Shroud of the Avatar - Update #20, Crafting and an Interview with Warren Spector

Update number 20 of Shroud of the Avatar offers the opportunity to enter a contest involving a video you should make related to SotA and information on crafting.

When we started the crafting design discussions there were a number of differing opinions on how to attack the problem a design standpoint.  One idea was essentially work in reverse and figure out the outputs we wanted from the system and design the crafting system around the outputs.  Another important voice on the topic was that crafting itself should be able to stand on its own without regard to the output because if not we could be asking a whole class of players(crafters) to endure a system that was designed only with another class of people (adventurers) in mind.  Finally, some voices believed that we should address it from the head and base everything on realism because that is what people will expect from a Richard Garriott game.

In the end we feel have a system that will please most everyone and, most importantly, is a solid foundation from which to build on for future expansion.  During production we will continue to tune both the systems, the inputs, and the outputs based on both player feedback and player behavior.

So now that we got all that BS out of the way, let’s get to some of the reveals!

We’ve split the large category of “Crafting” skills into two major categories of resource production and crafting.  While we haven’t revealed much information on the skill system just yet, players who prefer to split their time between crafting and adventuring will be happy to hear that the crafting skill trees and adventurer skill trees are completely separated and do not share skill advancement points in any way.  In other words, working on crafting skills will not hinder your combat or magic skills in anyway other than the time you lose to crafting!

Each of the five categories for the resource production is split into a gathering skill section and a refining skill section.  For instance, for mining, there is one skill tree dedicated to the collection of ore and gems, and another for the refining of those into final forms for use by the crafting skills.  This same idea is mirrored for the other four categories of hunter(skinning/tanning), forager(herb collection/preparation), woodsman(lumber collection/lumber cutting and planing), fishing(fish catching, fish cleaning).  

Skill trees for each of the above categories has branches for faster collection/refining, more output from each collection/refining, higher quality collection/refining, and greater tool endurance for collection/refining.

The output from the above sets of skill result in the majority of the input for what most people think of as crafting.  The major categories for crafting are Blacksmithing, Cooking, Tailoring, Alchemy, and Carpentry. The outputs from crafting are any of dozens of various recipes but the the outputs tend to fall into the categories of consumables, wearables, and decorations.  They also generally fall into one of three categories for durability which are hard goods (never breaks), soft goods (wears out through use and needs maintenance), and consumables (use it is gone).

More info in the update, which also offers more information on Farming. Besides that you can also watch this video

And to wrap things up Richard Garriott has interviewed Warren Spector.