CRAFTING EQUIPMENT VS BUYING IT

author=Null1988

author=Trihan
This is somewhat of a corollary to the topic about naming conventions, as something LockeZ said made my brain go off on a tangent about the role equipment plays in an RPG and what I want it to mean in my game.

A very good point was made that traditionally as the player progresses through the towns in a game the shops will store progressively better equipment for progressively higher costs, which may or may not be offset by the amount of money the player is getting from treasure/battles. However, the salient point was that this is largely useless in most games as the new equipment tends to either be not much better than the stuff you had before or not so much better that it justifies the price tag.

I was thinking about other ways to implement equipment in my game to keep this from being an issue for those who don't think the progressive nature of equipment adds anything to the game, and my first thought was crafting. I think Master of the Wind did this quite well, and I'm thinking of doing something similar with Tundra. That is to say that enemies will drop materials and such and the primary method of gaining equipment will be to use materials and craft it yourself.

However, this also presents potential drawbacks, in that you'll have to rely on luck to get the drops you need for the equipment you want. It also means that you'll have to balance money gains to make sure the player doesn't have so much money that other purchases become meaningless (because they're not spending money on equipment, or not as much as they otherwise would have). I'd also make it make a modicum of sense in the materials required for the equipment made, which would also limit the kinds of materials an enemy could feasibly drop. It's a good idea, but it still has flaws.

What other kinds of equipment "system" can you guys think of? What have you seen done in games that you think approached this topic particularly well? Perhaps you're doing/have done something cool with your own game. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't asking this hoping for some discussion that will generate ideas for myself, but I'm also curious as to what other people's opinions on this are.

I didn't read all the comment so i don't know if anyone brought this up but in FF8 you had to do that you could buy weapons and you had to get the items through events or mostly monsters, but the easyset way to get those items from the monsters was by getting Diablos as a GF and learning Mug and you where able to Mug items from the monsters and leave the battle. Don't know if that helps but yeah just thought it was worth mentioning if no one has already.

Sorry I meant to put couldn't buy weapons ^_^, you would go to shops and they would make them for you with the items you were supposed to get for the weapon.

That's because you hate gameplay. Most of us are designing RPGs for people who actually like to play them, and will ignore you.

If the crafting system was incredibly dull and unimmersive then I'd prefer to just be able to guy everything. If I'm going to be forced to work harder for something, at the very least I'd like to have a bit of fun doing it. Otherwise I'll, in the end, just feel cheated for all it's worth. Something a bunch of games I've seen do wrong is they make some fancy schmancy system that overall bores me to death. It's just not worth it.

/endminirant

How do you all feel about games where equipment needs to be repaired? As a player do you like having to maintain the condition of gear or is it an annoyance?

I ask because I'm thinking of merging a crafting/augmentation system with a repair system. They'll be effectively indistinguishable.

If maintaining your gear is a meaningful trade-off, which is to say money is rare enough and fighting without the equipment is functional enough that you have to think about it every time and make a real decision whether it's worth it or not to repair the gear, then the system is adding an element of strategy to your game and is therefore fun.

If repairing the gear is the best option 99% of the time, then it is not adding an element of strategy to your game. It's just forcing the player to visit another building every time he's in town, and to go back to town every 30 fights, which isn't fun. In this case it would probably be best to figure out exactly what you're trying to accomplish by adding the repair system, and find a less tedious way to accomplish your goal. Typically when I see this sort of system, the designer is trying to use it to eat up the player's gold, because the gold drops are distributed poorly and the player can easily get far more gold than he'll ever need.

If you hear "crafting" and you seriously can't imagine any type of it other than "hours of repetitive grinding" I really pity you. I've played a few games where crafting worked that way but there are seriously dozens of other methods.

Here are some random other examples of grind-free crafting systems. Some of these systems are for crafting usable items rather than equipment, but could just as easily be used for equipment.

- In Diablo 3, any piece of equipment in the game can be reduced to magical dust. There are eight types of dust, based on the level and quality of the item. The blacksmith can create items; the only things he needs to do so are this dust, and money. So, essentially, if you get several pieces of equipment you don't need, you can turn them into one you do need.
- In Dragon Age 2, different items you can craft have different recipes. The ingredients for these recipes are found in dungeons. But there's a catch: once you find an ingredient in a dungeon, you have an infinite amount of it, forever. The result is that crafting is exploration-based.
- Similarly, in Suikoden 2's cooking system and also in the crafting systems of many other games, all the ingredients you could ever need can be bought at shops, but the recipes are found hidden throughout the game. So, once again, you can craft more items the more you explore.
- Final Fantasy 9's equipment synthesis works like this: you take two or three specific pieces of equipment to a synthesis shop, and it combines them into a new item that you can't get any other way. Each town's synthesis shop has different items. This rewards the player for finding equipment through other methods, and adds new recipes as the story progresses. It also makes some items be trade-offs - you can get a fire-absorb hat, but only if you give up your blind-immune shield.
- World of Warcraft has a jewel system that lets you put gems in equipment, if those pieces of equipment have gem slots. The gems add stats to the equipment. This basically lets you customize, to a limited extent, the stats on your equipment. Thanks to being an MMORPG, the gems are, for all practical purposes, buyable. Diablo 3 has the same system, but also lets you combine gems into more poweful ones, if you have a ton of gems and a ton of money.
- FF7's materia can be viewed as essentially similar to the jewel system from WoW. Each weapon and armor in the game has one or more slots which you can put materia in. Some materia grants new usable abilities, while other materia grants passive effects. Materia can be freely moved from one piece of equipment to another, allowing a heavy degree of customization. Better pieces of equipment typically, but not always, have more materia slots.
- In FF13, enemies drop items that can be used to upgrade your equipment. Unusually, though, every item in the game can upgrade any piece of equipment in the game. There are really only two types of ingredients: organic and mechanical. Upgrading any item efficiently requires using a lot of both types. You can also buy these items from shops, once you get about halfway through the game. Notably, there's almost no way to get better equipment except by upgrading what you've got - new weapons aren't better, they're just different. You have to find items to upgrade, but you can find these items by fighting literally any enemy in the game so the typical method is to just use whatever you get while doing other stuff.