The “I” word and Crafting – Part 2

This is a continuation of my brainstorm on crafting and eliminating the monotony.

Every game has thousands of items added to it on top of the recipes that are given to crafters. Usually these are separate from dropped items from mobs or quest related rewards. I have never liked this approach. I really feel that it separates the players. These dropped items are linked to loot tables that are being implemented much better in games. You no longer see that level 10 boar somehow drop a dagger or bow. NPC mobs are actually coming closer to dropping what they are wearing and using in game and I think this is something that we should use to an advantage.

The system I’m about to tell you about will not appease those of you who love the click process of crafting. Now here, take these John Lennon glasses and follow me for a moment. Imagine if mobs actually dropped items that they were wearing and crafters could use those drops to learn new recipes and then craft the items. This would create a world of items availiable to both crafters and adventurers.

How in the world could this ever work? It is a very free system and not like anything I heard of before. The crafter is not limited in the traditional sense to what they can craft.

How would you keep track of all of those items? The User Interface can be a wonderful thing if done correctly and to be honest, I’m pretty sick of the small window with the scroll bar, moving through a list format of my recipes. Lets please get with the program and change this. How often do you look at your avatar after you have seen the animation of him smelting copper for the first 100 times? Give us an optional full screen display of our recipes and we can accommodate all of these items.

Think family tree format but each point on the branch is a style of that weapon or item. Mousing over that style gives you a list of the recipes you have. For a quick example, lets take One-handed Swords. You would start out with the most basic of sword and then this would progress to scimitars and rapiers, shortswords and gladius. Each of these categories are nothing but placeholders for actual items that you might find.

Once you pickup an item or receive one in trade, you study it and open both the category and recipe for that item. Studying the item should be detrimental but rewarding to the crafter. It should destroy the item but in its place you receive the recipe to create more.

Well, thats about it for this brainstorm and I’m not sure I can really continue on with that thought of making a crafting world without the need to harvest materials. Its possible and I probably just need to drink the 4th cup of coffee.

later