It’s time once again to listen to a developer from Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen talk about a game feature for roughly an hour and a half. Yes, it’s the February Dev Roundtable podcast and this episode features associate game designer David “Nephele” Beach who fields questions about the MMORPG’s crafting and harvesting gameplay.
The very first question dug into the game’s economy and trading, with Beach confirming that there are no plans to artificially restrict what can be traded or put on the market. In order to ensure the market isn’t flooded with items, however, there are plans to mitigate that using a combination of resource scarcity, a more involved item creation process over mass production, and ensuring demand by making sure items are viable and useful.
As for resources, finding them will require more exploration, with Beach pointing out that materials may be in high mountains, hidden map locations, or even in dungeons, all with the intent of making gathering “an adventure.” Additionally, while there will be material progression, Beach also confirmed that even later crafted items will still require some combinations that include basic materials to put together.
Players will be able to take part in all of the gathering they want, but will only be able to specialize in two gathering professions. To that point, most of the resources needed for crafting won’t be sold by NPCs, so either trading with others or gathering items personally will be the methods that crafters get their mats.
When it comes to crafting items, it’s all powered by schematics, which are consumed when the materials are put together. Common schematics are readily found via NPC merchants for example, but there are rarer schematics that can only be found via content rewards, faction rewards, or monster drops. Crafters will also have skills and progression via the game’s mastery system, some manner of specialization system (though that’s still being fleshed out), and unique equipment; whether that equipment will have durability is also undecided.
Another question touches on consumables, with Beach saying the devs will be keeping a close eye on balancing the usefulness of food or potions with not making them a hard requirement to be effective in combat as well as specifically staying away from level-based consumables to mitigate the problem of high-end items being useful.
Finally, the podcast confirmed that there are no plans for housing or guild halls, especially since the devs want things like crafting to be a social experience. To that point, there will be central areas in cities where crafting tables are located to facilitate players collecting together and being social with one another.
