Crafting Systems
Making from materials
A crafting system lets the player make items from gathered ingredients. In the magazines held here it runs from Secret of Evermore's alchemy in 1995 through the trade skills of Ultima Online and EverQuest to the recipes, forges and crafting stations reviewers judged in the MMORPGs of 2003-04.
A crafting system lets the player make items from ingredients rather than find or buy them. In the magazines held here it appears as Secret of Evermore’s alchemy on the Super Nintendo in 1995, becomes the “trade skills” of Ultima Online and EverQuest, and by 2003-04 is a system large enough for reviewers to judge on its own: recipes, forges, crafting stations, and the grind between them.
Fast facts
- Ingredient-based alchemy: Secret of Evermore (Square, 1995) — “combining varying amounts of ingredients such as wax and oil” into learned formulas (Nintendo Power 77).
- Crafting as a livelihood: Ultima Online (Origin, 1997) — a “perfectly fine virtual life as a baker” (Computer Gaming World 156).
- Trade skills: EverQuest (1999) — pottery, brewing, smithing, tailoring, improving “only with repeated use” (CGW 183).
- Crafting as its own game: Asheron’s Call 2 recipes and forges, EverQuest II’s system that “mimics combat”, World of WarCraft‘s Herbalism, Star Wars Galaxies’ crafting stations, Horizons’ crafting schools (CGW 224-238, 2003-04).
Alchemy in Secret of Evermore
Nintendo Power’s October 1995 coverage of Secret of Evermore set the system 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 — a table lists Acid Rain, Barrier, Call Up and Corrosion against their ingredient counts — and the following issue’s walkthrough shows the village “shops for armor and alchemy elements” and a formula, Hard Ball, “that uses one part Crystal and one” part Clay. The magazine’s advice that “Alchemy formu[-]las become much stronger with repeated use” is the same use-to-improve rule the online games adopted a few years later.
A living as a craftsman: Ultima Online
Terry Coleman’s Computer Gaming World preview of Origin’s Ultima Online in July 1997 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 added 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 on, PC Zone’s Chris Anderson described how the choice was made at character creation: “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 the rule for learning 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 the crafting system was a feature reviewers examined on its own terms, and each new MMORPG was measured 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 required 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 Sony’s answer to that button: “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, crafting became “a crafting system that mimics combat, complete with risk and tension” — progress and concentration bars, events such as “Overheating Metal” answered with “maneuvers” such as “Cool Metal”, and failure costing “the raw components and money you put into the item” though not the rare ones.
- Gathering and specialisation. 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”, levelled “by using them, finding trainers, or completing quests”, and at higher levels requiring cooperation: an alchemist’s flame oil and a blacksmith’s sword “combined” into a flaming weapon.
- Tools and stations. Ron Dulin’s Star Wars Galaxies guide in November 2003 explained that “the generic crafting tool is enough to build your items” at low skill, but “more complicated schematics” needed “the large crafting stations” 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 found a game whose classes were “broken into two schools-adventure and crafting”, with blacksmith, outfitter and scholar on the crafting side, and whose “level grind in the crafting schools is miserably monotonous”: “you’ll s[p]end dozens of hours making bronze items until you can finally process iron”, “destroying the majority of your creations just to gain experience.”
Minecraft (2009-11), whose grid-based recipes made crafting a household word, falls outside this library’s period; see its own entry.