So if the combat's merely lackluster and the player economy model severely hampered by lack of tools, why am I enjoying the game?

The crafting! Which seems a bit silly, especially if you're fighting with a hand tied behind your back when it comes to selling the results, but there you go.

In WOW, crafting is fairly lackluster. Your character picks a couple of professions (generally a gathering one and something that uses the results of the gathering profession, unless you're some kind of masochist), and that's all you'll ever get to do without throwing away something else. There's a big standard book of recipes that everyone can learn from a trainer, crafting is "collect materials, hit button" simple, and most of the equipment is completely useless. (There's so many dropped items in the game, usually with stats superior to what you can craft, that crafted items are either just toys or a sign that you're badly undergeared.) There are a tiny number of recipes which are dropped as items, but most of them are so rare (and several only available in raid dungeons) that you can't effectively go after them, as a crafter. There's no such thing as individual skill; if you have the recipe, you can create the item, and if you don't, you can't.

FF11's crafting was much more open, but also profoundly player-unfriendly in several ways. No such thing as recipes - if you try to combine the proper items, your character will attempt the craft, and then it's a matter of skill, luck, phase of the moon, and two or three other factors as to whether you succeed or not. Failure costs you some or all of the materials, success gets you the item, and occasionally you get a high-quality version of the item (or, if the item has no high-quality version, you get extra finished product.) However, the skill-ups were much more random than in WOW (which gave you a "yes-maybe-possibly-no" as to whether you could gain skill from a recipe) and the slower pace of the game meant that leveling a craft could be very hard. It wasn't unusual for someone to go through the results of a month's worth of gathering in an hour, only to fail on a significant number of the resulting recipes and to gain very little skill out of the whole deal.

FF14 has some of the good from each system. First off, attempting to craft starts up a little mini-game, where you attempt to fill up a completion bar, try to avoid depleting "durability", and simultaneously try for a higher-quality end result. For a difficult recipe you're just barely able to do, it's likely to be a race between running out of durability and getting that last few percent of progress. For a recipe you outlevel by 20 ranks, you may want to try more high-risk "bold" crafting in order to drive the quality up high enough to get an exceptional result. It doesn't require a terrible amount of skill to figure out what you should be doing, and there's a goodly amount of random luck in there too, but it adds a tension to crafting that's absent in WOW and too arbitrary in FF11.

Furthermore, crafting isn't something that's tacked on to your character; each craft is its own class, and you gain experience points from crafting the same way you do from killing monsters (i.e. more for tougher ones relative to your level). Even failed attempts get you a little something, so there's some salve for your lost materials, and you can get an idea of how many attempts it will take to go up a level (there's no "dry spots" where you'll try something 20 times and not get one point; you'll know after 1 that you need 19 more, if that's where you are.) But more importantly, because each craft is a class, that means that the crafts have other things associated with different classes... equipment and abilities!

The abilities are mostly things you can activate while doing the crafting mini-game, to help you craft more reliably, or to drive up quality, or to bail you out if you're about to blow it, and their presence makes things quite a bit more interesting. (I've only got access to one so far - the blacksmith's "Maker's Mark", which gives you a higher chance of success on normal crafting for two or three attempts - and it's already saved one or two crafts that I'd have flubbed otherwise.) The gear is mostly generic between crafts, excepting each craft's individual tool, and upgrading to a new tool can have a tremendous effect on your success rate, as much as upgrading a weapon does in combat classes.

Still, by itself this wouldn't get around the problem of having to build up huge stocks of materials to make mostly-worthless products merely to level your craft. However, the game also has crafting quests! Essentially, it hands you materials and crystals, points you at a recipe, and says "get cracking"; you are rewarded for succeeding X out of Y times, a bit more for better quality, and the experience is yours to keep no matter how it turns out. You're free to do your own crafting on your own dime, so if you really want to push a particular craft skill, nothing's stopping you but a lack of crystals to fuel it... but if you're in one of those ugly patches where every completed synth costs you huge amounts of gil, and failed ones even more, you can take it easy and let the crafting quests carry you through. (You're limited to 8 every 36 hours, and there's several different crafts, so you can't just buzz to the top this way... but it's a lot better than having to hunt down the stuff to work on!)

As far as I'm concerned, the crafting system makes it worth putting up with the bugaboos of a broken market, at least long enough to give Square a chance to iron things out a little.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 02:47 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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