On Crafting in Video Games

Happy Day After Valentine’s Day! Don’t give me cake. I’m tired of it.

I realized Friday that my argument on the last Note was that the Death Star is equivalent to civilian bombing. Maybe the nuclear bomb is a better analogy? I need to think more about this.

Currently, I am watching Dragon Pilot on Netflix, an anime about dragons who are also airplanes. I re-read Artemis Fowl (the signed copy!), which was great fun. Next novel will probably be Sanderson’s Lost Metal. I’ll try to watch the Netflix animated Witcher movie this weekend, too.

Bit of life advice: with everything going on, don’t let politics consume your life. It’s important to keep up with current events, but you can’t forget to breathe once in a while.

On Crafting in Games

Ten years after its release, I found Dragon Age: Inquisition on sale, and I’ve been enjoying it. It’s the first game in the series that I’ve played. I suspect I’m not very good at it, though, because I’m barely engaged with the gear system. Part of that is because of the crafting mechanics.

Crafting. It might as well be a dirty word at this point. For those of you that don’t play video games, many story-based games come with crafting mechanics. There’s often a workbench, or at least a menu, that you can open and use the materials you have collected out in the game’s world to build or improve new gear, like weapons and armor. It’s incredibly common in video games, and in many it’s the way to get the most impressive equipment.

Friends, I’ve come to hate crafting in games. This is immensely frustrating, because it’s increasingly obligatory in single-player story-based video games. When Dragon Age cheerfully informed me that I could craft new gear, I may have been tempted to throw something*. Because not only do I have to close the hole in the sky, juggle Companions, fight monsters, manage the War Table, explore the regions, help beleaguered civilians, and recruit agents, now I also have to make my own crap, make crap for my companions, make extra crap for my crap to upgrade it, collect hoards of materials to do it, and then figure out what to do with all that crap (sell it, probably) when it inevitably becomes obsolete because I’ve found better crap while exploring the armpit of some elven ruins or something. And unlike some games like Horizon or Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, I can’t disassemble crap for parts; you either sell it or throw it into the Underworld or something.

It’s a chore. It’s intentionally a chore in video game design. The idea is that it’s something to help drive player engagement. Or, in plain English, it’s made to make you keep playing the game for longer. Many games have narrative reasons why a character would craft things, like it being the post-apocalypse or something. Many do not. Why would the Inquisitor, someone with no history of blacksmithing, be forging his or her own weapons? How does that make sense? It ultimately comes down to stupid math, where I look at a bunch of numbers and weigh whether I have high enough numbers. I don’t want to do this! I want to go fight monsters and interact with other characters! I don’t play video games so I can do homework!

People give a lot of grief to the design choices in Fallout 4, and a lot of those are justified. But I liked that weapon crafting system because it made sense–you could see what upgrades you could get on your gun, and they were intuitive design choices. Adding a bayonet gives melee damage. Adding a silencer makes it a stealth weapon. Add a scope for accuracy. Lengthen the barrel for range. Extend the magazine to hold more ammunition. Numbers were there, but also designing a weapon made sense.

Heck, it’s really simple in Skyrim. If I want steel armor, I get some steel and leather together, and BAM! I’ve got steel armor. I can improve it by adding more steel. It’s perhaps stupidly straightforward, but it works. It’s easy to understand! It makes sense! It doesn’t feel like I need a database to understand this stuff!

In Dragon Age, I have to go through a bunch of different fabrics and metals, many of which I found at random, to discover which one maybe works best, which one will have special features, and whether those features mean anything concrete other than more numbers that don’t affect my gameplay experience. Which, again, tends to be meaningless, because about an hour later I’ll stumble across something which has better numbers while wandering around.

It felt a bit like The Witcher 3 in this regard. I also crafted swords and armor, and then someone would hand me something much better not long afterward. It made me feel like it wasn’t really worth doing any of this work.

There are worse crafting systems out there, I’ll admit. The one in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag is really shallow, it’s just ‘two of animal skin’ for whatever upgrade, in ways that don’t make much sense. For instance, you need two deer skins to get a new holster, and then you need two of some other animal for another holster. Why can’t you just make it out of the same material? And there are a couple of upgrades that require two of some kind of whale, because apparently Kenway requires a couple of entire whale skins to add some padding to his leather armor. Honestly, in that game, if you see an animal, kill it, and it will definitely come in handy later. 

The exception to my woes is ammunition crafting–Black Flag has it (for darts, anyway), Odyssey has it, Horizon has it. In that system, if you need more ammo, you can make it on the fly. Which is great because you might run out of ammo in a fight. If you have enough wood, or animal bones, or whatever, you can craft those suckers out in a fight, and BAM! You’re back in business.

Otherwise, though? No! Get that crap out of my face. I don’t need to do a butt-ton of crafting. I don’t want it! I didn’t turn on this game so I could craft crap! I wanted to play Dragon Age so I could fight monsters! Shoot fireballs! Hang out with fantasy warriors! I did not sign up for this to churn out endless loads of crap! It’s not fun, it’s annoying. 

Developers, I am begging you: stop putting crafting crap in video games.

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*I may have actually thrown something when it was introduced in Horizon Forbidden West.