#idk but i'm going to find out by simply maxxing out the character limit for each tag and finding out the limit of tags for each post lololo

[iceeericeee]

I wonder how many tags i can add on to this

[cortexreaver]

okay i think i remember where i was going with this sort of umm so a) i feel that the gathering and use of materials both being firmly in the player's hands is crucial to idk The Immersion. like the actual crafting of consumables in da2 and dai, in addition to being tedious from a mechanical perspective since you have to hoard materials *and* return to a specific location to make use of them, imo feels less fulfilling from a roleplay perspective since it's presented as a task being outsourced to an npc. fitting for dragon age: liberal paramilitary commander sim i guess but imagine if origins' skills had been carried over into da2 and a hawke with maxed poison-making could notice anders was asking for help acquiring shit you could make explosives with (maybe one could even assume anders might be aware of how risky asking hawke specifically for help would be in that case). i already touched on the insanely short dev period that game was allowed so idk why i'm even thinking about this though lol

b) hmm how do i put this okay so like in the witcher (1) or morrowind for example alchemical ingredients have assigned sets of properties and most recipes are simply a particular combination of specific substances derived from ingredients rather than specific ingredients themselves, which is more mechanically flexible for the player because they don't have to worry about their supply of one singular material and suggests knowledge/resourcefulness/curiosity on the part of the player character (reflected in both examples mentioned above–the witcher has the player learning to identify plants and studying their uses alongside geralt as he re-learns things he lost to amnesia; ingredients in morrowind have their properties revealed in the ui as the player increases their character's alchemy skill; in both cases the player can also discern properties through experimentation, and the witcher additionally always allows for an item to be created whether or not the combination of base substances is a valid recipe, and the player/geralt has to use the result to find out what it does). obviously this isn't the only approach that can make a system satisfying to engage with, but as i sort of half-explained in my original post it's one that i think works well for games that have the player interacting with lots of flora fauna etc because it illustrates a relationship between a setting's natural world and its inhabitants, and thus i feel it's one that could've fit into.... let's say inquisition because that's the one that has the player doing the most gathering and where resources have the most relevance to the main plot. it is sort of how its armor/weapon crafting works given that a majority of the materials involved have shared properties and are thus technically interchangeable, though it once again is a system where quantity still equals quality to a degree, which i could see theoretically being a means of throttling the player's access to overpowered gear too soon but with the merciful addition in one of the last patches* of the ability to sync acquired schematics across playthroughs it's still very easy to do that–ironically i think fixed-component recipes would have been the way to go with armor and weapon schematics because locking access to higher-quality materials behind the difficulty threshold of the areas they're found in could impose the same limitation while adding even more necessity to explore new regions as their challenge becomes viable for the player, mirroring the expansion of the inquisition's occupied territory and (implied) resource extraction operations plus it would've been consistent with the previous two games using items' material type as an indicator of quality. ive gone off on a fucking tangent again but i started with my point this time instead of forgetting it halfway through so that's progress

*unless you played on xbox 360 or ps3 in which case all you got was another L

it's a shame that bioware never designed a satisfying crafting system at any point in the dragon age series because crafting can add a little somethin to a game not just in terms of strategy (i.e. what a player can do with crafted items) or character depth (i.e. what skills does a character have as a person beyond combat and/or magical prowess) but also as a means of familiarizing the player with the world or at least the region they're in by providing them with another way of interacting with it–it tells them which plants are native to an area, what kinds of animal products its inhabitants use, which metals are common and which are rare, and so on. origins has a nice range of items, but its range of components, most of which are poorly described, is relatively limited, resulting in a system where (for me) the recipes all kind of blend together because the main variation ends up being in component quantities instead of combinations. dragon age 2 had a nine month production period. inquisition has the widest range of components and a decent range of biomes to find them in, but the crafting system is still one in which quality and quantity are essentially the same thing, and in the case of consumables (excluding runes) is out of the player's hands again and contains a glaring disconnect between the herbs that go in and the potions/tonics/grenades that come out. idk what my conclusion was meant to be here or why these stupid fucking games still have me in their grasp. im like 2 months dragon age sober except for the time i booted up origins a couple weeks ago to look at my elves which doesn't count because i wasn't Sober sober at the time. my elves are in there serah