[Agentlien]

There's been quite a few games in recent years where I notice some system and think "ugh, do I really need to bother with this, too?". Especially crafting or skill point systems which feel slapped on. Some games make them a fun and integral part of the gameplay, some seem to include them because it's trendy and it just adds friction and mental load with little payoff.

I don't mind complexity, some of my favorite games are ridiculously complex (Dwarf Fortress), but the complexity needs to pay for itself.

[ceigey]

I’ve had similar thoughts too: the older I get, the less “extra features” translate to value if I’m expected to stretch my concentration across all of them to have fun.

I’m not as sophisticated as the average Dwarf Fortress player, but an emergent quality of that game that I’ve admired from afar has been how you can ignore various mechanics and you’re rewarded with an interesting ride.

It’s dynamic enough that by pulling various gameplay “levers” you can get wildly different outcomes (and thus value through replayability), but things will sort of run themselves (for better or worse) if you forget about them. So you’re half writing your own story, half discovering it as it writes itself.

[moduspol]

My cynical take is that crafting systems are probably the most attractive on the ratio of "amount of dev effort required to implement" relative to "amount of play time added." They're also trivially tunable. You can add (or subtract) hours of play time just by changing the numbers required to craft things.

Unless they're an integral feature of the game (like in Minecraft), they always feel slapped on to me.