I’m intrested in your oppinion and maybe you have some time to spare and want to answer on this ^^.
We all know the rng based drop and crafting systems in loot driven Hack and Slash games and that system is okay and I’m not against it even when some drop chances make me sad.
On the other hand I’m a pen and paper player and I have sometimes issues with the fact that generic enemy A drops a platmail all of the sudden that is exactly the size my Gnome Warrior needs.
To me loot Piñatas make little sense in games and I have fond memories of the “The Bards Tale” tutorial where an enemy drops a kitchen cupboard 10 times larger then the monster.
On to my question:
What would you guys think about a more determistic aproach in a game? Like there are gatherers bringing materials to a crafter and then said crafter makes items that can be used. Said crafter needs to have enough passive skill to deal with materials and good enough tools and whatnot and needs to do some minigame kind of stuff to craft the item a player ordered.
This is just an example for an economy where adventures kill mobs while gatheres collect stuff so crafters can make goods. So random dropped gear can be sold or reforged or whatnot while there are still some powerfull items in the wolrd people can achive like the good ol’ sword in the stone kind of stuff or the treassure the big bad Dragon sleeps on. Yet if there is a grandmaster weapons smith he is equaly able to craft the “Armageddon Blade of World Ending”.
Would anyone even be intrested in this or is the good old rng without asking questions if this makes sense at all the better approach?
Just some random shower thoughts here and I would like to lightly talk about this topic and if it would be good or bad.
I would definitely be down for a game where you collect scraps from the fallen, forge them into gear, level up your crafting ability while doing so, and eventually craft your own custom legendary items. That sounds awesome. Personally I would not at all be against such a system being in an ARPG, though many would indeed be against it, they seemingly want ARNG from what I can see and want a reason to play the same build for 100+ hours instead of a reason to explore a different build every 10-20 hours. Different strokes for different folks, but I at least would be in.
Rather than just collecting scraps, I’m a BIG fan of “You keep what you kill”, the game which did this best was Borderlands 1 (2 and onwards sadly scrapped it for loot pinatas, the worst change in the history of the series imho). Basically the idea being you pre-roll what the enemies will drop when generating them, and let them use said item in combat. See an enemy running at you really fast? Well you can be excited about the apparent move speed bonuses on whatever they’re going to drop. Hitting like a truck? Kill them and you will be too! Such a system not only telegraphs what enemies might be packing good gear on them, it also in my opinion leads to a much more satisfying experience when acquiring said gear because you earned that gear by killing its wielder, instead of having just gotten lucky.
Such a system could be great in conjunction with the whole forging thing, maybe you get the gear they drop but then it needs to be reforged with adequate skill and scrap before you can actually use it yourself. Would be a really cool game in my eyes. Definitely though shouldn’t look for it to happen in this one.
Doesn’t have to be by any means. FTL is a Rogue-Lite for example, despite having almost nothing at all to do with Rogue, since the genre it’s in is defined by the procedural events and differing gameplay during each loop rather than specific mechanics.
We are in agreement that it would have “RPG” involved, the only difference inherently between a MMORPG and ARPG is the combat style (both would work fine for this but ARPG would be cooler by far) and the number of players in at a time (which for a self-found survivalist forging type experience ARPG makes a lot more sense). Remember, not every game within a genre needs to be the same or even necessarily close to the same.
Kind of. There would be more player interaction needed and you need to have at least or know at least one crafter. But the backround and backround systems for everything else don’t matter that much to me in this. The main point is if RNG vs Craft the stuff you need is something people would even want in a hack and slash game.
For most people H&S games are singleplayer games to unwind and mindlessly slay mobs and get dopamine hits from colorfull pixels. Lost Ark is less of a H&S game to me because the chors of the mmo genre are far to overwhelming in this game.
Titan Quest did it well in that the mobs used equipment which was dropped on death, so if you saw a Skellie weilding a particular unique weapon or wearing a unique armour you could get it when you killed it.
