A crafting system lets the player make things instead of finding or buying them: gather the ingredients, learn the recipe, put them together. In the single-player role-playing games of the early 1990s it was often a way of making magic, with potions and spells mixed from formulae. Online, it became something bigger. In Ultima Online a player could choose to be a baker and sell bread to other players, and within a few years reviewers were judging each new online world by whether its crafting was fun to play, or just a grind.
Fast facts
- Potions from formulae: Darklands (MicroProse, 1992), where magic worked “only through the art of alchemy and by praying to saints” (Computer Gaming World, December 1992).
- Alchemy on a console: Secret of Evermore (Square, 1995), “combining varying amounts of ingredients such as wax and oil” (Nintendo Power, October 1995).
- Crafting as a living: Ultima Online (Origin, 1997), where you could “live a perfectly fine virtual life as a baker” (CGW, July 1997).
- Trade skills: EverQuest (1999): pottery, brewing, smithing and tailoring, improving “only with repeated use” (CGW, October 1999).
- A game in itself: Asheron’s Call 2, EverQuest II, World of WarCraft, Star Wars Galaxies and Horizons, reviewed for their crafting in 2003-04.
Magic from recipes: Darklands and Secret of Evermore
MicroProse’s Darklands (1992) was set in 15th-century Germany, and its designers kept out the fireballs. Scorpia, reviewing it for Computer Gaming World, explained that “magic, as such, is accomplished only through the art of alchemy and by praying to saints. Alchemy involves obtaining various formulae, and then mixing the required ingredients to create potions.” Offensive potions “can be thought of as grenades”, thrown at the enemy, and like grenades they “cannot distinguish friend from foe”; defensive ones strengthened the party, its weapons and its armour.
Square’s Secret of Evermore used the same idea on the Super Nintendo in 1995. Nintendo Power set it out in a box headed “The Art of Alchemy”: “By combining varying amounts of ingredients such as wax and oil, you can create formulas that produce useful effects. You must learn the formulas from an alchemist and possess the right amounts of ingredients first.” The formulas stood in for spells, and a table listed Acid Rain, Barrier, Call Up and Corrosion against the ingredients each needed. The next issue’s walkthrough found a village with “shops for armor and alchemy elements” and a formula, Hard Ball, made from Crystal and Clay, and noted that “Alchemy formulas become much stronger with repeated use”. The online games that followed ran on the same rule: a skill improved with use.
A living as a craftsman: Ultima Online
The Ultima series already let a player bake. Previewing Origin’s Ultima Online in October 1996, CGW’s Paul Schuytema wrote that “as in earlier Ultimas, a player can mix flour and water and bake it in an oven to make bread. In ULTIMA ONLINE, you can sell the bread for hard cash (to both other players and NPCs)”. The difference was the other players. Terry Coleman’s preview the following July treated crafting as a way of playing rather than a menu:
Those who really aren’t into quests and want a sort of extended chat area can live a perfectly fine virtual life as a baker. Of course, if your pastries become renowned throughout the land, you could lead an ancillary existence as a purveyor of information to travelers seeking adventure. Likewise, a blacksmith known for Crafting swords with a well-honed edge will be highly sought after as well.
He allowed that “being a craftsman really is role-playing in a general sense”, though “most of us crave a bit more action”, and noted “straightforward guilds of craftsmen”. Two years later PC Zone’s Chris Anderson described how the choice was made when creating a character: “You’ll also need to choose a trade skill at this point so you can make money. Magic users normally choose tailoring so they can make clothes to sell on to tailor shops; fighters have a reputation to uphold and so will often choose a more masculine profession such as lumberjack, because it builds strength.” Skills then “evolve depending on how you play”.
Trade skills: EverQuest
EverQuest (1999) used the same term. Thierry Nguyen’s CGW review found “a thriving player-driven economy. While people still buy from NPC shops, a lot of gamers develop their trade skills, and you’re guaranteed to see someone auctioning off some odd item every couple of minutes.” The magazine’s guide three months later listed the crafts and how to learn them:
Trade skills allow characters to become proficient in such formidable arts as pottery, brewing, smithing and tailoring. There’s no Heald Institute in Norrath, so being a successful tradesman requires your character to purchase the appropriate “How To” book and materials, and have at it. Trade skills, like all other skills, will only improve with repeated use.
Nguyen’s comparison with Ultima Online drew the line reviewers kept drawing afterwards: in UO “you can actually make a living off of trade skills”, while in EverQuest “the trade skills are useful, but you can’t really be a tailor or a baker.” PC Zone put the EverQuest version in one line: “choose a trade skill and make things to sell to other players.”
Crafting as a game in itself
By 2003 reviewers were examining crafting on its own terms, and measuring each new online game against the last.
- Recipes and forges. Reviewing Asheron’s Call 2 in March 2003, Nguyen called its crafting “the most playable in any MMORPG so far, not asking the player to burn experience making clothing and forks. Instead, all you need is the right recipe and the items that possess traits to fulfill the recipe.” Working “near a forge” gave “a bonus to crafting skill”, and since materials often came “from the bodies of dead enemies”, crafting still needed combat. “Still this is the first MMORPG in which I didn’t mind making my own junk.”
- Crafting that “mimics combat”. CGW’s EverQuest II feature two months later described a different approach: “Crafting items won’t be a simple matter of piling materials into a box and smacking a ‘create’ button a la Asheron’s Call 2.” Because the game awarded experience for a finished item, it used “a crafting system that mimics combat, complete with risk and tension”. Bars tracked the item’s progress and the character’s concentration; events such as “Overheating Metal” had to be answered with “maneuvers” such as “Cool Metal”; and failure cost “the raw components and money you put into the item”, though not rare components.
- Gathering and specialising. Jeff Green’s June 2003 preview of Blizzard’s World of WarCraft reported “an elaborate trade-skill system in which players can specialize, for example, in Herbalism, which involves collecting herbs littered throughout the world in order to make magic potions and elixirs”. Trade skills levelled “by using them, finding trainers, or completing quests”, and at higher levels players would need each other: for a flaming sword an alchemist would make a potion of flame oil, a blacksmith would forge the sword, and the two were combined.
- Tools and stations. Ron Dulin’s Star Wars Galaxies guide in November 2003 explained that at low skill “the generic crafting tool is enough to build your items”, but “more complicated schematics” needed “the large crafting stations” found in cities: “a weapons crafting station for weapons, a furniture crafting station for making furniture, and so on.”
- The grind. Dulin’s review of Horizons in May 2004 described classes “broken into two schools—adventure and crafting”, with blacksmith, outfitter and scholar on the crafting side. The crafting levels were “miserably monotonous”: “you’ll spend dozens of hours making bronze items until you can finally process iron”, “destroying the majority of your creations just to gain experience.”
Minecraft
The best-known crafting system came later. Minecraft, finished in 2011, starts the player with nothing in a generated world and makes crafting a picture: in Edge’s words, “Two sticks beneath three planks will give you a wooden pickaxe, so two sticks beneath three cobblestones should provide you with a hardier model.”
Sources
- Computer Gaming World issue 101, December 1992, p. 52: Scorpia on Darklands (alchemy and saints; potions as grenades).
- Nintendo Power issue 77, October 1995, p. 60: Secret of Evermore, “The Art of Alchemy”.
- Nintendo Power issue 78, November 1995: Secret of Evermore walkthrough (alchemy shops; Hard Ball; formulas “stronger with repeated use”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 147, October 1996: Paul Schuytema’s Ultima Online preview (baking bread in earlier Ultima games; selling it in Ultima Online).
- Computer Gaming World issue 156, July 1997: Terry Coleman’s Ultima Online preview (the baker and the blacksmith; guilds of craftsmen).
- Computer Gaming World issue 180, July 1999: Thierry Nguyen’s EverQuest review (the player economy; the comparison with Ultima Online).
- Computer Gaming World issue 183, October 1999: EverQuest guide, “Career Changes” (trade skills).
- PC Zone issue 80, September 1999: Chris Anderson, “Ultima Online versus EverQuest” (choosing a trade skill).
- Computer Gaming World issue 224, March 2003, p. 92: Thierry Nguyen’s review of Asheron’s Call 2: Fallen Kings.
- Computer Gaming World issue 226, May 2003: EverQuest II cover feature (crafting that mimics combat).
- Computer Gaming World issue 227, June 2003, pp. 50–54: Jeff Green’s World of WarCraft preview (trade skills; Herbalism; the flaming sword).
- Computer Gaming World issue 232, November 2003, pp. 164–166: Ron Dulin’s Star Wars Galaxies guide (crafting tools and stations).
- Computer Gaming World issue 238, May 2004: Ron Dulin’s review of Horizons (crafting schools; the grind).
- Edge issue 236, January 2012, pp. 118–120: Minecraft review (crafting a pickaxe).