I was very tempted to go for the mountain citadel, unfortunately, money was not strong. I do however have a large castle, and a large keep, and a large fort, and maybe a medium something or other or two... so we can put a fort in a fort in a keep in a keep in a castle in a castle in a citadel.
So I played a few hours of alpha today, its the 'open world' alpha now. Seems like a pretty good base for the game, obviously still missing a lot. The world is pretty big and in decent shape. You can interact with the trees, rocks and ore veins for crafting ingredients. There are buildings and some chests you can go into but nothing too crazy. Walking around is much better than before in the PVP alpha, as is combat (although I didn't do much of that). Skill leveling is in, its passive so you just select one and wait. Crafting is the big item to do in the alpha right now, thats really the only thing you CAN do. Its super complex, as in to make a regular sword, you need to make a hilt, a pommel, and a blade, but to make each of those you need to make like 5 subcomponents, each of which may have a subcomponent of their own. This needs a shit load of mats (rock, wood, ore) which you can gather fairly slowly around the world while trying to avoid ganks (its not solo player friendly at the moment). The fun part is that you can try to make your stuff 'better' by investing points but it could fail, and its actually fairly easy (at least without leveling skills) to fail at any part of the process and lose all your mats and stuff, starting over a multihour process. Granted, its a test at this point but holy fuck can it be frustrating. It DOES have ridiculous depth though of customization because a tool that needs 3 wood can be done different with different types of wood, etc, and you can save your schematics for later use to make it faster. No mass production tools to be seen yet.
hopefully they'll streamline this a bit, I don't mind having failure chances, but hopefully once you've done it successfully you won't have much chance of failing again afterwards.
I also think skill training is going to play a large part, I'd assume a well trained crafter isn't going to fail at anything standard, maybe at the higher level stuff, but that helps the scarcity and value of super high level gear, especially when gear is designed to degrade and potentially be lost upon death. Main item I see they really need to address is the ability to mass produce cheap stuff. For higher end, good gear, the one off meticilous approach seems valid, but once you get good at crafting, crafting a basic sword should be done en mass at least through the UI. Maybe the more stuff you try to make at once the higher the failure %, and the harder stuff scales quicker or something.
I'm hoping they don't go for the ultra tedious 'make this then make that then make that' formula that hyper realistic crafting systems tend to fall into. I'd love to see one of these systems where they give you the reverse formula, click to make object x it asks you to fill in the materials for all the parts you need to make etc... instead of having to toggle back and forth to making each individual part separately.
Well, its sorta both right now. You select what you want, then you can just click on the materials in your inventory you want to use for it and they click into place in the formula. But as of now you can't make multiple items at once, so you can't make the sub-materials all at once, which I think definitely should be a thing.
I don't know about that, being able to make them one at a time over time makes perfect sense, maybe once you've gained some skills and maybe can hire some apprentices you could be working on multiple things but by yourself you've pretty much got to do it on your own. Hopefully the end results will be worth the effort ^.^
Well, they've said that the end game gear will all be crafted. So I imagine it will be a little like Warframe, except instead of having an automatic forge you maybe have a blacksmith with a bunch of peons that you queue up things to craft. New characters are given basic starter weapons, armor, and gear. But everything beyond that is either crafted yourself or bought from another player who crafted it. The incentive to go out into the world isn't to gain gear, it's to gain the materials to craft it yourself, or the gold necessary to buy it from someone who can.
the focus on crafting, gathering, and fighters needing new gear regularly was what ultimately attracted me to the project. the focus on that cycle and the need for players to essentially specialize in those roles is fairly unique in the current day of MMOs. used to be the norm, obviously, but most of today's MMOs are pretty casual from an economic perspective that being said, i hope the crafting system they ultimately develop is complex without being tedious for the sake of being tedious. it's a fine line to tread but i'm confident in their ability to walk it from their past projects
Yea I think vassals are going to be key in the crafting process, allowing them to create basic crafting components and general gear and leaving the high end specialized stuff to the players. Crafting is going to require a lot of specialization through time (ala EVE), so not everyone is going to be good at it. However, resource gathering is its own tree, so to be an awesome crafter you're not going to be as good at gathering materials. So exploration / resources, combat, and crafting are separate. Within exploration and gathering you then have separate trees for gathering ore, rocks, wood or animals, so that's another specialization, so there's a lot of shit to pick from to where you wanna go. I'm thinking my first character will be exploration heavy, probably animal kind (you can get steeds / pets), plus some combat to stay alive and less crafter.
This is why I want us to start recruiting for this game as soon as possible. Because, with the exception of a handful of people, the majority of the Skjaldborg seem to have an aversion to PvP, like to the point where it pisses them off. I'm OK with that, those people are free to enjoy the PvE aspects of the game like crafting and resource gathering. But we can't be a dedicated crafting or farming guild. Because you're going to need a lot of PvP fighters to protect your ass while you farm or craft. The handful of us actually interested in the PvP are not going to be able to protect you guys from the bigger guilds that want the node you're farming.
I'm liable to delve deep into crafting if it's done right, it's one of the experiences in MMO's that is traditionally lacking, both in depth and reward, the crafted end game items tend not to be worth the effort invested in obtaining them for the general majority, why spend an extra 60 hours to get a 1% bonus? That's even assuming that the crafted gear is actually better than the dropped gear, which often seems to be atypical.
Well, my point still stands. You're going to need people to protect you. And it's going to take more than Pidian and I.
