In a lot of games, especially AAA titles, crafting is kind of pointless.
I get why many of them have it. With more and more games trying to include realistic
elements, being able to craft items with materials found around the world helps push that sense
of realism. It makes places feel lived in and offers players more things to interact
with. Furthermore, it allows developers to scatter item components throughout their maps,
providing players small rewards for exploring and engaging with the environment that will
build to bigger rewards after collecting enough stuff, creating a nice sense of Game Feel(™)
where players never go long without getting a hit of that sweet, sweet dopamine. Beyond
that, crafting can create a connection between the player and the things they build because
it feels more personal than buying something at an in-game store. Also, Minecraft sold
a lot of copies. Like, a stupid amount of copies. AAA studios noticed and wanted a piece
of that market, which is why it seems to be shoved into so many games.
Crafting has a ton of promise, but I’ve found that in practice it usually falls short
of its full potential. At its worst, it leads to tedious gameplay that incentivizes players
to collect nearly everything they see, diminishing the sense of reward that comes from finding
stuff and turning what should be a thoughtful choice into a mindless one.
Games typically use crafting in two ways: for permanent items and for consumable ones.
Crafting permanent items is tied to progression. Whether it be forging a more powerful sword
so the player is able to take on stronger foes or building a teleportation device to
transport to a spot on the map that otherwise would be unreachable, this kind of crafting
moves things forward whether. It acts as a benchmark to show how far players have come
and let’s them feel good for earning a lasting reward. Crafting consumable items, focuses
on temporary changes that help players get through various encounters. So like crafting
a health potion from plants found in the wild or modifying bullets so they do more damage
in upcoming fights; it gives players a chance to customize how they approach an encounter
and also replenish their stocks on the fly in case they didn’t bring enough stuff with
them in the first place.
These systems aren’t inherently bad by any means; in fact I think they can encourage
creativity with how a player engages with a game and also can help set a strong thematic
identity, usually one of survival, through actual game mechanics, and that’s really
neat. However, my issue with crafting stems from the fact that a lot of games with it
are not actually built around it, which ends up undercutting how mechanically engaging
it can be.
In a lot of games crafting is optional, and I get the logic behind that choice, especially
with AAA open-world titles. Having a ton of different systems that players can choose
whether or not they want to engage with provides player agency and also appeals to a wider
base. The issue with this is that these kinds of games are balanced in a way where if the
player chooses not to engage with a mechanic, they won’t face any consequences, which
sounds good, but it ends up making those mechanics feel less important. As it turns out, there
is a noticeable difference between how crafting works when it is just in a game versus when
it is the game.
Take Fallout 4. Players have the ability to craft a variety of items that they can keep
on their person as well as building an actual base. Crafting is required a few times throughout
the game, but most of those instances happen early on and are more of tutorials than anything
else. Materials are spread all throughout the map, giving the player plenty of stuff
to pick up while scavenging the wastelands and these items typically weigh next to nothing
making it so they can pretty much always pick them up without having to worry about becoming
over encumbered. Early on, I had stuff I wanted to craft so I would save up materials until
I could do so, but as any given material can be hidden anywhere, I’d sometimes find myself
waiting a really long time before being able to craft what I wanted, and by the point I
ended up getting enough materials to make it, I had either gotten something better or
forgotten about it entirely. As for making a base, while I had some fun designing one
in the early parts of the game, it didn’t have much of a function aside from looking
cool. All of this led to me putting crafting and building on the backburner. Every so often
I would check in on what I could make, and if an item or upgrade interested me, I would
craft it, but it wasn’t something I thought about all that often because I didn’t have
control over what I found and also the core gameplay had little to do with searching every
corner of a room for items. I found it more reliable to just buy items at vendors, which
is a shame because there’s actually a lot of depth to the things players can craft in
Fallout 4; I just couldn’t be bothered with the gameplay surrounding it.
Compare this to a game actually centered around crafting, like Subnautica. In Subnautica the
only way to progress through the story is by gathering supplies found across the map
and crafting them into new items and upgrades that allow the player to explore deeper in
the ocean to find even more materials that will help them escape from the planet they’ve
been stranded on. Materials are found in specific biomes so as the player familiarizes themself
with the areas, they gradually learn where to find things. This made it so whenever I
set out from my base, I had a specific goal in mind of what I needed to collect in order
to craft the next item I wanted. It influenced where I explored and also got me to spend
time thinking about what would be the best upgrades to craft in order to do things more
efficiently. While gathering supplies, I also had to think about what I brought with me
and what I picked up while exploring as inventory space is pretty limited. Instead of mindlessly
grabbing everything, I had to make choices of what would benefit me most. If I found
a rare material that I didn’t need at the moment but would probably would later, I had
to make a choice on what to prioritize. And while having to leave something behind is
bound to frustrate some players, it gives more value to the items they bring back to
their base. And even the base building is tied to progression as expanding it unlocks
more things to craft and creating multiple bases throughout the ocean makes it easier
to travel deeper and deeper.
Fallout 4 and Subnautica have a lot of similar systems in regards to crafting, but they don’t
feel nearly as consequential in Fallout 4 because they aren’t baked into the core
of the game.
This same thing can be seen with consumable items as well. I’ve talked a fair bit in
the past about my issues with consumables, and most of my problems with them boil down
to how games rarely give me a reason to use them, especially the ones that do more than
just replenish health or fix a status ailment. As I almost never feel incentivized to use
consumable items, I rarely end up crafting them. There are a lot of layers to this problem,
but when looking at the crafting side of things, it comes back to how many games don’t make
players think about what they’re picking up and using. While it would seem like having
a wealth of materials would lead to players crafting and using items more often, in my
experience that hasn’t been the case. In fact, I actually think the combination of
limited inventory space and scarce item drops incentives players to use their consumables
far more.
A series that handles this pretty well is The Last of Us. Focusing on Part II, there
are 6 types of materials that the player can scavenge and they can only carry 3 of each.
On top of that, the amount of crafted items the player can carry is limited as well, so
they can’t just endlessly stock up. Each craftable item requires a combination of at
least 2 of the primary materials; some require the same components like health kits and molotovs
and others just share one like silencers and trap mines. What I like about this system
is that players have to make a choice of what they think will be most beneficial to them
in the immediate future. Would it be best to use the rag and alcohol to make a med kit
in case they take a lot of damage or would it be better to throw a flaming bottle of
death at the enemy to avoid taking damage in the first place. And, due to the limited
carrying capacity, as players find more materials and craft more items, they are incentivized
to use them because otherwise they will end up leaving supplies behind. Of course, part
of why this works is because The Last of Us is a linear game and once the player leaves
an area, they won’t come back, making it so if they don’t grab something right away,
they’ll miss out on it forever. While this level of pressure is harder to cultivate in
open-world games where players can always go back to a spot to grab something they missed,
I still think this approach would help a fair bit, especially if designers added some sort
of system where materials weren’t always guaranteed to stick around.
With crafting around both consumable and permanent items the common thread is that in too many
games players don’t have to think all that much, and when this happens it leads to stale
mechanics and misses what makes crafting satisfying in the first place. Honestly, it makes crafting
materials start to feel more like an alternate currency than an actual item that can be used
to build something, and in a lot of AAA titles, they could replace those materials with money
and functionally very little would change. Part of that has to do with everything I’ve
talked about so far, but it also has to do with the fact that crafting in games...doesn’t
really feel like crafting. More often than not it just feels like a menu interaction...and
that’s because it’s just a menu interaction. And, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It simplifies
the process and doesn’t waste the player’s time; but it’s boring and a little pointless.
Sure, I can craft 100 daggers in Skyrim in like 2 minutes, but is that fun? Does scrolling
through a menu and clicking what I want to build give me any sense of satisfaction? No.
In Shadow of the Tomb Raider I can build arrows on the fly with a press of a button and not
even need to go into the menus, but does make crafting feel like anything more than a mild
flavor choice so that they didn’t need to have an in-game reason for why arrows are
scattered all across the map (even though they do that with every other type of ammo)?
Not even a little.
The actual act of crafting, even in games that have pretty good crafting systems, rarely
has much to it. So many titles aim to make crafting as unobtrusive as possible.
Personally, and I know I may lose some of you here, if a game has crafting in it I want
it to be a bit obtrusive. I want it to feel like I’m actually crafting something. While
the unskippable animations in titles like The Last of Us Part 2 and Red Dead Redemption
2 certainly border on excessive, both were extremely effective in creating an almost
tactile connection between me and whatever Arthur, Ellie or Abby was working on. The
time it takes to skin a bear or modify a rifle makes the output of those actions feel more
important. I actually wish these two took it a step further and tied some sort of gameplay
to it, like in Dragon Quest 11, or Spiritfarer. These systems certainly take more time, but
they highlight the importance of every item the player crafts and also act as a meditative
activity to engage in between adventures. Also, in Dragon Quest 11’s case, depending
on how well the player does at the crafting mini-game, the quality of the item can go
up, giving a small set of stakes that rewards skilled players.
Admittedly, crafting animations and mini-games both run the risk of getting annoying after
seeing them a thousand times, so if a game is going to include them, it should be balanced
accordingly by making sure that the system is centered around crafting for quality instead
of quantity.
All in all, I don’t think that shallow crafting systems dramatically diminish the value of
a game; most of them are fine. They provide some flavor that appeals to our base desire
to create things and they give an alternate way to mark progression, which is fine. It’s
fine. But while it doesn’t always make games with it worse, it also usually doesn’t make
them better. Too often, developers could get rid of their crafting systems entirely and
it wouldn’t really change the game that much. They’re shops with a slightly different
skin. By streamlining crafting in an effort to appeal to the largest base possible, a
lot of titles make it so unobtrusive that it begs the question: why even have it in
the first place? I think crafting deserves better. It should be in a game because it
adds to it, and not just because it checks a box off a list.
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To everyone still watching. Thank you. It means a lot, and uh ya know I hope you have
a good day and or night or whatever. Peace.