The March 2023 Nephele crafting update video/interview
Wow, did we get a good look at the design and direction or what?
What I love:. The gathering and crafting gear/tools.
I have separate clothing for working the shop, the land and geeking out with electronics. In game, being able to get dressed and head out for a focused afternoon of gathering and crafting is something I can't adequately express my happiness for, you'll just have to hear me giggling when traipsing off to find the goodies.
Question: if I die while wearing this gear what does and doesn't take damage? All of it or just a select few items? I'm fine with whatever, but I'm also curious.
Cooking: mushrooms are not, a vegetable. This is petty, and I understand a small issue in the grand scheme of things but maybe this could be a thing to reconsider. As a member of the oldest continuously existing amateur mycological club in the world, The Boston Mycology Club, I would humbly suggest adding the Fungi slot for the cooking interface. At the very least it allows for more combinations and variables down the road. Again this is petty and will not cause any real issues but I will forever have to apologize to any new players that I end up introducing the cooking features to, in the game, and I will go on and on about why mushrooms are not a fruit or vegetable which will lead to me recommending books and recipes and they will become uncomfortable with my presence and will end up avoiding me in social situations leading to me feeling bad and seeking comfort by eating, in-real-life, too many mushrooms, which makes me gassy and the wife will kick me out of bed. Then when I'm on the couch for the evening I'll be thinking of ways to get my revenge upon those that classified mushrooms as a veggie. But no pressure.
StoneFish said: As a member of the oldest continuously existing amateur mycological club in the world, The Boston Mycology Club....
Suddenly, all of your 'unusual and entertaining' posts start to make a lot more sense LoL!
I really enjoyed the stream too. I was already planning on several crafters and skilling-up harvesting on all of my alts. Now I'm even more eager to jump in and start making stuff. I look forward to some fun days of group harvesting. We need to get a few Bards involved, to entertain us with their ditties.
♫ Oh, I'm a lumberjack and I'm ok. I sleep all night and I work all day ♪
At the moment crafting and gathering are very basic. So nothing to be excited about, yet.
I'm cautiously happy that Nephele wants to take some inspiration from Vanguard in this regard, but until VR shows us something more fleshed out there's nothing to see here as far as I'm concerned.
Excited: to see significant progress, various approaches to tasks, danger inherently and thoughtfully implemented and encouraging social consideration. All from a small team. Some people just can't get excited unless they have contraptions and gerbils all the while being witnessed by their grandmother . But if you just cut back from some of those websites you may find it easier to reach that stimulus you seek.
Kaynrath said:I'm cautiously happy that Nephele wants to take some inspiration from Vanguard in this regard, but until VR shows us something more fleshed out there's nothing to see here as far as I'm concerned.
You aren't wrong but an objective of taking one of the best MMO systems ever in terms of harvesting and crafting and improving it gives far more encouragement than an objective of simply having a decent workable system. Given that we are still in pre-alpha I don't see what more we can ask for than what we have gotten. It can all turn to garbage if they cannot implement it well (which is your point) but for where we are I am quite happy.
It was a very good stream for me. I don't have unrealistic expectations with Pantheon. I temper my excitiement with the reality of what is shown and what I can infer from what they have shown. I only expected a basic introduction to crafting/harvesting and some vidoes showcasing some crafting/harvesting, which is exactly what we got. Those expectations allowed me to enjoy the stream more. A good balance of show and tell.
I will say that Vanguard crafting was something I did not enjoy when I tried it out on the emulator. I had no idea what was going on during the crafting and didn't feel I should have to go to a website or something to have it explained to me. It seemed overly complex and overly random. The crafting shown int the Dev Stream was easy to understand and intuitive, with a good balance between not being too simple or overly complex. Just seeing crafting/harvesting in game and hearing about the future plans for it was enough for me. Like I said, tempered expectations. I also saw the steady improvements form last month. the game is looking better and better.
Just some thoughts and questions...
I really hope that the UI for Recipes (for all Trades, not just cooking) will be robust enough to allow filtering and such. So for example hopefully I can select a specific Stat and then have it show me all my 'known' recipies that grant that Stat. Or perhaps I could select an ingredient and the UI would show me all of my 'known' recipies that use that particular ingredient. I know that I can experiment in order to learn new Recipies, but my Tradeskill Journal should be searchable and filterable with the Recipies I've already discovered.
Regarding the Multi-player Harvesting. What happens if multiple people who are Not grouped in the same party try to Harvest the same node. Will this follow the same rules as killing enemies where the group who does the most "Damage" to the node gets the loot? Or would both groups get some of the loot based on how much of the Harvesting "damage" they did. - Seems this was answered in this Other Thread
Back to the UI... will there be a special toggle to switch over to the Harvesting hotbar or will it auto-switch if your Hostile target is a Harvestable node? What happens for Healers if you are harvesting a Node and suddenly your team gets jumped and you need to start Healing your Beneficial target? Would you need to clear the node from your Hostile target before your Hotbar would switch over so you could cast your Heals?
What happens if you spend a bunch of time Harvesting a node and are almost done when something happens where you stop harvesting and never finish. Perhaps your group got jumped and you got chased away or perhaps even die. Does the Node start to recover it's "HP" over time or does it stay mostly harvested forever until somebody comes along to finish harvesting it, be that you (at a later time) or some other adventurer who stumbles upon a mostly harvested node? - Nephele also answered this in the Other Thread
The Schematics UI window on the left of the screen... will this only include Schematics which are in your special Schematic's bag or will this include Schematics found anywhere in your inventory? I'm just wondering if you have more Schematics than your Schematic bag can hold, will you need to be swapping them back and forth with your main inventory bags in order to get them available to craft with.
Regarding the 'Challenge Phase' of crafting... Will the difficulty of the challenge be the crux of the 'Skill' system for that Trade. Meaning will the challenge adapt based on the characters skill level in that Craft?
So for example if my character is super high level cook and I attempt a very easy low level recipie, will the 'Challenge Phase' be something I can just quickly accomplish as the player with very little talent on my part... And the opposite, if my character is a lower level cook and attempt a Recipie that is very high level will the Challenge be almost impossible for me to accomplish no matter how Leet my gaming skills are?
Or will the challenge itself stay relatively the same no matter which Recipie I'm doing, and instead the game will just decide if my character has the Skill to even attempt the Challenge in the first place?
Goofy, you may want to break those thoughts down in another post. Good ideas and all but I see some of it being subject to a lot of tuning in alpha and beyond. Mostly I just wanted to know about damage to harvesting/crafting gear you have on you while out and about if you die.
I know they said you respawn with what you had on and it will take some damage or something but if you have you harvesting gear on, with the pick out and a bear bites your bootie, will I lose my fishing rod? The iemdea is to avoid getting into real trouble and to pair up. Going out into the wild to pick the flowers by yourself seems very dangerous.
GoofyWarriorGuy said:Back to the UI... will there be a special toggle to switch over to the Harvesting hotbar or will it auto-switch if your Hostile target is a Harvestable node? What happens for Healers if you are harvesting a Node and suddenly your team gets jumped and you need to start Healing your Beneficial target? Would you need to clear the node from your Hostile target before your Hotbar would switch over so you could cast your Heals?
Right now it's based on what you have targeted, but we will probably continue to refine this over time to make it easier and more intuitive, especially in situations like what you're describing.
GoofyWarriorGuy said:The Schematics UI window on the left of the screen... will this only include Schematics which are in your special Schematic's bag or will this include Schematics found anywhere in your inventory? I'm just wondering if you have more Schematics than your Schematic bag can hold, will you need to be swapping them back and forth with your main inventory bags in order to get them available to craft with.
Inventory management in general is something that we are always evaluating - the schematics "bag" is a recognition that crafters will want to carry some schematics with them and so we should have an allowance for that. It is not intended to be unlimited, but the goal for it would be for it to give you enough storage that you didn't feel chained to your bank whenever you wanted to do some light crafting. It doesn't replace your bank for long-term storage however.
GoofyWarriorGuy said:Regarding the 'Challenge Phase' of crafting... Will the difficulty of the challenge be the crux of the 'Skill' system for that Trade. Meaning will the challenge adapt based on the characters skill level in that Craft?
So for example if my character is super high level cook and I attempt a very easy low level recipie, will the 'Challenge Phase' be something I can just quickly accomplish as the player with very little talent on my part... And the opposite, if my character is a lower level cook and attempt a Recipie that is very high level will the Challenge be almost impossible for me to accomplish no matter how Leet my gaming skills are?
Or will the challenge itself stay relatively the same no matter which Recipie I'm doing, and instead the game will just decide if my character has the Skill to even attempt the Challenge in the first place?
At a high level, your skill level in a particular trade (for example, outfitting) does two things:
1) It gets compared to the schematic and materials you're using as part of determining the overall difficulty of the challenge phase. So the higher your skill, the easier things get during the challenges.
2) It can act as a gating requirement for crafting techniques you might use during the challenge phase - these are the buttons you would press to get through that challenge. Essentially, a higher skill means that you might have more techniques available to you (if their other prerequisites are met)
Progression for crafting and gathering is something we will probably be enabling during Alpha, and so you'll get to see a lot more about how it will all work once we get there. Right now in pre-Alpha we are focused primarily on the foundational things like making sure that we can correctly consume items from your inventory when you're crafting and correctly create the output items.
All the UI stuff that we have shown by the way is very much just our first iteration. So you can expect the UI to continue to improve evolve between now and when we launch! :)
Good questions and great answers, thanks!
Nephele said:Right now in pre-Alpha we are focused primarily on the foundational things like making sure that we can correctly consume items from your inventory when you're crafting and correctly create the output items.
Dikenzu said:...
I will say that Vanguard crafting was something I did not enjoy when I tried it out on the emulator. I had no idea what was going on during the crafting and didn't feel I should have to go to a website or something to have it explained to me. It seemed overly complex and overly random. The crafting shown int the Dev Stream was easy to understand and intuitive, with a good balance between not being too simple or overly complex. Just seeing crafting/harvesting in game and hearing about the future plans for it was enough for me. Like I said, tempered expectations. I also saw the steady improvements form last month. the game is looking better and better.
IMO:
I played Vanguard from launch for about 2 years. I saw the various iterations of crafting. I had more than one crafter, and more than one adventurer. I had two adventurers at max level. I harvested a tremendous amount, created a tremendous amount, saw all the good & bad inherent in the system that Silius created. I have also tried it on the emulator.
I echo your sentiment, Dikenzu. I did not enjoy it. I understand the design goals. I understand what Silius was going for. I read all his forum posts at the time he posted them, both on the official forums and the fan site forums that were live, back then. I completely understand his approach, design, and implementation.
His design philosophies are attractive to a niche market. Most of them were to ensure that crafting was as difficult or more difficult than being a solo adventurer. Why does that matter? If anyone is designing and implementing a harvesting and crafting system based on what Vanguard had a launch (and for the first year, at least) they will be deriving inspiration from what Silius implemented. That has some consequences, and not all of them are good.
Notably: The basic premise of the system was that you gained experience to advance based on the relative challenge of the recipe you were attempting. Recipes, like mob cons, were green, blue, white, yellow, orange, red, and so on. This was to create 'challenge' based on the difficulty of the recipe. The reality was, players needed crafting gear that was above their level to comfortably attempt recipes that granted a reasonable amount of experience. This created a very uncomfortable play space for the average crafter, in that when attempting to be anywhere near efficient or effective, you faced almost certain failure. The constant negative interactions would be the equivalent (from the adventure loop) of repeatedly dying to an even con solo mob, while wearing gear appropriate to your level. Intensely frustrating.
Now, I'm using a bunch of weasel words here because I don't want to offend everyone who absolutely loves Vanguard crafting. With adjustments that came after most of the paying customers had left, the system wasn't that bad. But it was still quite a negative experience, because there was too much Risk and not enough Reward. Again, this is all just my opinion. But, many many players said these same things to Silius while he was defending how colossally un-fun the entire implementation was, during the first year, post-launch. All of the feedback regarding how un-fun it would be was provided in Beta, and it went to Prod/Launch unchanged.
It was possible to fix, and it was fixed. It was too late, but eventually, he made some QoL changes. Those were: If a very negative event happened during a combine, it was still possible to create a finished product. Prior to those changes, multiple random very negative events could happen in succession on all but green-tier combines. I personally saw 3 or 4 very negative events during a single blue-tier combine, when I had a mixed set of white & blue gear. To me, and those in my guild at the time, this was an extremely negative end user experience. Why?
Because it was more difficult than the combat loop, and there was no way for players to get ahead of the curve, until they hit max level. There were also a handful of players, most of them Beta testers ( I knew them) who utilized several crafting xp-granting exploits in the first weeks/months, which were never rolled back, largely because they also new Silius, personally. That kind of thing is quite common, no surprises, but it led to an unfortunate feedback loop. Silius only listened to those testers who were at max level, due to their exploiting those bugs which he refused to address. Consequently? Objective feedback stopped entering the continuous improvement process. :)
This had very unfortunate consequences for the bulk of the players who were not max level, and did not have access to the full range of crafting-specific equipment. They were stuck, struggling against two things. 1) trying to get gear that would allow them to be time efficient with their combines and 2) failing combines due to not having gear that was good enough, due to guaranteed failure events being built into the system.
That was the second major mechanic I mention above that was changed. Once players could, by paying enough attention, with balanced Risk & Reward, be efficient with their time, the system was less terrible and slightly more fun, at least compared to what was in place previously. If you didn't pay attention? Your recipe would fail. If you did pay attention, and you had blue/white gear and were trying a blue/white combine? You could succeed. Sometimes the result wasn't amazing, but at least you didn't fail and gain nothing. Note: This paragraph is describing the second implementation. Not the first.
I should also mention the elephant in the room here, for context. It took tens, hundreds, or thousands of green-tier combines to advance, in Vanguard. That was not being efficient with your time. It was, however, relatively easy, given the gear that 90% of the crafters had access to, as they were leveling up. As a consequence (and you can find posts about this online to this day) people macro'd the hell out of that, because they were unwilling to spend 8 or 10 hours a day grinding green combines in person. They were also unwilling to interact with white/yellow combines and see guaranteed failures due to events that could not be countered, corrected, or compensated for.
The path of least resistance was to macro, because at least then you could progress, even though it was not ideal from a gameplay perspective. So between "this is so bad I want to macro it" and "this is so bad, I want to logout and/or never craft again" was the design space Silius had created. And that was by choice.
He was told it was objectively bad and very few players would enjoy it. That feedback was acknowledged, and his response? "Working as intended". He made it that way, intentionally. He saw the server side logs of failures and he saw the gear that people had, and he saw the combine difficulty, and the absolutely insane amount of time required and said: "Working as intended".
So, my positive feedback? My constructive criticism? Design and implement the harvesting and crafting in Pantheon such that it is always unbalanced towards the Reward side of the Risk / Reward equation. Do not implement a system that favors the Risk and punishment side of that equation. Do not repeat the mistakes and failures of Silius from Vanguard. Take the good, throw away the bad. Do not make the crafting loop MORE difficult than the combat/adventure loop. It's been tried, and it failed, badly.
The UI, reactions, recipes/schematics, event driven system, gear required, levels of difficulty, all that stuff? Nothing objectively wrong with that. The details of the implementation though, can vary drastically between fun and rage-quit un-fun. Learn from history. Make it fun. :)
Wow! Thanks for typing all that. I agree and you put it much better than I would have. There was so much excitement around the crafting system and the guild had really big goals but while playing, it never felt fun to me. Anyway, yes to the above and I think the VR team has absolutely learned from history.
What a thorough explanation!!
I liked the system because it was more complicated than I was used to - a plus for me. It seemed more realistic in terms of the use of the crafting equipment and need to respond to problems while crafting. I was more of a harvester than a crafter and I really liked having and being able to craft harvesting gear.
All of this outwieighed the negatives to me - I might have felt otherwise - strongly - had my goal been to harvest for large amounts of in-game cash. It wasn't. I harvested for fun and to make gear for my characters and guildmates. Rare and ultrarare harvested materials I mostly sold - that was my way to make cash in-game not the actual crafting.
So, note, that while I have often said over the years that I liked Vanguard harvesting and crafting greatly I am not disagreeing with one single thing that vjek said. Just trying to explain how two people each of whom spent a *lot* of time in Vanguard and on the crafting and harvesting side as well as adventuring see it so differently.
Given all of this talk about how Vanguard was (or is, on the emulator), figured these links would help unfamiliar people get a better context regarding the subject:
I thoroughly enjoyed the crafting interface, to dorotea's point. Fun, innovative, all of that. Hopefully emulated or ~copied for Pantheon.
I just despised the Crafting Complications chances/calculations/equations in the first year of their implementation. :)
What a great summary of the issues that Vanguard's crafting system faced, especially early on. Thank you, Vjek, for posting that :)
Just to hopefully reassure you all, while some aspects of Pantheon's crafting system may feel similar to Vanguard, the way we handle challenge and progression will definitely not be a carbon copy of that or any other game's approach.
Nephele - thanks. My hope has been that Pantheon crafting would look to Vanguard for some of its inspiration (EQ - not so much) but just as few of us want an updated copy of EQ few of us (not even me) want an updated copy of Vanguard. Quite a few years have passed and it would be an enormous waste of all the talent and enthusiasm we have working on Pantheon to just update anything - however good it was for its time.
vjek - thank you for the reminder about the emulator. My latrst stint in LOTRO is near its end and I was considering what to do next. If the emulator can be installed by someone that isn't all that good at such things and allows even a significant part of the game to be played this may have answered my question. My memory isn't so bad that I remember Vanguard's adventuring side as perfect but I do remember it as pretty good in many ways and the crafting/harvesting side better yet.