Craft randomness

[yarnevk]

The entire problem with putting mini-games on is you will get forced to play them when you don't want to, even if you are the guy that wanted them in the first place, you realize you just want to make some planks and not in the mood for a silly game even though it is your game! No matter how much you say make it optional you insist on a reward, which means you will insist the rest of the game be balanced accordingly, which means it is not optional.

There is no possible quick and easy challenge when you have a big stack of crafts and have to do it on every single thing you make, it is nothing more than an annoyance. Imagine you are cutting planks and have to use your hammer to knock out all the knots (classic 'whack the mole' mini-game). Sounds fun, and is fun for the first tree. 1000 planks later with a cleared forest you needed to make your house and fence, you realized that was no longer any fun, so you stop doing it then get mad when your porch collapse because of all the notty wood. Even games that force you to only click the mouse just to make every piece get annoying, the game designer thought they was smartly simulating human actions there, but very quickly relented and implemented to hold the button down to increase the make count (if single player) or add a timer to increase the make time (if multiplayer) having learned that spam clicking is bad GUI design.

Imagine if the standard 'hold W to run' was done like it is in Olympic games, with you having to spam click left/right as fast as you can to determine the stride and speed of your legs. Very fun if you are playing Olympics, not so fun when you are trying to run away from a spider. Mini-games have a time and place, and the very same game can be made not so fun when you have to play them when you do not want to. Of course you say make it optional you still press W, but you know the game designers balanced the game so that the only successful escape is spamming the mouse buttons so you have to do it or die. Sounds annoying, but trust me when you are on your knot number thousand you will be thinking the same thing.

You seem to think crafting is boring without any action, good crafting games are about collecting resources, learning complex recipes and the strategy of making what you want with what you do not have, it is an interesting game on it's own. Of course if you use the Wiki to find out all the resource locations, know all the good recipes, you have indeed bypassed the crafting game making it boring, but that does not mean you add an action game to it in place of actually playing the crafting game.

Anyways Frontiers has already pulled some features that sounded good at the time, yet initial play testers found them incredibly frustrating, Guess I missed you spamming forums with your idea, not many people are willing to tell someone when your idea does not work. Lars is smart enough not to keep something just because he wasted time coding it, for example he threw out way more complicated survival mechanics that he thought he would be a fan of yet he hated it on implementation.

A good place for mini-games is in a bar with some gold on the line. When it is a bar game then when you feel like wasting some time on an entertaining game then you go to the bar, roll some dice, play some cards, get taken, get drunk have fun. They do not seem out of place at all there.