» Fri May 27, 2011 10:30 pm Loot is one of the pillars which rpgs thrive. Loot can be a driving force for a game, one of the main focuses for some (Diablo, etc) but even for those that it isn't (like TES) it plays a huge role still.
Loot comes in many shapes in sizes, from weapons, to equipment, to money/supplies. It's the old carrot on a stick routine that has kept many a people playing a game even after the story itself may have ended. Wondering what new piece of equipment you might find or wondering what will be in that next chest you uncover tucked away in that old dungeon.
Loot is generally treated to nothing more then a simple drop from an npc/creature you kill or something you loot from a chest. The only back story you might get is if you're lucky and it's from a quest, however for many rpgs even the best things are just randomly found items. Perhaps there's a codex or some little blurb to read, but nothing that feel substantial to make the items that unique or memorable.
Apart from loot a lot of rpgs can have crafting in them. The ability to make items yourself provided you have the skill, money, and items required for it. Most crafting systems simply follow a pre-determined template, the plate armour is the plate armour. It looks the same regardless of the person that made it. You have no real say on how you craft something. A sword is a sword, an axe an axe, so on and so fourth.
So I thought, how could you make loot more involved? How can you make things more memorable to a player and better still, how can you let players make those items more unique to themselves? This is my idea (actually similar to one I posted years ago before Oblivion was out, but that's buried) on how you can make loot and crafting something different then other games, to make it something that a game could truly have on it's own apart from any other game out there and have it mean more to players and bring the world more life.
First off, crafting. When it comes to crafting one thing that would really help make it both more meaningful and more fun is to allow the player the ability to customize what they craft. It's not a hard to thing to do really. All you have to do is break down pieces of equipment into separate parts.
Basically to give an example of how it could work. you go up to a forge or other piece of equipment used for crafting. Then this opens your "crafting" menu. In this menu you select the type of item you want to make (Weapon/armour, then things like swords, axes, plate, leather, etc).
After you select which type of item you want to make you know go into crafting mode. Here it breaks down a piece of equipment and allows you to truly craft it how you wish. Take a sword for example, you start off with the hilt, have a various selection to choose from to make, then you can select the blade type (IE short, long, curved/straight, etc). Then finally after you select this you select the extras. Things such as colouring, perhaps simple etchings and designs you can place on the blade, or jewels in the hilt of the sword or other things.
The same basic function works for armour. You select the type then it breaks it apart, the style of each piece you want, colouring (within reason) and then painting(IE symbols)/etchings to go on it.
Ok now that the crafting is done, how do you tie this to loot and things, and how do you make looting certain things more memorable and impactful to the player along with having it feel like part of the lore and world of TES?
Imagine for example. You are going through a grand library in a city and you come across a shelf with a book that stands out apart from all the others. You can interact with the book, open it and actually read the short-story inside. Inside this book it tells about an old warrior of the lands. One who wore a very unique suit of armour and wielded a grand greatsword umatched by others. It goes on to tell about his last days, it mentions how he fell in battle and his surroundings comrades carried him off the field and secretly buried him in a lost tomb somewhere high in the mountains.
The book gives you just enough of a hint to know the general area that it mentions and perhaps it mentions some landmark, one that you'd have to see to know (IE like how in RDR the treasure maps worked with landmarks). So later on you are journeying through these mountains, perhaps you forgot about reading that book from earlier but you still remember parts of it. Then it catches your eye, you come across one of the landmarks described in the book. So you head off like the book says trying to find this tomb.
Finally after searching you come to a hidden cave, tucked back in the mountains. You head inside, torch in hand to see what you find. After going through the cave, you finally stand in front of an old tomb, with the markings of that fallen hero etched on top along with his name.
Now here is where the loot system and crafting system come to meet. In most games if you come across loot, what do you do? you simply loot it right? You pick it up, put it in your bad, go on your merry way. So how do you change this and combine it with crafting in ia way that hasn't bene done?
Simple, you don't actually "loot" certain items. Like the story I setup, you get to this tomb. You open the tomb and you see the guy buried inside, still in his famous suit of armour and holding his sword. Now just speaking realistically here, that armour, yeah a dead guy decomposed while wearing it, ewww.Not to mention the rest and other things that have happened to it over the years of not being taken care of. Really though, this is just a way to bridge the gap in a more realistic and meaningful manner.
So if you don't loot it what do you do? You use a book! Yes a book, now don't roll your eyes yet. When you come across certain items throughout the world, such as this suit of armour and sword, instead of simply taking them like most loot you can instead "memorize" them in your crafting book. All this does really is it take sthe items you find (which are determined by the devs obviously) and then once you find these items it adds them to your craftable list.
So throughout your time playing the game you can come across specific items and loot, which can be a journey to find in themselves, which you then add to your pool of selectable details during the crafting process. So for example, after you get back to a town or workshop you can then actually craft that suit of armour and sword you found and put in your "book." You can even take that armour and sword and ONLY use specific parts. So for example, if you find a suit of armour like that and you don't really like the chest piece, BAM, don't have to use it. However you really like the design of the pauldrons? Only select that then. You can mix/match from all your known designs to truly creature armour and weapons which are very unique to you.
With these system it places undone amounts of customization at the hands of players while also making use of the loot system, instead of having players focus on one or the other. It also allows you to intertwine it with lore and back stories which are already rich in TES lore.
