Artisan who gathers a material that they can't use without cross-discipline (perfectly fine overall) and another type that needs materials they don't gather, coming together to make a product type that is most 'fun' when it's opportunistically used, but for both of them, costs something to produce (Item durability or Currency). That sounds close enough to everyone else's Artisanship though, so what's the issue?
Reactive/Preparatory Consumables aren't binary like that. Proactive/Buff Consumables are usually food (Throne and Liberty, for example, currently shoves Alchemy under the Cooking umbrella because it only makes one reactive consumable for now).
The effectiveness-fun of Alchemy is directly tied to the difficulty/fairness of content itself.
In FF11 you might want Antidotes to do difficult content without a White Mage for that cleanse, or simply to ease things for them. In TL you might want some sort of potion to raise one of your eight Status Resistances without having to devote gear to that purpose in a difficult battle (this isn't in game yet, I'm just wishing).
But as of now, I look at the Alchemy recipes and see a designer's great effort, what seems like a genuine try at making this feel good, but missing this aspect, for me. So I don't 'want to go out and collect flowers', and I don't 'want to poke at the Marketplace', and I don't 'find myself thinking about a potion that would ease a problem'. I see the BDO outcome, in the end (I'd say BDO's is better but I'm adjusting for Alpha status).
I remember 'struggling to achieve the same feeling in BDO' for a very long time, so either I'm extremely biased, or very experienced and clear in what I'm trying to express here.
I know what solves this for me, but I'll leave the specifics of that to NCSoft, since I don't so much 'want Intrepid to solve this for me', just to understand it in case it helps with people like me.
(also just assume this applies in the exact 'opposite way' for my group's Jeweler, if that makes sense).
Disclaimer: I actually have some beyond-basic accreditations in Chemistry so I'm obviously biased.
My favorite Alchemy is obviously https://ffxiclopedia.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Alchemy
But it's flawed, and used to be worse, and Ashes' reminds me of when it was worse.
Most games can't genuinely offer the joy of 'developing new chemical processes', so they rely on 'know what to combine, and combine it'. This means I source some materials, think about what they could be used for, and make the thing. If you make the thing too commonly used, this won't be as fun.
If you make its uses too rare, it will be no fun. The main early Alchemy things in games share a common theme.
FF11 (Amateur) - Ink (from squid and such), glue (from animal bones), Beeswax, Antidotes, Deodorizer
The theme here is 'Preparation'. You are preparing to do something else in Alchemy or another craft later, or preparing to keep yourself safer out in the world.
This is why Potions and Salves don't fit as well though they should exist.They're not really situational in most games. They're not preparation. They're either helpful or not.
If you (as a player) make things that are for 'Preparation', you have some idea of how much of these it makes sense to make. You don't over-commit to spending your energy on them unless there is a market for them. In a small Node, people would 'let you know when they need them'. The other half of your effort goes toward your own 'Stockpile'. Stockpiling is important here.
In the early days of FF11 they kept with this theme for the next Artisanship tier (Recruit) but didn't have much to put there. We got Mercury ('Stockpile') and Echo Drops to cure Silence ('Preparation') and that was it, basically. Nearly everything else reasonable was added later. It was basically a horrible slog through these except that you knew what to go out and get, if you wanted to. Many people did. Alchemy was just converting 'items obtained by fighting/fishing' into 'Preparation/Stockpile' for a long time, and then, they expanded it to give the feeling of 'being the link between one type of playloop experience and another'
Without that feeling (lacking in Ashes for multiple reasons), Alchemy feels a bit suffocating. Fortunately there was Poison Powder and related ideas.
Then you could make a Fishing Lure or two. Why is this Alchemy? Who knows. It was a way to use your Stockpile though. It didn't even really let you level, because you leveled by trying to do things with a higher skill requirement than your current, but the thing that gives Glass Fiber is above the thing you use the Glass Fiber for.
So we have "Incidental items" + a few common other items + knowledge = 'Preparation' or 'Stockpile'. Ashes is actually doing pretty well there, if we define that as 'at least as good as the original dry FF11 Alchemy that many forgave them for'. I follow the same feeling when I think about a playloop now in Ashes.
But not only does Ashes have too few clear 'reasons to stockpile', it also seems to lack 'incidental items'. Alchemy feels good to me when you encounter a 'problem' in the world, and then think 'this would be easier if I had X to deal with it'. Not 'I need X or I can't do this'. Then you look into your information/book/codex/whatever and find 'ah this will solve it, how do I make that?'
Then you look into your stockpile and see if you have the stuff, or you go to the market to get the stuff, and you make it, and then you're prepared, either to use it yourself or to sell it to the next person going that way. I think the hard part is walking that design tightrope between 'I want to have this' and 'I actually need this'.
Instead, right now I get (assuming I do my own Herbalism which I was trying to 'avoid' doing so as to not get too much into the 'habit' of it and avoid just being another automatic datapoint of 'these two things go together'):
"Go out and gather flowers, which are either abundant or cross-discipline, pay money to stockpile them as powder with related names, hope for some use for the powder"
and then:
"Powder is used for an obvious thing that you should technically just make more of and everyone else will also think to make more of."
Ink is similar on Ashes' side.
But if I'm not an Herbalist for some reason, I literally can't gather 'random rare herb opportunistically', eventually. And then, reasonably speaking, I have to pay other people for theirs (which is fine). Which means I need to make money by selling the results, or by using them to get advantages/avoid meaningful disadvantages.
Where this falls apart is that by tying this so closely to Herbalism so far, you have one type of Artisan who gathers a material that they can't use without cross-discipline (perfectly fine overall) and another type that needs materials they don't gather, coming together to make a product type that is most 'fun' when it's opportunistically used, but for both of them, costs something to produce (Item durability or Currency). That sounds close enough to everyone else's Artisanship though, so what's the issue?
Reactive/Preparatory Consumables aren't binary like that. Proactive/Buff Consumables are usually food (Throne and Liberty, for example, currently shoves Alchemy under the Cooking umbrella because it only makes one reactive consumable for now).
The effectiveness-fun of Alchemy is directly tied to the difficulty/fairness of content itself.
In FF11 you might want Antidotes to do difficult content without a White Mage for that cleanse, or simply to ease things for them. In TL you might want some sort of potion to raise one of your eight Status Resistances without having to devote gear to that purpose in a difficult battle (this isn't in game yet, I'm just wishing).
But as of now, I look at the Alchemy recipes and see a designer's great effort, what seems like a genuine try at making this feel good, but missing this aspect, for me. So I don't 'want to go out and collect flowers', and I don't 'want to poke at the Marketplace', and I don't 'find myself thinking about a potion that would ease a problem'. I see the BDO outcome, in the end (I'd say BDO's is better but I'm adjusting for Alpha status).
I remember 'struggling to achieve the same feeling in BDO' for a very long time, so either I'm extremely biased, or very experienced and clear in what I'm trying to express here.
I know what solves this for me, but I'll leave the specifics of that to NCSoft, since I don't so much 'want Intrepid to solve this for me', just to understand it in case it helps with people like me.
(also just assume this applies in the exact 'opposite way' for my group's Jeweler, if that makes sense).
"I blame society."
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
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