WoW Tradeskilling
The World of Warcraft site has some new details on the game’s developing trade skilling system, and I’m a bit underwhelmed. While the system is doing away with combine failures (a simply evil game design element), it sounds like the same old “spend inordinate amounts of time collecting components, combine them, sell the result” treadmill. I don’t want to be jaded, but I’m getting the uncomfortable feeling Blizzard aren’t adding any new gameplay elements to WoW, but rather just refining ideas that already exist in half a dozen other MMOGs. I’m hoping they are withholding the best parts of their game to avoid giving competitors the chance to copy them before they ship.
posted by monty · at 1:30 pm · filed under MMO Games
As an avid tradeskiller in EQ and now SWG, I would like to say that I LIKE going out into the game world and finding my tradeskill supplies, then hauling them back to make the items I want.
Yes, EQ’s tradeskill system was annoying with the fails losing your materials, and those complete failures still occured even after you were a supposed master of that tradeskill (for RL eg, my mum has NEVER failed to make some sort of a cake since I’ve been able to keep track =). But there are items in the game that make it worth learning those skills still.
SWG takes it a bit further, the items you collect are resources, and each resource has varying properties that affect how good the resulting item is.. it’s a fun element to search the planets for that top notch resource to make that carbine you’ve always dreamed of…
While the non-tradeskillers may not like the WoW system, for someone like me who enjoys the systems in other games, the WoW system sounds pretty good =)