The reason crafting is in every game now: It’s like money laundering for game designers
Let me explain.
Let’s first look at Zelda 1.
It had 25 permanent items, either inventory items or upgrades. It also had 12 Heart containers, 8 of which were rewarded by killing dungeon bosses. All told, it had a total of only 33 possible permanent rewards to give out to the player.
As you got all the items, your capabilities went from fairly limited to very powerful. Your health increased. Your armor and damage increased. You got ranged weapons, aoe weapons, items that let you cross oceans or holes.
By the end you are the master of that sandbox.
Every game’s sandbox has an upper limit to how much power and how many verbs you can give the player before they start being able to do… everything. When I talk about this, I refer to it as the “surface area” for a game’s sandbox or systems.
Ok, so a 3-5 hour long game with 33 permanent upgrades feels pretty good.
What happens when you make a 8-12 hour game? If you only have 33 permanent upgrades, they may feel too infrequent. Do you expand to have 65-70 permanent upgrades? Hmm, but we might hit the limit of the surface area first…
In the end, what designers need, if they want longer games, is ways to either A: increase the surface area, or B: disconnect reward points (treasure chests, item drops, etc) from the actual rewards.
Historically, A is often achieved by getting more granular: instead of a sword that doubles your damage, you get a sword that gives you +10% damage. Instead of one character you need to equip, now you have a party of 5.
Instead of upgrading all your attacks, you only upgrade the 4th hit in a combo.
A classic problem with increasing surface area is that it makes rewards feel less impactful. You FEEL a huge difference from getting a +100% sword upgrade. You likely still feel it from a +50%.
Do you feel it at 15%? 5%? Nah.
Do you feel a 2% upgrade for one of your 12 equipment slots? Hahah, no.
B is typically achieved by giving out a resource. Historically this is a currency: money. You get awarded a big chunk of cash when you open a chest. But, oh, that nice upgrade costs 5 chests’ worth of cash.
Now you’re giving out 1 reward for opening 5 different chests.
There are some problems that arise from relying on money for this though. Players can stockpile money from an easier or more efficient source. It’s harder to get them to care about a variety of objectives, when they all reward the same thing: they’ll just go for the most rewarding one.
Crafting is common because it solves a lot of these problems in a way that a lot of players like
It lets you convert 1 reward into many reward points. It lets you incentivize different objectives, because certain materials only drop from certain places. It allows you to avoid increasing granularity.
One of the reasons that a lot of players LIKE crafting is because it gives them a sense of agency. They feel like they get to make meaningful choices about what objectives they pursue and what rewards they get.
And of course, looming over all this: the reason these problems need to be solved at all is because as an industry most games are always trying to be bigger and longer, but it’s hard to get enough surface area in our systems to fill them with meaningful rewards, ESPECIALLY in service games.
So yeah. Crafting:
Making long (or never-ending) games creates a problem with reward economies. Crafting is one of the most flexible and effective solutions to that problem. It lets us launder our reward points through a middle-man system.
And the industry is always trying to make bigger games.