The Digital Continuum: Crafting conundrum

Whenever I start playing a new MMO my interest in crafting tends to go through two phases: hope and realization. During the hope phase I find myself wondering what sort of cool things I could create. I also think about being able to use those creations in useful and interesting ways. My head tends to float up into the clouds as I contemplate all the great times I'm about to have with a game's crafting system.

Then there's the realization phase, where my crafting dreams are crushed. This is the point when I start playing with the crafting system and moving through its inner workings only to find the same old thing: Talk to an NPC, get crafting skill of choice, look at recipe, gather ingredients and proceed to select how many I want before clicking a single button to create my item. When will developers admit that this is incredibly boring and at least try to spice things up a bit. They don't have to re-think the entire system. I would be perfectly happy with some evolutionary changes.

I don't have an especially mathematical mind. Taking numbers and do amazing things with them is not my forte. So I'm not about to try and figure out how the math of any of this would or could work, but if someone else would like to take a crack at that I'd be more than happy to read it. I will, however, take a few swings at the creative side of this issue with crafting systems in MMOs.

The first thing that popped into my head when thinking about how to create a more interesting crafting system was casual games. It seems like the perfect solution, but there is a hitch. The problem I ran into was that making the entire process literally one big casual game sort of ruins the engrossing MMO feel. Plus if you simply make the process of putting all the pieces of your armor together in a mini-game, you still haven't addressed the issue of all the lifeless gathering steps prior to that.

Then I came up with something that seemed so simple yet so perfect. The answer was to make the entire process a series of little interconnected mini-games.

I'll give you an example. Let's say that you're a miner and a weaponsmith. The three things you're going to be doing are searching for minerals in the game world, mining those minerals and finally taking them to a smith and hammering them into a weapon.

First I'll tackle the searching part, which is something of a mini-game already but could use a little flavor. When you activate your "search for minerals" skill a little floaty icon will appear above your head. This icon will change shape and color depending on how close or far you are to a particular mining point. No more mini-map stare sessions. This both removes the need to stare at the corner of your screen and makes the entire process into a simple-yet-fun game of hot and cold. You'll be exploring the world while looking for your mining points and because the indicator is in the center of the screen you can enjoy the game's vistas while you do so.

Now onto the act of mining the resource itself. When you click a mining point you'll see a curved bar appear with a hit indicator that has three areas to hit: a large green area, a smaller blue one and a smaller yet red "bullseye" area in the very middle. There won't be any way to fail a mining attempt, but you'll have three possible outcomes: average, good and great. The better your hit, the more mineral loot you'll get from that hit. This is also a scaling system, which means the bars aren't always the same size. If your skill level is especially high at mining and you click on a lower-level mineral you'll have more red and blue than green to hit. Conversely this will also remove the complete hard cap on minerals above your level in that they'll be much more difficult to mine efficiently until you level up some -- but you can actually try to mine a little above your skill.

Weaponsmithing in this scenario is incredibly important, as it's the endgame to gathering's grind. Making the first two steps a bit more interactive will help reduce the grind but it's not going to go away entirely. The best way to ease the grind of gathering is to make the act of crafting a lot of fun. There are a few ways to do this. First and foremost is letting the player see what they're crafting. I know I'm asking a lot of a development team here, but there has to be a method of modeling weapons that would allow for this. Maybe by making weapon and armor pieces modular so when players are crafting they can first see only the hilt and then later on the blade. Something like that would be fine.

The second thing is of course some form of interaction. With weaponsmithing you could have a sort of "whack a mole" mini-game where the player can strike the glowing metal at specific points when prompted. Another idea would be create a series of gesture commands a player could follow per on-screen instruction. What's thirdly important is that the reward can't be something that makes the player feel like they absolutely have to play the mini-game to get the best version of an item. So a good reward choice would be visual customization. A player that actively contributes in the creation of their equipment will be allowed to choose the color palette of said equipment -- simple as that.

There could be more added to the physical creation process, such as thinking up a system that removes the recipe method. I just don't really think that matters as much as making crafting a more compelling and active experience. The success of this system will be determined by several things, one being worthwhile interactivity. None of the crafting mini-games can be too hard or too easy. They also need to be polished, balanced and tested as if they were a game onto themselves. If they aren't, players are immediately going to pick up on the lack of quality and disregard the system entirely. That's probably the biggest problem with putting in a deeper crafting system -- you've got to put a lot of effort into it.

Yet I think it's worth all the trouble. Crafting can be as much fun and worthwhile as combat if a developer would just put some time and effort into such a system.