For those who don't keep up to date on what's happening in the free-to-play wizard-themed MMORPG, "Wizard101," the MMORPG will soon be adding player crafting. Currently live on the Public Test Server, you can read the patch notes/announcement explaining the crafting system here.

I caught up with "Wizard101's" Rhea Shelley to ask some more questions about the addition to crafting in their MMORPG, to better help its players (and our readers) understand what it means for them.

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Brendon Lindsey, Chief Editor, MMO Life Network: Hi, Rhea. Thanks for taking the time out of your schedule to talk a little bit about "Wizard101's" upcoming crafting system. For our readers who may not know who you are, could you introduce yourself?

Rhea Shelley, Lead Systems Designer, Wizard101: Hey, I’m Rhea Shelley, the Lead Systems Designer for "Wizard101." I coordinate coming up with, fleshing out, and writing down all of the nitpicky details of the game systems. Things like, combat, crafting, PvP, equipment, housing, grouping, etc. I’ve been in the gaming industry for almost 15 years. I started in QA many many years ago at Origin Systems and I was hooked. Who knew that an Atari 800 and a degree in Mathematics would treat me so well?

Let's just jump right into it, shall we? Looking at the description of the crafting system you guys are adding, it sounds like there won't be any sort of minigame associated with crafting; once you have the recipe and ingredients, you can just make it by using the crafting station. Is that accurate? And will players always succeed, or will there be a success/failure rate as there is with casting?

That is correct. Once you have the recipe and the ingredients, and you meet all the requirements, you can make the item. There is no failure. I always hated it when I spent the time to get everything I needed, and then tried to craft them item only to have it fail and consume all my resources. That was really frustrating. Seeing no real value add in doing that, we decided not to. Yea. Crafting minigames can be fun, but we certainly wanted to keep it as simple as possible while still meeting our design goals. Crafting in and of itself has many components. Since we have no fail case and no variance in quality, adding a minigame on top of everything seemed unnecessary. So, no minigame.

Later on in the initial announcement, you mention that there will be "five tiers" of crafting. How will players reach the higher tiers? Will it be based on player level, the amount of things they've crafted, crafting experience, unlocking by getting X number of recipes?

The crafting tiers are based on completing the crafting quests. The crafting quests consist of a little gathering but mostly crafting particular items from across the worlds. Certain crafting quests give players certain badges. These badges represent the various tiers, like Novice, Apprentice and such. Certain recipes require that you have a certain badge before you can buy them. The crafting quests themselves don't have a level requirement. You could in theory start a brand new level 1 character and become a Master Artisan. It might be a little challenging, but it can be done. Because we based everything off of the crafting quests themselves, there is no crafting "skill" or "experience" per se. If you do the quests, you get the badge.

I think a lot of players are still a little hazy on how crafting an item works. Can you just give a simple step-by-step example of how a player will go about crafting one of the beginning crafts?

Sure.

Okay, let's say you've done the first couple of crafting quests. This gives you a few things. First, it gives you a Basic Crafting Station. This is where you craft all kinds of low level items. The next thing the quest gives you is a Crafting Slot, which is a new element of your character. When you craft an item, you must basically "rest" before you can craft another. This "resting period" or "cooldown" is shown in your Crafting Slot. If you don't have an empty Crafting Slot, you can't craft an item. As you do more quests, you earn more Crafting Slots so you can craft more items at one time. 

Alright, so now you have your Basic Crafting Station and an empty Crafting Slot. You go to the recipe vendor and you buy a recipe for something you'd like to craft. Different recipes require different Crafting Stations so make sure it works for the Basic Crafting Station since that's the only one we have at the moment. Let's say it's some kind of fancy desk. You check the required ingredients for the desk.

Let's say it requires 5 Mist Wood, 4 Black Coal, and 3 Leather Straps. Now we need to gather the ingredients. Well, you can buy the Black Coal from one of the Reagent Vendors. That's easy. Next you need to harvest some Mist Wood. Mist Wood is spread across many of the worlds along the spiral. Just search around for it on the ground. Once you find it, just walk up to it and pick it up. Next is the Leather Straps. Monsters everywhere drop various crafting reagents. Leather Straps is one of them. Defeating the right monsters will give you the Leather Straps you need. If you don't feel like harvesting Mist Wood or farming monsters for Leather Straps, you can always just watch the Bazaar and buy them from there. 

So, we've got our Basic Crafting Station, a recipe, all our ingredients, and an empty Crafting Slot. Now we go into our dorm room or castle and place our Basic Crafting Station down like any other housing item. Using the Crafting Station brings up our recipe list. We click on our Fancy Desk recipe, and click on the Create button. The ingredients are consumed and Bingo, we have a Fancy Desk. The Fancy Desk has a cooldown of 30 minutes. So, if we check our Crafting Slot on our character, we'll see that it is counting down from 30 minutes. Since we only have 1 Crafting Slot, we must rest and can't craft again for another 30 minutes.

It sounds like treasure cards and most of the cool looking furniture are going to become crafting-only rewards. Was there a reason for the change? Was it to add another element to the game, or were players getting the best and rarest things too easily?

Well, I'm not sure if I'd classify it as a change as much as I would an addition. There are still plenty of cool furniture items available outside of crafting. This just adds an additional way to acquire more nice items.

In a lot of MMORPGs, crafted items are always labeled as "good," but pale in comparison to the type of loot you'll get in a high dungeon. How does the highest tier crafting equipment compare to the types of things people can find in a high-level area?

The crafted equipment is quite unique. What most of the current equipment does is give either a large increase to stats for one school, or give a lower bonus to all schools. What the crafted gear does is to greatly increase stats for two schools. This should give a higher value to the secondary schools that people have chosen. Some of the secondary school bonuses are quite large. I think players will be surprised. So while there are great crafting gear items, there are also great drop items. Different play styles will prefer different gear.

Will recipes players can use be limited based on the school of magic they are?

Most no, but some yes. Right now, the Treasure Cards are the only recipes that are restricted by school. Since players can trade treasure cards, hopefully they will work together to form crafting communities. If you like playing solo, there’s always the Bazaar.

Approximately how many recipes are there in the MMORPG right now?

Oh wow.  Over 1,000 I’m sure.

Will more be added on a fairly regular basis? Or will further updates include batches of new recipes?

We sure hope so. Now that we have the system in place, it should be much easier to add additional items in the future.

First you guys added the arena, then housing, and now crafting. Was it your strategy to get the basic PvE element of the game down, and then add on to that, rather than try to tackle everything at once? Or did these additions sort of come about when someone went, "You know what would be cool..."?

Most definitely the former. You’ve got to get your core gameplay down first. We always knew we wanted to add these additional systems, but if the base game isn’t just right, it doesn’t matter what you have along with it.

Now that PvE is solid and fun, we get the time to add on all those cool systems along side it. And yes, there certainly is a good amount of “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” going on. I mean, we’re all game players. So thinking of that kind of stuff is always fun. Plus, we have a great online community who love this game and want it to grow. The constructive feedback from them is always nice to hear.

Thanks for taking the time to talk about "Wizard101's" crafting system, Rhea.

You too. Take care.

Posted by Brendon Lindsey
June 29, 2009

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