After months of putting it off, Ragar finally talks about FFXIV's crafting system and the changes he'd like to see down the road

Which of These Swords Did You Make?

The last area I wanted to touch on is actually something I think FFXIV needs in general. Remember earlier when I said that crafted items were mostly equivalent to quest rewards while leveling? That’s because they are the exact same item in most cases. FFXIV actually has a fairly limited selection of items for each class in a specific level range. While in a game such as WoW I may quest in two different level 20 zones and come out with two level 20 robes with slightly different stats, in FFXIV those robes would be the exact same normal quality piece with identical stats. A crafter may be able to make an HQ version of that piece with boosted armor and increases to some or all of those stats, but that’s all of the differentiation the crafter can have while making the piece. Anything past that is simply attaching Materia which, despite requiring a crafter to do, really just feels like socketing a gem in other MMOs.

This isn’t an unfamiliar concept in other MMOs; going back to WoW, a Breastplate of Ancient Steel will look the same from any 600 blacksmith. FFXIV has been trying to improve the crafting process though, so why stop at just item creation? Shouldn’t the end result have my personal touch as well? When I’m running around leveling Gladiator and I get a shield for a quest reward that’s identical to the one I spent hours grinding Armorer to finally make, that feels wrong.

So now the question is how do we differentiate our crafted items from those out in the world? There are a few ways to handle this. One would be a Discovery-style mechanic, similar to Reverse Engineering in Star Wars: The Old Republic or Alchemy in WoW. As a player crafts various recipes for their DoH class in FFXIV, they could randomly learn variants of existing recipes. Nothing extreme at first – maybe a variant of the same ring/staff/chest/etc with Determination instead of Skill Speed but identical stats otherwise. Just enough that it feels like my Alchemist can stand out from other Alchemists on the server.

For the other idea I have for differentiating FFXIV’s crafted items, I’d actually like to link back to an article our own Corey “Cyglaive” Jenkins wrote about the WildStar beta going on currently. WildStar is trying a few new mechanics with their crafting system that I think FFXIV could learn a few lessons from. First and foremost, let’s look at the Circuit Board crafting system – players assign different chips to each slot, then choose how much power each one is assigned to determine the final stats/abilities of the finished product. This is the level of customization I want for my crafted pieces. If I’m not going to have a separate recipe for each kind of specialization for each level, I want options to customize them for my purposes. Now for a world like Eorzea, assigning power levels to specific statistics may be a bit much, but surely we can allow some form of stat customization for items, right? Perhaps giving players the option to change from a water crystal to a lightning crystal or throwing in a cut gem of some kind to change the final stats could be one route to go.

FFXIV could also take some lessons from the Coordinate Crafting system WildStar uses. In this system crafters have hidden variants for some recipes that come out as a result of adding additional components to push the recipe target somewhere on an X-Y plane. Add the right kind of components to end up in a certain part and you’ve unlocked a variation of the original recipe, now with +Armor or something like that. This would be a great place to mix in some additional abilities to some of the classes – Blacksmiths could get to add different kinds of ingots to the final recipe, Culinarians could add raw spices, etc. With these additional components, crafters could try to unlock new recipes with some variance beyond “is it HQ?”, whether through new stats or simply swapping one for another.

Lastly, I’d like to bring up the crafting talents from that same WildStar article. Crafters in WildStar have talent points that come from completing their tech tree by crafting a wide variety of different pieces. Once enough talent points have been earned, players can choose to boost some aspect of their crafting abilities. Want to be the best at making helmets? Pick up the talent that lets you overcharge head slot items further than anyone else. You can only have one per tier, so short of spending money, you’ll need to choose what suits you best or what brings the most money on the market. FFXIV could easily apply a system like this to help differentiate crafters from one another. In addition it would give players another reason to complete their Crafting Logs. Sure you could burn through cheap guildleves to go from 1 to 50, but if someone’s made enough Goldsmith items to unlock 10% better stats on their rings than you, it’ll be much harder to outsell them. These number differences don’t have to be massive – it just has to be enough to make crafters feel unique rather than one face in a crowd.

Conclusion

There are many aspects of FFXIV’s crafting that are leaps and bounds above other MMO offerings. Crafting is treated as an actual path of progression here and, assuming your market hasn’t been destroyed by something like, say, Free Company housing prices, it’s considered the best way for players to make Gil. That doesn’t mean they should simply stick with what they have and call it complete though. All systems have room for improvement and I believe with even a few of my suggested changes, FFXIV’s Disciple of the Hand system would be vastly improved. Other games like WildStar are coming out this year with new takes on crafting and it is in FFXIV’s best interest to learn from their competition and evolve.

That’s it for this edition of the Eorzea Examiner. For our next issue in two weeks, I’m currently debating between either starting a “what classes are we missing?” series for potential new classes/jobs or talking about the story and instance attunements. If I knock out the last 8-man instance I’m missing for the original story questline, it’ll probably be the latter. Whichever is the case, I’ll see all of you in two weeks.

Michael “Ragar” Branham