WAR Crafting: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Personally, I love crafting systems in general. And the WAR crafting system has some very good ideas at its core. But it also inherits some very bad ideas from other games, and is plagued by ugly bugs. In this post I'll try to sort into good, bad, and ugly categories the various features of the WAR crafting system:

The Good: WAR crafting is based on a very different design philosophy than crafting in most other games. Crafting in WAR is not in competition with other ways of acquiring things; you can't craft weapons or armor. Instead you craft consumables, that is potions and talismans to enhance your gear. This cleverly avoids having to make lots of useless gear nobody needs. It is a lot easier to sell 20 healing potions than to sell 20 bronze daggers. Interestingly the gathering skills in WAR are also non-competitive. There are no resource nodes which you have to get before some other player. Instead you get most ingredients from scavenging / butchering the mobs you kill, or disenchant magic items, or grow plants. Another huge improvement to crafting is getting rid of fixed recipes. You don't need to hope for some ultra-rare recipe drop from some boss mob in a dungeon to craft something, you just mix the ingredients and go. Rarer ingredients and critical successes give better items. Except for the scavenging part, crafting in WAR is decoupled from your character level, which enables those players who prefer to play crafters instead of adventurers to do so.

The Bad: The flaw that WAR inherits from previous games, like WoW, is making ingredients the limiting factor of crafting. Any crafting system must have some limiting factor, as creating anything in a virtual world must involve some effort. But systems that require time or player skill (not character skill) are usually better than systems that are limited by tradeable ingredients. Because if somebody has enough money, he can simply buy all the ingredients on the auction house, and power level his crafting. That not only encourages gold selling, it also leads to players ignoring crafting at the lower levels, and then power leveling crafting later, when they have the higher cash drops from the higher level monsters. The only part of WAR's crafting system that requires time in addition to ingredients is cultivation, as it takes 2 minutes to grow a plant. And of course for scavenging / butchering you are limited by the speed at which you can kill monsters. But for everything else you can just load up your inventory with bought ingredients and advance many skill levels in a very short time. I would much have preferred some sort of mini-game or puzzle, requiring some attention and time, to make crafting more interesting. As long as crafting as process is trivial compared to adventuring, crafting will never be a real alternative mode of gameplay.

The Ugly: WAR crafting suffers from a range of bugs and inconsistencies, as well as from its link to the horrible mail and auction house system. For example some magic items can't be salvaged (disenchanted). Now that could be by design, but then it is hard to understand why what items can be salvaged changed with the last patch. And currently there seems to be no general rule as to what items can and cannot be disenchanted, I had two magic shaman belts of similar level of which one was salvageable and the other not. I can only assume that there is some bug behind that, or otherwise there really should be some indication for every item whether it can be salvaged or not. Other inconsistencies are for example that the apothecary window has a handy "repeat last recipe" function, but the otherwise very similar talisman making window doesn't have that. And there are a couple of minor bugs, like not clearing the contents of a crafting window correctly, or how buying stacks of ingredients works only half of the time. The most annoying thing is how user unfriendly the process of for example making 20 talismans and selling them is. Every step from crafting, to putting the item on the auction house, to getting the money from the mail, seems to have been designed to require the maximum possible number of mouse clicks, plus some false alarm warning messages when you try to delete a mail you already took the money from. The situation is aggravated by the fact that you can't craft anything using only ingredients gathered from one character. You must either buy ingredients from the auction house, or make several alts with different gathering skills. And even if you decided to buy ingredients from the auction house, the fact that it is currently impossible to search for e.g. all apothecary ingredients of crafting level 50 makes the process quite difficult. The only good news is that presumably the bugs will be fixed and the user interfaces improved with time. Further possible improvements would be a better tutorial, and maybe even integration of discovered recipes into the tome of knowledge.

In summary, assuming the bugs and UI problems will be fixed, the WAR crafting system is quite good. We are not a the level of a virtual world yet, where crafting would be an activity of equal complexity and interest as adventuring. But as optional game element to provide optional stat enhancements, the WAR tradeskills are already very nice. And they are useful, a couple of potion buffs and enhanced stats from talismans can really boost your power. It is clear that Mythic didn't put as much effort into crafting as they put into other parts of the game, but their basic concepts behind it are solid enough.
- posted by Tobold @ 6:30 AM Permanent Link