Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General What happened to blacksmithing and crafting?

That's... kinda why I hate crafting too.
I want loot in the world to be good, exploring to be rewarded.

But in those modern days, to not make crafting "useless", everything you find there is dwarved by crafted items. Result, instead of a sub-system called crafting being useless, your entire gameplay of exploration is useless. That's some great game development there...
Sad thing is, it's becoming more and more common and ruining games. One of my biggest flaws with Pillars of Eternity: It's $%#%!#% crafting and how it made all the loot in the world useless. If that's not an affront compared to Baldur's Gate II I don't know what is.

Okay then, then what's your alternative to balance crafted items vs loot drops? And I wouldn't call removing an options as I find that a terrible alternative that just cheapens the RPG element. You can't just make crafted gear only equal to the best loot drops as people had to give up combat abilities to upgrade those skills. In D OS 2 we have the unique ability to not have to choose between crafting skills and combat so one could use both if combat is all one cares about.

Yep. I hate when this happens as well.



I don't pretend to answer for him, but this is my take:
premising that if crafting was gone entirely I wouldn't miss a single bit , my approach would be to make crafting a viable option for mid-range stuff and then tie the possibility to craft actually powerful "artifacts" to unique loot as well.

One way to do it is the Baldur's Gate way, where top tier crafting was essentially putting together fragments of artifacts find around the game world; another, more "organic" and less blatantly "scripted" (at least at a first look) would be to require extremely rare/unique reagents/material to craft the actual good stuff.

To point an available example, think of Dark Souls and how bosses can drop both an unique weapon immediately and a reagent (Soul) that will be used to craft a variety of similarly unique things.
That's not exactly the "vibe" I was going for, but mechanically would be very close.

My preferenced was, and still is the way of Baldur's Gate II. Rather than random items, have specific powerful ingredients hidden in the world, and if you got all you can turn that into the final item. It's not really crafting as you know it, more questing (read: exploring) but that's the way I like it.
Makes it feel more worth it than just getting it for finding 50 random wood in containers.

Mmmm, so keeping everything else the same actually crafted gear would be below top found loot but by finding/obtaining "rare" items and using crafting one could make Uber stuff that you would otherwise miss out on?

I could get behind this as long as those crafted "artifacts" were significantly worth all the fort and time invested. You'd have to make them pretty awesome to make up for the time and stats used to get them made since other players would conceivably get awesome drops just ignoring all that and killing everything.

I'm not opposed to such a system. It'd allowed legendaries found to still feel powerful and worth the find, allow for tweaking of heat for upgrades and making mid to upper-mid/lower end stuff if to meet specific needs. At the same time it'd encourage other aspects and create a rewarding and challenging venture towards piecing together epic level "crafted" gear.

As long as I the ends of crafting still feel suitably powerful for all the time and such involved I could get behind this. After all, crafting still would help with gear upgrades, arrows, grenades, potions, scrolls, etc...there's more to it than just making a better sword every level.

Assuming the mid to lower-upper stuff is stuff crafted using regular bought ingredients and such and didn't require said rare items

I prefer that crafting is focused around upgrading weapons. That is, weapons (including unique weapons) have upgrade slots and you need crafting to unlock the full potential of this.

Although in the prison, it would make more sense to craft actual items, like makeshift weapons and armour.

You could already do this in DOS1, just with more flexibility.