At last it’s time to conclude this examination of crafting systems. I’ve learned a lot from the experience, both about the topic at hand and about writing in general. Today I’m going to rank each of the games I’ve been looking at in terms of my personal enjoyment of their crafting systems. I’ll also be including a summary of the rest of the articles in the series as well as considering how to apply what I’ve learned to my game.

Rankings and Opinions

1. Witcher 3

While not the system I’ve spent the most time with it is the one I’ve enjoyed the most. From retracing the travels of a fellow Witcher and being rewarded with recipes for awesome new armor, to bringing down a difficult boss monster and finally getting the last material to craft a new decoction there is never a dull moment with the crafting system. Mundane reagents like wild flowers can be gathered on the run with minor interruption and interacting with the crafting menu is quick and efficient. The game boasts a tremendous number of resource types and yet somehow manages to not feel overwhelming. Witcher 3 in general is fantastic and I feel the crafting system fits in perfectly.

2. Guild Wars 2

I’ve enjoyed the crafting system in Guild Wars 2 a great deal. At launch I had a ton of fun exploring the cooking system – checking every karma vendor I came across for new ingredients and trying many combinations in the discovery tab in hopes of finding a new recipe. The leveling process hasn’t aged well, but crafting at max level is still enjoyable and offers satisfying rewards. I had a great time working towards a set of ascended armor and a legendary for my main. The upcoming expansion is adding legendary precursor crafting which should serve to extend and improve end game crafting and I’m looking forwards to playing with it some more.

3. Minecraft

Crafting in Minecraft is pretty fun. The grid system feels pretty interesting at first and works quite well for crafting medium to low amounts of items. It’s pretty satisfying to draw something resembling a pickaxe and be rewarded with just that. On the other hand it can get extremely tedious trying to craft say 40 chests. In many games that would require gathering the required materials and hitting a ‘craft all’ button. In Minecraft the same act requires either frustrating stack splitting or awkwardly drawing a circle 40 times.

4. World of Warcraft

I have enjoyed WoW’s crafting in the past, however I strongly dislike the changes that have been made to the system with Warlords of Draenor which is why it’s ended up on the bottom. The variety of resources required to craft has never been tremendous in WoW, but WoD has removed any semblance of diversity it once had. Additionally the new time gates on crafting combined with the ease of getting all resources needed from the garrison has left the system gutted. I haven’t done much crafting since the early days of this expansion and I don’t foresee myself doing much more unless radical changes happen.

Lessons Learned

Material Acquisition & Diversity

• Gathering nodes add a lot of value to games
• When a player reaches a new area they should already be of the correct crafting level to harvest the newly available resources (given regular gameplay)
• I prefer when gathering can be done without inhibiting player movement
• Specialized mob drops should be common, generic mob drops can be rarer
• Material diversity and recipe complexity should expand along with the player’s mastery of the system

Skill Improvement & Gating Mechanics

• Leveling up a skill can be a useful way of gating players and it’s an easy concept to grasp. I personally would design a system with a far lower than typical number of levels with each level having a noticeable improvement.
• Recipe requirement is a great way to implement skill improvement. They can be rewarded for tasks as simple as visiting a new area or as daunting as taking down a big bad. Recipe systems tend to promote other areas of the game (exploration, combat, etc.) and don’t require tedious ‘craft 10 copper hammers, now 10 iron hammers’ minigames.

Permanence & Usefulness

• When crafted items aren’t adequately useful the system feels unrewarding and unfun.
• Making crafting one of many ways to obtain a given reward incentivizes participation without forcing players to do so.
• When crafted items are critical the system should be strong enough to stand on its own.
• A mix of consumables and permanent items provides a good balance of strong rewards and ongoing use for the system.

Application to my game

• Gathering nodes will play a huge role in the game and will not inhibit player movement in any way
• Medium to low amount of material diversity when starting out scaling up with the player’s progress to high diversity at end game
• Hidden recipes scattered throughout the world as a skill improvement/gating system
• All items should be useful in some way and old recipes should not be completely invalidated by new ones
• Menu based crafting system should be intuitive and quick to use

Meta

Writing this took a lot longer than I was expecting. Sometimes delays were caused due to something else needing to happen more, but often I was just not motivated to write. I found it difficult to keep track of what I had already written when I was moving on to new topics. A lot of time was spent rereading the other articles which hurt productivity. Another issue I came across was that the initial outline I laid out wasn’t always relevant to what I was thinking about while writing. For example I often felt I had to stretch for ideas to write about with Minecraft. I think if I had written this series in full before releasing it I likely would have chosen different games to examine.

Despite all these issues I do feel it was a worthwhile experience that’s taught me a lot. In future I’ll likely either write self-contained articles or finish a large article first then split it up and post it in segments. Hopefully this has been helpful to you too. Thanks for reading!