The Elder Scrolls Online Crafting Facts
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As ZeniMax Online champions ahead to the release of The Elder Scrolls Online later this year, they've continued to update the official website with blog articles like this one that covers "crafting facts" and the design approach that the team took to the staple MMORPG feature. Here's a bit to start you off:
One thing you'll notice about the crafting in ESO is that the different skills offer varying levels of complexity. We want you to be able to get something out of crafting even if you aren't making it your character's focus. And, conversely, if you want to invest a lot of time and effort, we want the rewards to be worthwhile. To that end, each craft is different. Provisioners simply find recipes and ingredients throughout the world, and they can cook or create drinks as long as they have a recipe and the corresponding ingredients. Enchanters and alchemists will need to experiment a little more, discovering the traits of ingredients or the meanings of runestones. Finally, smiths (the most complex) can create weapons and armor, learn different racial styles, discover secret crafting stations that impart set bonuses, deconstruct items to learn new traits, improve item quality with boosters only they can obtain, and make tons of decisions about the items they craft. No matter how invested you are in crafting, there's something for you.
We want you to have the freedom to pursue one or all of the crafting skills, but we still want you to have interesting character development choices. All of the crafting skills are part of the overall skill system, so you'll need to consider your options carefully when you spend a skill point. Should you put one more point into blacksmithing, or do you really want to learn a new two-handed weapon ability? While there are tons of skill points to earn, you'll still have important choices to make. Crafting is useful from your first steps in Tamriel on, so it's worth spending some time and points to level at least one skill.
You'll notice that no two crafters are quite the same, especially smiths. Because you choose how many points and how much time you want to invest in a crafting skill, your character's level doesn't necessarily determine how (good) you are at crafting a particular type of item. Take a smith's item traits, for instance. To learn one, you need to deconstruct an item with a trait for research. When research is completed, you can make that particular item with that trait on it. This takes longer as you research more traits for that type of item, so you'll need to find a smith with the trait for the item you want and that may not always be the highest-level crafter! It would take an incredibly long time to learn every trait for every weapon and armor piece.
