"As you carry on 'cause it's all you know
You can't light a fire
You can't cook or sew"
So, as I said, forestalling my dive into Night City's fluorescent wasteland I've installed The Witcher 2, having been insufficiently impressed with the original to buy its sequels on anything but the hefty sales preceding Cyberpunk 2077's release. Not that they're terrible games, but CDProjekt seems incapable of putting out a real RPG, instead marketing simplified "action" third person slashers to the braindead gamepad crowd. For the moment I'll just stick to bitching about loot and crafting, but let's backtrack a bit to a thematic counterpoint first.
The Age of Decadence seems fairly... controversial... even among the old-school RPG fans it targets, with its low-budget, low number of very difficult encounters and skill checks forcing you to navigate a maze of life or death choices. It can be a bit of a chore at times. Nevertheless it stands out in a crowd, not least because its resource scarcity makes you latch hungrily onto the few pieces of loot you can grab and manage your finances more carefully than Scrooge. Every mushroom, every scrap of leather grows more significant. Most games, even modern ones, go the other route of showering you with piles of useless trash loot, doing nothing to reward careful oikonomia, an insult to their better customers.
So I ran through The Witcher 2's tutorial, and its tiresome, lengthy and cutscene-choked prologue, and its first actual mission or two, relentlessly snatching up every piece of trash loot and scattered crafting ingredients I could and hoping for a payoff when I finally find a seamstress to turn all these bolts of cloth into belts for clods, or something. Imagine my disappointment when:
- crafted goods turn out to sell for a mere fraction of their manufacture cost, rendering my piles of dutifully amassed ingredients little more than unlabelled trash loot. Much as in the Original Sin games, crafting seems a tacked-on timesink, good for little more than interposing an extra, perfunctory step betwen players and their exploration rewards. If that.
And, while The Age of Decadence rewards your crafting investment in a much more satisfying fashion, I'd argue there's still very little difference between the good and bad way to handle a feature extraneous to the genre in question.
Crafting has little place in story-based RPGs.
In sandbox games, sure, the player can deliberately manage the cost/benefit analysis of bending over to pick up every penny off the sidewalk or every dandelion from a field, or of taking a trip out to the dandelion field or sidewalk in the first place. Trade runs can be planned, as in Mount&Blade, with supply and demand estimates in mind. However, in a game with a fixed number of zones with a fixed number of resource spawns and a fixed number of encounters demanding resource expenditure, gathering ingredients is simply a foregone conclusion, a chore, and the more ingredients the bigger the chore. Either grab everything before leaving your current zone or you lose money, you loser.
I could think of a couple of good arguments to be made in support of crafting during a scripted campaign, both sorely undercut by a glance at how such games handle the feature.
1) Crafting is a character skill, a measure of one's roleplaying. It can require an investment of skill points. Therefore, it's not just a "feature" but a valid route of character advancement and personalization.
[Unfortunately, in most cRPGs crafting is a freebie, a separate minigame, requiring no balancing act with other skills.]
[Even when properly implemented, it requires foreknowledge of the campaign to know what resources will become available and when. My AoD loremaster / alchemist had a devil of a time finding black powder, yellow powder and white powder for late-game encounters.]
2) Resource scarcity during a campaign can force players to choose gear upgrades more carefully, therefore becoming a roleplaying choice.
[As with investing in a crafting skill, investing in a crafted item among a fixed pool of resources depends on foreknowledge of the campaign so you don't waste your future +5 sword ingredients on a +3 sword right before +4s come into play. It's not like an endless game where you can shift your priorities to compensate.]
[Also, this does not require a crafting "system" per se. If only a few gear upgrade choices will ever be relevant, those few can be handled through dialogue or context menu interactions. For the rest, if every single player will acquire enough materials for exactly 37 rusty daggers, every single campaign run-through, then just cut out the middle-man and give us 37 rusty daggers to vendor. The only thing worse than trash loot is crafted trash loot.]
Cutting out the middle-man is probably the sorest point here. As I sit looking at The Witcher 2's gratuitous timesink of a crafting interface I can't but wonder at how many developer work-hours it must have eaten up, which wasted time gets passed on to customers, included in the program's price tag. I have to wonder how many more side quests, how many more dialogue options or monster types that "feature" cost us, or how many bugs could've been debuggered in that time.
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P.S.
The title was a Skyrim reference. I occurs to me now that enough time has passed since its release for not everyone to remember one particular crafting ingredient. Not everyone lives inside my own head, I keep forgetting...
Oh well.
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