Howdy everyone!
Today we are showing off some of the concept work that Dave Greco has been working on for crafting stations. While we aren’t ready to use them quite yet, the concept art phase happens weeks or months before we actually begin building the in-game versions of them. That being said, we have begun rather large efforts to implement the first phase of crafting that will be seen in the next milestone.
So what are crafting stations? They are objects placed in houses that enable specializations for specific types of crafting. For example, if you wanted to craft a sword, you would need to do that at a forge crafting station. This means there are multiple types of stations for the various crafting professions. All of this might sound very familiar to people who have crafted in any MMO, so let's talk about how crafting stations in Crowfall® are a bit different.
In addition to acting as centralized locations to craft items, crafting stations in Crowfall also provide a collection of other services to the player. They can have inventories for storing resources (and completed items), they enable an "experimentation" phase (where the crafter is allowed to invest 'points' to adjust the attributes and stats for the items produced), and they offer NPC (thrall) slots. Placing a thrall into a crafting station will grant buffs and stats to the crafting process and enable the creation of blueprints. These stations also act as factories for 'mass production', in a manner similar to the bulk-production runs of “Star Wars: Galaxies”.
From a visual standpoint, we divided up our various crafting disciplines into functional categories and started with the idea that each of these categories would dictate the look of the 'base station' (i.e. is it a wooden table? a stone altar? a fiery furnace?) and that we would then use props on top of that base station to customize it to match each particular discipline.
Sometimes, this worked great. The stone table is perfect to use as a base for both Necromancy and Enchanting, which are both ritualistic disciplines. But in some cases it doesn't make as much sense... Disciplines within a particular group within a set group might work better with different base stations, and sometimes the same base station would actually make more sense to use across entirely different groups. For instance: the furnace works great for Blacksmithing might be repopped and work great for Cooking.
We're still early in this process, but once we finish this round of concepts, we'll get to work on the items themselves and bring them into the game so that players can start using them.
More specifics on crafting (and stations, and recipes, and factories...) will be the focus of future updates!
Thomas Blair
Design Lead, ACE