kofeiiniturpa;n9739341 said:Crafting might work if it wasn't about scavenging tons of trash to make a weapon you will buy or loot soon enough anyway.
A limited set of very special items for unique purpose and for which you have to buy the parts to build and eventually upgrade to their final form.
And specifically "buy" the parts, not scavenge from trash and corpses. You need to acquire the funds and find the retailer and build up the skill to even craft the item. Or perhaps, if you search carefully enough, you can find a specialist NPC that can craft for you for not at all modest fee to not make it a cheap pass compared to the Techie who needs the skill and all (and craft better than the PC ever could... for being a "specialist" who's dedicated his life for the job).
I would rather ditch crafting all together..it's fine in survival or resource gathering games: they are more direct and have less clutter to deal with ( Last of Us, Alien Isolation, etc) or resource gathering makes a central aspect of the game, being directly tied to difficulty/world/encounter design.
But when rpgs try to do similar, they always fumble about: developers have to deal with systems of progression and with much, much more complex itemization.
Result feels unrefined, unrewarding, very easily exploited to break economy, ruining loot and world design ( hundreds of barrels filled with iron, chemical ingredients, etc), and turning into hassle of never-ending junk collection/inventory management. ( 99% of the time I find the game to be better, more balanced, enjoyable, by playing on lower difficulty and completely ignoring it)
And it wouldn't make much sense in futuristic, massively populated setting( plenty of shops and factories, right?)
Instead let's have a simple, easy to use, "lean" system of quality weapon and armor mods/equipment customization and use it to:
Reward exploration..."what's that? Why's that painting slightly to the side? Let's see...ohh, there's a safe there with a braindance chip and nice sniper mod" ( that modifies sight into thermal vision)
and
Offset to different "levels" of equipment...instead of shotgun +1,+2..+10, higher level gear should be less modifiable by having more complex circuitry/design. In this case, prototypes would take place of "unique" items.