In my last post I said I was going to wait to write about Robocraft's crafting system because I had mixed feelings about it and I wanted to stay positive. Now that I am free to be as catty as I want to be, the time has come.
The crafting system is potentially very powerful and as I browsed the marketplace, I saw dozens of really cool looking robots, ranging from whimsical, impractical creations to killer death bots that could plausibly be in a sci-fi horror movie. Which brings me to my first main complaint about the crafting system - the selection of parts available to you is basically random. And while you can have multiple robots, you can only use a given part once. So if you want to use your rarest parts on a second robot, you have to go back and strip it off the first.
This really limits my creativity and experimentation. I have so few viable parts that I have to deconstruct my older robots to make new ones, and if I commit to buying new parts from the shop, it will influence almost every robot I make from that point forward. The worst part is when I get a new rare part that gives me a great new idea, but then realize that I'll need to grind for hours to get enough duplicates that my bot is viable in combat.
It's immensely frustrating. I mean, I get it, it's a free-to-play game and its entire business model revolves around inciting deadbeats like me to pay up. But I don't think I can think of any time I've felt more manipulated by the free-to-play model. There are all these cool things just out of reach and my cheapness is keeping them away from me.
Though that's not really fair. Because there's no way for me to simply give Robocraft money and then just have everything I want. I can buy a premium membership, which will double the rate at which I acquire loot. Or I can buy loot boxes directly. But in both cases, the outcome is still random. My vision is constrained by the scarcity of parts, but that scarcity can only be alleviated by time (or, I suppose, by dropping a truly obscene amount on lootboxes until I get multiples of every part). In a way, this is almost worse. If there's one lesson I've definitely learned from doing this blog for four years, it's that time is always in short supply.
The other thing I don't like about the crafting system is that it's oddly under-featured. Maybe I've just been spoiled by Starmade, but there are a lot of powerful tools that are simply missing here. You can only put down one block at a time. There's only one available axis of symmetry. You can't copy or paste sections of ships. You have to enter a separate menu every time you need to place a different part. And the thing is, this isn't Minecraft. Navigating around the environment while trying to build isn't part of the challenge. You're just this floating presence which places parts with the mouse buttons. There's no need for the bot creation process to be this slow.
Yet despite my complaints, crafting robots remains my favorite part of Robocraft. Though I've yet to come up with a design that excels in PvP combat (and have been much too afraid to inflict Octohealdron on my fellow human players, seeing how ridiculously it handles vs the AI), I do like seeing my creations given life. And I would gladly play a game that had Robocraft's building and combat systems, if it distributed parts in a way not meant to maximize profits from obsessives and gamblers.
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