![]() ![]() ![]() I wasn’t sure when I started writing this if I would end up slagging off crafting systems or not. Any old twit could save the world with an assault rifle and a box of grenades, but look at what we managed: we repelled the forces of darkness with some old radio parts and expired wine. I think it’s important to that sensation that the raw ingredients were useless to us until they were combined. It flatters our intelligence and problem-solving skills. The appeal of crafting lies in the raw sensation of making something new with our own hands. Creating something useful gives us the same thrill that Grog had when he tied a sharp rock to a bone and accelerated the arms race between his tribe and the guys in the next valley who were still whipping each other with twigs. Similarly, and moving on a bit in our evolutionary cycle, we also have the instincts of tool-using creatures, of builders. Video games play to those instincts on a regular basis, we like the adrenaline rush of excitement because it means we might have a nice fresh sabertooth tiger to eat once we’re finished with it. Crafting is something that appeals to us on a deep, instinctive level, thrown back from the minds of primitive ancestors. No, I think there has to be something more to crafting, I think we have to focus our attention on the third leg of my game design theory: Catharsis. But, here comes another but, you could also achieve this without crafting, most obviously by restricting what items a shop sells. This encourages you to experiment with what wouldn’t have been your first choice, using a smoke bomb where you’d prefer a Molotov, say, and perhaps discovering new strategies you might not otherwise have considered. You still have to track down the raw ingredients, and you won’t always have the ability to craft certain things. Maybe what it is is that crafting a tool doesn’t have as much restrictions as being handed one with no say in what kind of tool it is, but has slightly more restriction than simply buying whatever you want from a shop. But again, surely going to a weapons shop and deliberately buying specific pieces of equipment would have the same effect.Īlright then. ![]() As I smash my way through a roomful of crates or glide down a shelf spamming the ‘pick up’ key, I’m not really taking any kind of account of what I’m picking up, so crafting items does force a greater awareness of my inventory and its capabilities. I personally find that having to go out of my way to craft an explosive tool in an action game does make me slightly more conscious of it, that I’m more likely to use it spontaneously during combat, whereas I often don’t fully register collecting ready-to-use items. But if it were just about letting the player have agency, then how is it any different from giving them money, that they can use to buy whatever piece of equipment they want from a shop? So I ask again, what is it with crafting? Is it just because it makes the game play a tad bit more organic, letting the player have a little more agency over what equipment they have, rather than simply handing out random pickups from every crate. It seems to be something that video games have been chipping away at for quite some time and that triple-A gaming, in the typically glacial way it adopts new practices, has only recently begun to carve out in earnest. Doodle God is an example of a game that has been boiled down to nothing but that single principle. But the principle is the same, regardless of game play genre it’s combining things to make some kind of progress. It’s not quite the same as crafting tools in an action game, in that in the case of point-and-click it was about mandatorily combining two specific items to get past a one-off situation, rather than choosing at your own discretion to combine recurring items to bypass a recurring situation. It was always a big part of the old classic adventure games, of course, combining, say, crowbar with rope to make impromptu grappling hook. ![]() Resident Evil Revelations 2, Watch_Dogs, Alien Isolation, This War Of Mine, The Last Of Us, a whole slew of ‘wilderness survival’ games on Steam, all have a feature that involves Use Thing On Thing to make Other Thing. Because it’s been cropping up an awful lot lately I don’t even want to speculate on how many Molotov cocktails I’ve made in the last year or so. And in the light of recent paths the evolution of triple-A games have taken, I ask you this: what is it with crafting?īy which I mean, collecting extremely specific items of random garbage and combining two or more in predetermined combinations to make useful items. I wish there’d been a bit more examination going on when everyone was into planking, or bell bottoms, or anti-Semitism. Trends come and trends go, but the one thing all trends have in common is that they shouldn’t go unexamined. ![]()
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