temesgen77
Member
DA:I has one of the worst crafting and inventory management systems, really feels like work. I almost stopped playing a couple hours in due to some of the flaws but it gets better and I'm glad I stuck with it.
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Turned off by crafting and inventory management in games to the point you quit?
- Thread starter family_guy
- Start date
EveChristine
Member
I agree with this. I hate alchemy/crafting in Elder Scrolls, Fallout games and now Dragon Age Inquisition....however I find you can avoid engaging in this entirely by simply making do with the rare items you find.
When you try to think about...try to understand it.....it can indeed become overwhelming (and as someone else mentioned, pointless when you concoct a magical potion with 100 ingredients that only boosts strength 5% for 2 seconds....)
I played through both Fallout 3 and New Vegas barely crafting a thing thankfully. If that had felt mandatory to progress I'd have probably quit early on. I saw enough of the crafting in Skyrim to tell me that was boring too but I quit that game for the combat not the crafting.
I struggle to understand the appeal of clicking on a bunch of random things in a menu to make a new thing. If to craft a weapon you have to travel to a location find the rare sacred gold feather of whateversville and then find a workbench to use I'd rather instead just have that awesome weapon hidden in that location without the boring extra inventory clicking. If a game absolutely required crafting I probably would quit it early.
As an exception Dead Rising 2 did have crafting that appealed as it has a creative "what if I jammed these two objects together" element. Something that most games with crafting don't as you have little creative logic as to why mixing the things required makes the item you get from it.
I struggle to understand the appeal of clicking on a bunch of random things in a menu to make a new thing. If to craft a weapon you have to travel to a location find the rare sacred gold feather of whateversville and then find a workbench to use I'd rather instead just have that awesome weapon hidden in that location without the boring extra inventory clicking. If a game absolutely required crafting I probably would quit it early.
As an exception Dead Rising 2 did have crafting that appealed as it has a creative "what if I jammed these two objects together" element. Something that most games with crafting don't as you have little creative logic as to why mixing the things required makes the item you get from it.
chrominance
Member
This particular comparison is so unfair it's ridiculous, but let's compare Dragon Age: Inquisition to Atelier Escha & Logy, a JRPG known for its complex alchemy crafting system. Dragon Age crafting is as follows:
- find a schematic in a chest or receive it from a mission (usually the former)
- collect resources in the game world, which are all essentially commodities (all Spindlewood are the same, all Summer Stones are the same, etc)
- go to your smithy, choose a schematic, fill the spots with various resources (different resources give different bonuses to an extent)
- if you created an upgrade, try to find a weapon or armor piece it fits on, because good luck getting the game to tell you
Atelier Escha & Logy works similarly as far as recipes and resources go. But the actual crafting is far more complex:
- go to your alchemy cauldron and choose a recipe
- that recipe may require other ingredients that need to be synthesized, so make those first (this can go several layers deep, depending on how dedicated you are)
- select resources for the intermediate items. Like DA:I, different ingredients confer different traits and effects, but crucially, some traits combine with others, and the resulting item has a limit on how many traits it can have (and on what traits make sense for the final product)
- each ingredient has a specific cost, and you have a sort of stamina meter that dictates what kinds of recipes and what quality of ingredients you can use; this meter improves as you synthesize more items
- as you level up, you also gain access to alchemy skills that can influence this limit by reducing/eliminating the cost of certain ingredients; these skills rely on elemental points provided by the ingredients themselves
- after making the intermediary ingredients, you can make the final item, which itself can incorporate a mixture of traits from the intermediaries as well as new combined traits.
Granted, alchemy is kind of the whole point of Atelier games; Dragon Age's crafting system is a minor system amongst many. But there are certain things about the crafting system that feel like afterthoughts, such as many varieties of metal having essentially the same bonuses, or the apparent inability to see whether an upgrade you craft will apply to the weapon you're using or not. The number of times I've seen, say, a staff blade upgrade that inexplicably didn't apply to any of the staffs my mages used. It's possible there's some arcane method to this madness--I know items have levels and tiers to them, for example--but the game hasn't yet told me how any of that stuff matters besides "higher levels and tiers = more powerful."
[stealth edit] As gelf mentioned above, Dead Rising 2 had a pretty good crafting system too. It was a dead simple system that accomplished what it needed to and nothing more. No unnecessary complexity, no hidden gotchas (except a bunch of items that wouldn't go together, but the time lost due to stuff like this was minimal at worst), rewards creativity. Great.
Bethesda games are just the worst for this. Half the game in Fallout and Skyrim is shuffling crap in your inventories all over the place. Having to warp back home, shove all your crap into different boxes, dealing with encumberance. So annoying. I'm pretty sure it's half the reason I stopped playing Skyrim.
texhnolyze
Banned
Have you played the Witcher 2? It's one of the worst. Limited slots, plus weight. You can only bring several item at a time.
Inventory management is part of the game though. It's an RPG, afterall. If you don't want to deal with that, just play action games.
Inventory management is part of the game though. It's an RPG, afterall. If you don't want to deal with that, just play action games.
Scrooge McDuck
Member
Thank you for the explanation. I can see how, for people who like crafting, Inquisition's system isn't adequate. However, for someone like me (and presumably the OP), something like Atelier's would only make it worse, right? It requires even more steps and planning, and since crafting is the point of those games, I assume you couldn't immediately get great equipment just from exploration.
Personally, the part I dislike the most from crafting is the resource gathering. It always feels mindless and takes a lot of time (if there's a game that alleviate this, I'm interested in knowing). I guess then Inquisition's problem is that the system is too much of an afterthought for crafting-lovers, but still too cumbersome for people like me. However, precisely because it's minor, I could just ignore it altogether. I decide to run through the field ignoring early on Iron and am much happier for it.
Dead Rising 2's sound like something I might like, though.
chrominance
Member
Yeah, I can see how you'd be completely turned off by an Atelier game (though because the resource gathering is a significant portion of the field gameplay, and because it's relatively streamlined, it feels less annoying because it's not getting in the way of anything else). I agree with the sentiment that Dragon Age's crafting is an awkward in-between system that doesn't really serve anyone all that well.
Begaria
Member
I just want to give a shout out to one company in particular for RPGs that has always tackled their crafting system up until the point where they got it pretty much perfect:
Level 5
From Dark Cloud/Chronicle 1/2, Rogue Galaxy, Dragon Quest VIII/IX, Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White specifically.
In Dark Cloud 1 they had this simple to understand but somewhat deep weapon upgrading/crafting system where pretty much any item you picked up could be broken down into an element and applied to a weapon to increase its parameters. Increase a weapon's parameters enough and you could upgrade that weapon to an even better version of that weapon. Continue to do this and eventually you'll start getting branching paths to create weapons that specialize in different elements and eventually into ultimate forms. It's a bit addicting tracking down Gems, and crafting items to power your weapons up, and you can also add abilities to your weapons. This continued pretty much untouched into Dark Cloud 2 aside from some very small improvements that aren't worth going into much detail as most of the improvements were in the weapon repair system and cutting down the amount of characters.
Some examples from Dark Cloud 1:
Dark Cloud 2:
Man, I really want a Dark Cloud 3. Sony, Level 5, you guys should get on that.
Rogue Galaxy kept a similar weapon upgrade/crafting system - though the actual factory item synthesis that opens up later in the game is novel, it's almost next to useless. In Rogue Galaxy, instead of just changing one weapon into another after reaching certain parameters, once you've reached certain parameters with one weapon, you'll also want to increase the parameters of a second weapon (well, if you want higher stats on the created weapon). Then, you actually combine these two weapons
to create the next tier of weaponry with higher stats.
I couldn't find a good picture to demonstrate this, so here's a random LP video quickly demonstrating what I mean:
http://youtu.be/wHDXcLV_GbE?t=6m33s
Dragon Quest VIII and IX introduced the Alchemy Pot and they work pretty much the same way across both games - put ingredients in the pot from a recipe and you make an item. In DQVIII, there was a timing element to the pot (though you could win an insta-alchemy pot in post game), while in DQIX the alchemy pot would instantly make you items. There was this meta game of tracking down recipes from bookshelves or from people to craft with. If you know the recipes from a guide, you can easily deck yourself out in equipment that is overpowered for areas you're in:
DQVIII:
DQIX:
The DQIX alchemy was a bit overwhelming since there were sooooo many recipes. It's a bit insane.
Level 5 were on god damn fire on the PS2 with Dark Cloud 1/2, DQVIII, and Rogue Galaxy.
Now, having made several RPGs, all with varying item creation systems, I personally feel they nailed it in Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. It took a little bit from all of their past works and blended it perfectly. Resources were everywhere in the world from resource points (introduced in DQIX I believe). You picked up alchemy recipes (DQVIII/IX) from quest completions. The alchemy pot was instant, like DQIX, but you could carry it around with you at all times like in DQVIII and being able to alchemize at any time like in DQVIII/DC1/2/RG. You had this awesome in game "strategy guide" with the Wizard's Companion that kept track of all of your recipes, a really good in game bestiary that showed exactly what enemies drop what and where they were, so you never really had to hit the internet to find everything. The amount of items were scaled back from the insanity that was DQIX, while also leaving a good amount of items to equip yourself with. It did get bogged down later if you were trying to go for the Alchemy trophy or complete the list as the really rare ingredients were...well, really rare.
Ha! The genie's name is Al-Khemi. Oh, Level 5 and your silly puns. Ahhhh, man. I rambled on again.
Level 5
From Dark Cloud/Chronicle 1/2, Rogue Galaxy, Dragon Quest VIII/IX, Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White specifically.
In Dark Cloud 1 they had this simple to understand but somewhat deep weapon upgrading/crafting system where pretty much any item you picked up could be broken down into an element and applied to a weapon to increase its parameters. Increase a weapon's parameters enough and you could upgrade that weapon to an even better version of that weapon. Continue to do this and eventually you'll start getting branching paths to create weapons that specialize in different elements and eventually into ultimate forms. It's a bit addicting tracking down Gems, and crafting items to power your weapons up, and you can also add abilities to your weapons. This continued pretty much untouched into Dark Cloud 2 aside from some very small improvements that aren't worth going into much detail as most of the improvements were in the weapon repair system and cutting down the amount of characters.
Some examples from Dark Cloud 1:
Dark Cloud 2:
Man, I really want a Dark Cloud 3. Sony, Level 5, you guys should get on that.
Rogue Galaxy kept a similar weapon upgrade/crafting system - though the actual factory item synthesis that opens up later in the game is novel, it's almost next to useless. In Rogue Galaxy, instead of just changing one weapon into another after reaching certain parameters, once you've reached certain parameters with one weapon, you'll also want to increase the parameters of a second weapon (well, if you want higher stats on the created weapon). Then, you actually combine these two weapons
to create the next tier of weaponry with higher stats.
I couldn't find a good picture to demonstrate this, so here's a random LP video quickly demonstrating what I mean:
http://youtu.be/wHDXcLV_GbE?t=6m33s
Dragon Quest VIII and IX introduced the Alchemy Pot and they work pretty much the same way across both games - put ingredients in the pot from a recipe and you make an item. In DQVIII, there was a timing element to the pot (though you could win an insta-alchemy pot in post game), while in DQIX the alchemy pot would instantly make you items. There was this meta game of tracking down recipes from bookshelves or from people to craft with. If you know the recipes from a guide, you can easily deck yourself out in equipment that is overpowered for areas you're in:
DQVIII:
DQIX:
The DQIX alchemy was a bit overwhelming since there were sooooo many recipes. It's a bit insane.
Level 5 were on god damn fire on the PS2 with Dark Cloud 1/2, DQVIII, and Rogue Galaxy.
Now, having made several RPGs, all with varying item creation systems, I personally feel they nailed it in Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. It took a little bit from all of their past works and blended it perfectly. Resources were everywhere in the world from resource points (introduced in DQIX I believe). You picked up alchemy recipes (DQVIII/IX) from quest completions. The alchemy pot was instant, like DQIX, but you could carry it around with you at all times like in DQVIII and being able to alchemize at any time like in DQVIII/DC1/2/RG. You had this awesome in game "strategy guide" with the Wizard's Companion that kept track of all of your recipes, a really good in game bestiary that showed exactly what enemies drop what and where they were, so you never really had to hit the internet to find everything. The amount of items were scaled back from the insanity that was DQIX, while also leaving a good amount of items to equip yourself with. It did get bogged down later if you were trying to go for the Alchemy trophy or complete the list as the really rare ingredients were...well, really rare.
Ha! The genie's name is Al-Khemi. Oh, Level 5 and your silly puns. Ahhhh, man. I rambled on again.
Bomber Bob
Banned
Crafting is life.
A game without crafting is just not fun.
A game without crafting is just not fun.
I enjoy it but I took it too far in Skyrim and made my self almost invincible!
I'm not entirely happy with it in DA:I, I'm never quite sure what I already have and what I should be making next.
edit
Dead Island, I loved the crafting in that, pretty simple but I made some ace weapons.
I'm not entirely happy with it in DA:I, I'm never quite sure what I already have and what I should be making next.
edit
Dead Island, I loved the crafting in that, pretty simple but I made some ace weapons.
zenosparadox
Member
Oh gosh, I hated the inventory system for Xenoblade Chronicles so much. They did not bother to make it easy to transfer gems from the item you have equipped to the new item you want to equip, and so that could mess up determining if said item upgraded or downgraded your stats depending on the gems.
Xenoblade Chronicles X better step into the 21st century or I will not even bother.
Xenoblade Chronicles X better step into the 21st century or I will not even bother.
Omegasquash
Member
Where any randomization for a good item being crafted comes into play, it's a shitty mechanic. Farming for an item, I understand. Hunting for a drop, I understand. Getting all your materials together, attempting to create something and having it turn out to be a lump of shit because of a roll you can't really influence? Fuck that.
Starzonedge
Member
For me, crafting is fine as long as the menu shows me the end result first, while highlighting missing materials with bright bold red text. 
Dead Island Riptide does it right. It even displays missing materials at the shop, so perfect.
I probably wouldn't have quit Minecraft if you didn't have to craft from scratch.
Dead Island Riptide does it right. It even displays missing materials at the shop, so perfect. I probably wouldn't have quit Minecraft if you didn't have to craft from scratch.
Mudron
Member
I've socked about 20 hours into Dragon Age: Inquisition (I just finished Act 1 last night) and I'm still pretty confounded by the crafting/inventory system, to the point that it feels like it's more hassle than it's worth to swap out party members since it'll take so much goddamned time trying out which new armor/weapons/trinkets would be best equipped to any new party member.
I've also found myself having to literally write down the stats for weapons and armor currently equipped to the party members I DO have so I don't waste precious crafting materials when crafting new stuff, which I can't believe us something I'm forced to do in a major console RPG in 2014.
I've also found myself having to literally write down the stats for weapons and armor currently equipped to the party members I DO have so I don't waste precious crafting materials when crafting new stuff, which I can't believe us something I'm forced to do in a major console RPG in 2014.
GifGafIsTheBestGaf
Member
i like to grind like a mofo but god forbid i have to grind crafting, fuck that.
Halph n Halph
Member
I hate grinding and crafting unless its simple like TLOU. I game to have fun and endless crafting or grinding for shit makes playing similar to going to work .
The problem is that most designers do it very poorly. Some designers make it interesting, but most make it feel like I'm doing my taxes.
Bad management systems appear all the time in JRPGs, WRPGs, and Ubisoft open-world games. BioWare is really bad at it because they over-simplify it. And recent RPG darlings like Divinity: Original Sin are bad at it because they over-complicate it. It's hard to do well. Part of what made Final Fantasy entries 7-12 so good was how they handled crafting and inventory/character management. On the other end of the spectrum, I also think the Grand Theft Auto games do a great job of it.
Bad management systems appear all the time in JRPGs, WRPGs, and Ubisoft open-world games. BioWare is really bad at it because they over-simplify it. And recent RPG darlings like Divinity: Original Sin are bad at it because they over-complicate it. It's hard to do well. Part of what made Final Fantasy entries 7-12 so good was how they handled crafting and inventory/character management. On the other end of the spectrum, I also think the Grand Theft Auto games do a great job of it.
Goldenroad
Member
Final Fantasy IX rings a bell. I started playing the game, got maybe 6 hours in, and put the game down. I came back to it maybe a month later and I had no clue how the crafting system was supposed to work. I've never touched it again. It's too bad because I was really enjoying that game.
Strict encumbrance actually makes certain games much more fun to me.
STALKER is the perfect example - you can't carry much at all, and there's a lot to worry about (depending which version/mod you're playing). Food, ammo, artifacts, anti-rad stuff, vodka...it makes you plan your loadout carefully before leaving town. It also influences other things, like for example you know you're going to be fighting a certain faction and they use certain guns, so if you bring one of those guns you'll be able to scavenge ammo. It's also smart to leave caches of supplies out in areas you travel through frequently - at least, in the versions of the game where this doesn't cause memory leaks.
The extra limitations on the player made me really enjoy New Vegas' hardcore mode, and I'm hoping the next Fallout game has something similar.
I really enjoyed the first game but this shit made the sequel unplayable to me. I just want to make cute patapons fight to a rhythm, why are you making me grind?
Morrigan Stark
Arrogant Smirk
I tend to hate crafting, unless it's the focus of the game, such as Monster Hunter. It helps that they've really polished the mechanic too. Though I wish there was a better interface to check out the parts I need for, say, a full armour set rather than break down each individual armour piece.
Yup, absolutely terrible. And their crafting system is such a pain in the ass, I did it once and never again. Fuck that shit.
I just want to give a shout out to one company in particular for RPGs that has always tackled their crafting system up until the point where they got it pretty much perfect:
Level 5
From Dark Cloud/Chronicle 1/2, Rogue Galaxy, Dragon Quest VIII/IX, Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White specifically.
In Dark Cloud 1 they had this simple to understand but somewhat deep weapon upgrading/crafting system where pretty much any item you picked up could be broken down into an element and applied to a weapon to increase its parameters. Increase a weapon's parameters enough and you could upgrade that weapon to an even better version of that weapon. Continue to do this and eventually you'll start getting branching paths to create weapons that specialize in different elements and eventually into ultimate forms. It's a bit addicting tracking down Gems, and crafting items to power your weapons up, and you can also add abilities to your weapons. This continued pretty much untouched into Dark Cloud 2 aside from some very small improvements that aren't worth going into much detail as most of the improvements were in the weapon repair system and cutting down the amount of characters.
Some examples from Dark Cloud 1:
Dark Cloud 2:
Man, I really want a Dark Cloud 3. Sony, Level 5, you guys should get on that.
Rogue Galaxy kept a similar weapon upgrade/crafting system - though the actual factory item synthesis that opens up later in the game is novel, it's almost next to useless. In Rogue Galaxy, instead of just changing one weapon into another after reaching certain parameters, once you've reached certain parameters with one weapon, you'll also want to increase the parameters of a second weapon (well, if you want higher stats on the created weapon). Then, you actually combine these two weapons
to create the next tier of weaponry with higher stats.
I couldn't find a good picture to demonstrate this, so here's a random LP video quickly demonstrating what I mean:
http://youtu.be/wHDXcLV_GbE?t=6m33s
Dragon Quest VIII and IX introduced the Alchemy Pot and they work pretty much the same way across both games - put ingredients in the pot from a recipe and you make an item. In DQVIII, there was a timing element to the pot (though you could win an insta-alchemy pot in post game), while in DQIX the alchemy pot would instantly make you items. There was this meta game of tracking down recipes from bookshelves or from people to craft with. If you know the recipes from a guide, you can easily deck yourself out in equipment that is overpowered for areas you're in:
DQVIII:
DQIX:
The DQIX alchemy was a bit overwhelming since there were sooooo many recipes. It's a bit insane.
Level 5 were on god damn fire on the PS2 with Dark Cloud 1/2, DQVIII, and Rogue Galaxy.
Now, having made several RPGs, all with varying item creation systems, I personally feel they nailed it in Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. It took a little bit from all of their past works and blended it perfectly. Resources were everywhere in the world from resource points (introduced in DQIX I believe). You picked up alchemy recipes (DQVIII/IX) from quest completions. The alchemy pot was instant, like DQIX, but you could carry it around with you at all times like in DQVIII and being able to alchemize at any time like in DQVIII/DC1/2/RG. You had this awesome in game "strategy guide" with the Wizard's Companion that kept track of all of your recipes, a really good in game bestiary that showed exactly what enemies drop what and where they were, so you never really had to hit the internet to find everything. The amount of items were scaled back from the insanity that was DQIX, while also leaving a good amount of items to equip yourself with. It did get bogged down later if you were trying to go for the Alchemy trophy or complete the list as the really rare ingredients were...well, really rare.
Ha! The genie's name is Al-Khemi. Oh, Level 5 and your silly puns. Ahhhh, man. I rambled on again.
Ironically, in Ni No Kuni, I didn't craft a single item. Never had to, never found it useful. By the end of that game, I had so many items from working off the land that the Alchemy system seemed completely unnecessary.
Agree with the OP and others.
Loving Dragon Age: Inquisition in a lot of ways, but the inventory management is noticably lacking. Given the amount of characters one acquires, I am constantly manging inventory and either selling/destroying gear while doing quests. Having no place to store rare/higher-level gear that you don't want to sell/destroy is really irritating and nonsensical.
As others have mentioned, given the story in the game, it doesn't make logical sense that the inquisition wouldn't have any place for you to store extra stuff anyways.
Still, the game has a lot of things going for it...maybe they'll patch in extra space/storage at some point.
Loving Dragon Age: Inquisition in a lot of ways, but the inventory management is noticably lacking. Given the amount of characters one acquires, I am constantly manging inventory and either selling/destroying gear while doing quests. Having no place to store rare/higher-level gear that you don't want to sell/destroy is really irritating and nonsensical.
As others have mentioned, given the story in the game, it doesn't make logical sense that the inquisition wouldn't have any place for you to store extra stuff anyways.
Still, the game has a lot of things going for it...maybe they'll patch in extra space/storage at some point.
Morrigan Stark
Arrogant Smirk
I just want to give a shout out to one company in particular for RPGs that has always tackled their crafting system up until the point where they got it pretty much perfect:
Level 5
From Dark Cloud/Chronicle 1/2, Rogue Galaxy, Dragon Quest VIII/IX, Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White specifically.
In Dark Cloud 1 they had this simple to understand but somewhat deep weapon upgrading/crafting system where pretty much any item you picked up could be broken down into an element and applied to a weapon to increase its parameters. Increase a weapon's parameters enough and you could upgrade that weapon to an even better version of that weapon. Continue to do this and eventually you'll start getting branching paths to create weapons that specialize in different elements and eventually into ultimate forms. It's a bit addicting tracking down Gems, and crafting items to power your weapons up, and you can also add abilities to your weapons. This continued pretty much untouched into Dark Cloud 2 aside from some very small improvements that aren't worth going into much detail as most of the improvements were in the weapon repair system and cutting down the amount of characters.
Some examples from Dark Cloud 1:
Dark Cloud 2:
Man, I really want a Dark Cloud 3. Sony, Level 5, you guys should get on that.
Rogue Galaxy kept a similar weapon upgrade/crafting system - though the actual factory item synthesis that opens up later in the game is novel, it's almost next to useless. In Rogue Galaxy, instead of just changing one weapon into another after reaching certain parameters, once you've reached certain parameters with one weapon, you'll also want to increase the parameters of a second weapon (well, if you want higher stats on the created weapon). Then, you actually combine these two weapons
to create the next tier of weaponry with higher stats.
I couldn't find a good picture to demonstrate this, so here's a random LP video quickly demonstrating what I mean:
http://youtu.be/wHDXcLV_GbE?t=6m33s
Dragon Quest VIII and IX introduced the Alchemy Pot and they work pretty much the same way across both games - put ingredients in the pot from a recipe and you make an item. In DQVIII, there was a timing element to the pot (though you could win an insta-alchemy pot in post game), while in DQIX the alchemy pot would instantly make you items. There was this meta game of tracking down recipes from bookshelves or from people to craft with. If you know the recipes from a guide, you can easily deck yourself out in equipment that is overpowered for areas you're in:
DQVIII:
DQIX:
The DQIX alchemy was a bit overwhelming since there were sooooo many recipes. It's a bit insane.
Level 5 were on god damn fire on the PS2 with Dark Cloud 1/2, DQVIII, and Rogue Galaxy.
Now, having made several RPGs, all with varying item creation systems, I personally feel they nailed it in Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch. It took a little bit from all of their past works and blended it perfectly. Resources were everywhere in the world from resource points (introduced in DQIX I believe). You picked up alchemy recipes (DQVIII/IX) from quest completions. The alchemy pot was instant, like DQIX, but you could carry it around with you at all times like in DQVIII and being able to alchemize at any time like in DQVIII/DC1/2/RG. You had this awesome in game "strategy guide" with the Wizard's Companion that kept track of all of your recipes, a really good in game bestiary that showed exactly what enemies drop what and where they were, so you never really had to hit the internet to find everything. The amount of items were scaled back from the insanity that was DQIX, while also leaving a good amount of items to equip yourself with. It did get bogged down later if you were trying to go for the Alchemy trophy or complete the list as the really rare ingredients were...well, really rare.
Ha! The genie's name is Al-Khemi. Oh, Level 5 and your silly puns. Ahhhh, man. I rambled on again.
Beautiful post and I agree 100%! I absolutely love the way Level-5 handles crafting. Just seeing those images makes me want to play Dark Cloud 1 and 2 again. Really hope they make an RPG for PS4.
Mechanized
Member
I think there are games where it is unnecessary. Skyrim, for example, didn't need crafting at all. But I can't say that aspect has ever made me quit a game. Inventory management is much the same, usually an unnecessary encumbrance(lol) that is more annoying than fun or enjoyable in some way. There are games that can make it fun, Far Cry 3/4 have you gut animals for bigger ammo pouches and shit, which leads to you exploring the world and having adventures thanks to the way the games are structured. I think realism for the sake of realism "features" in video games kinda blow unless they're well thought out and dealing with that "feature" leads to compelling gameplay.
I totally agree. It's nice that the crafting is so robust but it does get a little fiddly.
Oh, and don't get me started on the stupid 60 item inventory limit. I'm sorry DA:I, but you don't have encumbrance. No encumbrance, no need for an inventory limit unless you just like forcing me to waste time by fast travelling to a merchant. It really starts to grate as I'm never below half full at any moment.
Palette Swap
Member
LTTP but yeah, inventory management is the one glaring fault of DA:I for me.
It's a stupid and irrelevant idea IMO: it doesn't add a challenge to the game, it just makes it tedious.
It's a stupid and irrelevant idea IMO: it doesn't add a challenge to the game, it just makes it tedious.
Begaria
Member
Which is crazy to me since you could make some pretty powerful equipment at certain points in the game that completely trivializes those areas, especially if you head into areas for ingredients that you're not supposed to get yet due to higher enemy levels. It's also, hands down, the best way to get Familiar treats and recovery items.
Stopped playing Mass Effect 1 because of the horrid menu UI and Item Management and characters having seperate lockers, etc.
Also stopped playing Dragons Dogma because I am OSD about grabbing every item. But the game could have had more intuitive menus and info. Sucks having to back out of 1 menu, several levels to find the same item again in another menu, to see different info, and then go back again to the previous menu. Loved DD though.I hope to beat it as a remaster one day.
Also stopped playing Dragons Dogma because I am OSD about grabbing every item. But the game could have had more intuitive menus and info. Sucks having to back out of 1 menu, several levels to find the same item again in another menu, to see different info, and then go back again to the previous menu. Loved DD though.I hope to beat it as a remaster one day.
To be fair - the crafting itself seems fine to me. The problem is the absurd UI - "it's pretty, but it's pretty unusable".
FlyingSaucer
Banned
Inventory Management made me stop playing Divinity Original Sin.
PayOffWizard
Member
I guess it all depends on how it works in the game. In the persona games its very enjoyable.
Demon crafting = Fun
Equipment Crafting = Not Fun :/
Demon crafting = Fun
Equipment Crafting = Not Fun :/
Florida_Man_5000
Member
I've simplified things in DAI: I sell everything cause if its good its usually over your level. And by the time you reach that level your crafted items are better. Makes life simpler.
Far Cry 3 to get a bloody decent inventory size etc. Stop playing but went back recently and did a few upgrades here and there then ignored it and just played the story missions and some camp stuff.
Looking back I don't know how I stuck with the first Mass Effect on 360. Now that was torture.
Looking back I don't know how I stuck with the first Mass Effect on 360. Now that was torture.
WonderCheese
Banned
Yes, it can become too much and an annoyance in many games.
Erik Kain wrote a pretty good article about this recently.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkai...ition-and-the-problem-with-roleplaying-games/
Erik Kain wrote a pretty good article about this recently.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkai...ition-and-the-problem-with-roleplaying-games/