Okay, now that I've reached lvl 21 every part of the crafting pazzle got into it's place. Thus I ask everyone to come by and participate in these talks - so that I can work something worthy of notice for Bioware. Completing the game isn't nesessary for your opinion to be heard, but owning lvl 21+ character is highly welcome.
So, General Issues.
When you make a crafting system is considered to be made, there are 4 parts of it that must be well-thought:
I. System in general (Why do Bioware need it, What for we need it, Who is going to do it)
II. Resource gathering (Tiers of resources, Resource Diversity, Resource Stats, Resource collecting mechanics)
III. Schematics/Recipe system (How Should It Be Organized & Balanced)
IV. Crafting & Upgrading Items (highly depends on the previous parts).
This topic is about the very first part - issues in general. Please refrain from discussing other matters here before I post other threads for it.
A. Why do Bioware need it?
I can't get into Bioware project leaders to see their reasons, so I'll speculate:
1. Crafting greatly increases the time player spends in the game, that isn't quest-related. Which happens to be true in DA: I case (mostly because it's way unbalanced).
2. Crafting parts can be a quest reward if it's Treasure Hunt type quest chain. The better the recipe the more players are motivated to go through the stages of The Hunt. And it saves developers from investing into quest rewards (like creating unique items that won't be used any often). So crafting saves developing time & effort.
3. Crafting has a potential for putting player into a challenge. I, for one, beated that Emprise du Lion part @ lvl 10 to get crafting essentials, which was very hard for me. Challenge itself might serve as an additional motivation for crafting (like, get the best gear possible).
B. What for we need it?
1. Perfectionists usually want best possible gear that outguns anything droppable. Happens to be very true in DA: I as we can craft amazing pieces here, tho the need of it is questionable.
2. A lot of people see gear as a part of their character build. I mean, you need to tune your instrument to play well, right? This is pretty much reachable, tho a little bit broken in my books.
3. Gear looks. Most default armours look nice, but some of the best stats look plain horrific. That's too why we need crafting - to make our characters look less ugly. It works in DA: I ... mostly, if you don't speak about weird color choices.
C. Who is going use crafting?
I believe Bioware tended to make crafting easy-to-start with for all. Literally. Menus are designed in the way imbecile won't do anything wrong, however any intelligent person can have trouble (because interface isn't really helping and too console-oriented).
As the official BW policy is to make the same game for all platforms to deliver the same experience to everybody, I see no point in asking any advantages to PC version of the game. Maybe top-end graphics, idk. Nothing gameplay-based, anyway.
So we're basically doomed to live with those console controls and maddening UI.
Thus everything we should think about crafting here must be easy enough to be used on consoles (which is a challenge because of console controls). Please keep that in mind.
Last thing worthy of notice is that all parts of crafting (I-IV in the list above) must be connected to eachother. If one of those parts is broken others simply won't work as intended. I'll explain that in the next parts (II-IV).
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