Cosmic Exploration arrives in Final Fantasy XIV not this week but next, which means that we’ve got a little more time before it’s present. But it also means that this is a fine time to look back at the rather odd history of crafting in FFXIV because while the game has always placed a high emphasis on crafting gameplay, it has also always had some odd quirks. For example, at launch the game actually didn’t really support using high-quality materials for crafting – which is the unpleasant state of affairs that Expert crafts bring back, unfortunately.
As long as crafting is getting a big focus, it only makes sense to spend some time actually looking at how crafting has worked in the game historically, and that means starting back at the game’s relaunch. It’s an interesting state of affairs because it was clear that the designers had an idea of how crafting was supposed to work that didn’t map on to the abilities and systems we actually had.
See, at the relaunch, crafting looked a lot more complicated than it actually was. The real way you created high-quality goods wasn’t by gathering high-quality ingredients, even though everything could be high-quality. No, the path was to just get enough ingredients, and then spam your random quality increase with a couple other abilities so that you were essentially making a series of weighted coin flips.
It sounded dumb, but the reality was that most of the time, you could consistently get high-quality results from any quality of ingredients. This meant that the developers needed to find ways to make crafting more interesting, resulting in several system changes that were meant to basically avoid “weighted coin flips” being the best way to make things.
Unfortunately, this also made high-quality ingredients both constantly less valuable and less important. It also makes sense, to a point, that the designers don’t want normal quality crafting items to lose value. After all, if they do lose all value then a good chunk of the game’s economy gets blown up. And that’s considering only gathering materials, not dropped ones like animal hides.
When high-quality items were largely removed outside of specifically crafted ingredients, the real change was acknowledging that no one wanted high-quality results to be the product of random chance. The problem, however, is that because of how crafting in the game is all based upon pretty reliable math, crafting basically every item comes down to following a very specific rotation and meeting very specific stat thresholds. Once you do that, you will get a high-quality output. Even changing the math so that you have a reason to make high-quality ingredients just adds one step, and not a challenging one.
Now, you may think that this is actually just part of how FFXIV works anyway, and you’re not totally wrong. There is a pretty comprehensible and steady rotation to any given job. The tricky part of playing Red Mage isn’t that random, as inexplicable things will proc as you play Red Mage. The tricky part is following that rotation while roughly 90% of the arena is covered in Doom Fire, and which 90% changes on a regular basis. That’s the game.
It is into this space that Expert crafting is supposed to help change things up. It is meant to bring back crafting to a space where you go into a craft and can’t just hit a macro idly as you watch something on your second monitor. The problem, however, is that it functionally turns the clock back to those earliest days when you were just relying on endlessly weighted coin flips and using that as your balancing mechanism. And the problem is that this… like… isn’t fun to do? It’s not actually a challenge so much as it’s just completely random nonsense.
It is possible for a lot of expert crafts to wind up just being statistically impossible to max out even with very good equipment and melds because, y’know, random chance didn’t break your way. And the problem is that random chance not breaking your way doesn’t mean you weren’t paying attention or making good decisions. You did all the right things, you were just told “nope, you lose” and your choice is between losing the materials or accepting a lesser results, which isn’t a fun choice to make when this stuff is expensive.
But the flip side is that it also is trying to solve a very real problem. You want to have a kind of craft that you can’t macro your way out of, but the problem is that even if you put some specific conditional to prevent people hitting a macro, memorizing the button presses isn’t harder either. You need randomness so that players have to actually make decisions during expert crafts, and that is an important aspect.
So how do you make expert crafts be interesting without making them something you can macro? I have an idea, but it’s a weird one: You take failure out of the equation.
Allow me to explain. Currently, the random-chance abilities you have to use have a fixed chance to either make significant progress or do nothing. What I’m proposing is that Expert crafts would feel better if you have a fixed chance to make significant progress or make minor progress and specifically change the item condition to something else.
In other words, you still want the “significant progress” result, but instead of making the failure state just be a matter of “lol” it is instead a chance for you to smartly capitalize upon the new state. This forces you to still pay attention because it still has a random outcome, but it also avoids having one of those outcomes potentially lock you out of any progress.
I also think it would track if ending an Expert synthesis partway through automatically just refunds the materials, if not the crystals used. Expert synths are not something you are ever using to craft normal items at this point, so it would be nice to respect the economy of players who are trying to take on these challenges; we don’t somehow get penalized with hard-to-acquire items if you’re challenging Savage fights, after all, or even Ultimates.
Obviously, I have not yet played around with the content that is coming with Cosmic Exploration and thus cannot yet comment conclusively on how the crafting will feel. It’s possible that the developers already have plans to help even things out when we get in there; I certainly hope so. But for the moment, I do know that I’m really not a fan of how Expert crafting feels, and I’d like to see some improvements made even if I am sympathetic to the ideas in play.
I would also like to see something done about old specialist recipes and primal weapon crafting, but that’s a different discussion altogether.
Feedback, as always, is welcome via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com or in the comments down below. Next week, we are… still going to be waiting for our next dose of new content, so I will not at all be talking about crafting and will instead be focusing on a different question. Namely, I want to talk about what I’m hoping to see from our upcoming field content when it releases next month.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
