Monday, December 1, 2008

Tabula Rasa - Crafting that I like

How odd.

I messed around with the crafting system yesterday. I just wanted to note that what we have here is actually a fun and simple crafting game.

You have several steps to working with crafting.

You either can break down junk equipment for items called mimeomechs.
You can rip modules off weapons to reuse (example, higher damage mods or modifiers for attributes)
You can re-add modules to weapons and armor.

You need the mimeomechs to rip the modules or add them again. Each weapon and armor piece has a possible 4 slots for upgrades. You can pull one upgrade and add a new one in it's place, etc.
If an item has 2 slots filled, you can add 2 more modules.

Total control over how you wish your items to be.

So, if I am focused say on more armor and regen of health...no prob. I can rip what I need off lower grade equipment and add it to new equipment.

This is all I know so far. According to the TR wiki I can also eventually fabricate items.

I do not need to spend money on points for crafting or get my skill up, etc. It just works right out of the box. Reminds me of being very Diablo in the sense of adding and removing items.

I would like to see another game use this craft system.

Quite fun, and easy without taking my game time away. Finally a craft system I like, and it is going away...

So sad.

5 comments:

Gamer Hudson said...

Isn't it cool? I liked the crafting too.

Trust me the game had its hooks.

But you will do a lot

of

shooting

over

and

over

Elementalistly said...

WoW - You will do a lot of sword swinging and spell casting... a LOT

EQ2 - You will do a lot of sword swinging and spell casting... a LOT

Oh crap...how weird is THAT?

lol...

But, yes, there is a lot of shooting, and thanks to the spawns being so frequent, you fight a LOT...
Population would have fixed that.

No, I cannot find anything really bad about the game now. But, most people start at launch, see the mess, and give up, and never give a game a chance again...that is probably the saddest part.

I actually will miss this one. Guess I better get to leveling!

Gamer Hudson said...

yes that is the one thing I got tired of. Every I went, I was assaulted by PACKS of mobs. It got to the point where if I wanted to get from one point to the other I would literally just log out because I didn't want to fight my way through all the wandering crap.

And this was directly related to a lack of players after about one month. First month, everyone was killing and having a dandy old time, but after a while the natural culling of the mobs died off and the game became a royal pain in the arse to me.

Anonymous said...

It sounds like their 3rd attempt at crafting in TR actually may have turned out to be a good one, nice to hear.

The mob density can start to become an issue in the higher level zones.

That was a bit of an issue in Crucible and very much an issue in Descent. But a lot of the other zones are fairly ok and Descent you will only visit around level 45+.

Torden Mires even felt a bit empty in comparision after they fixed the lag issues, byt reducing the mob activity in the zone.

Melf_Himself said...

The salvage/re-use of mods sounds pretty much the same as the Hellgate: London crafting system.

IIRC, they also had machines in each town that allowed you to:
1) add random stats to a weapon (these weren't modular, ie you couldn't re-use them on another weapon), which was a bit of a grind because you didn't know what you were getting.
2) Upgrade the weapon to do more damage (there were a limited number of upgrades per weapon, but I'm not sure why because the cost was prohibitive, and the level req went up also)
3) Add more mod slots to the weapon

At first glance it was a great system, but they messed it up with the irritating details. Still, it was better than any other crafting in any other MMO.

In general I'd love to see a system similar to TR/HGL in future games. But I doubt any dev will have the balls to point to a failed game and say 'hey, let's copy this feature' (even though both games have some great features)