Today the website I write for, MMORPG.com, released its Vanguard: Saga of Heroes review. While it touches briefly on quite a few subjects, I think it was remiss in not mentioning the crafting system.
Let me start by saying right now that I hate tedious, overly complicated crafting systems that try to resemble "reality" by making you jump through hoops, even though they are still ridiculously unrealistic. I don't care that you made me make 15 sub-components and then do 100 other steps to brew a keg of beer. In real life, it's less than 20 steps, and it takes at least 2 weeks. So, don't ever preach to me about making it more real by making it more tedious. It's not true. You didn't make it more real, you just took the fun out of it.
Vanguard has one of those systems. You are, for the most part, required to build several sub-components and then combine them in to a final product. For most games, that would be enough. Not for Vanguard. Not only are you required to make all of those sub-components, but each one of those requires you to work through multiple steps to build. Not only are you required to do all this work, but a great degree of the quality of the item is dependant on the quality of the sub-components. The quality of the sub-components is dependant on, to a large degree, luck, at least until your crafting skills are raised a good amount. This means an item that you spent a great deal of time crafting can end up being low quality due to a random event during crafting. Frustrating, to say the least.
Finally, after all of the work that you have done, you have a quality item. Too bad it looks just like every other quality item of that type that everybody else has made. Customization? I think not. Salt in the wound.
On a scale of 1 - 10, I would rate Vanguard's crafting system a 4.
1 comment:
so what would you have given swg's crafting system?
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