How to make looting fun.

Tinkering with tidbits

Looting is one of those facts of life by this point- wait, no actually I'm going to have to think about that statement a little harder now aren't I? Looting is a video game fact of life; since the time that RPGs became something of a mainstay genre that every other style of game under the sun decided to borrow from we eventually reached the point where the pilfering of one's enemies, of various boxes and of the earth herself, became a cliché of game design. Perhaps it's a little gauche to turn around and blame Ubisoft for this one too, but they're so often the faceless monocrop responsible for proliferation other people's ideas that they then proceed to plaster all over every single property they have in an unending march towards turning every franchise into clones of one another. Besides, when I think back I do remember seeing this aspect of looting crates in Far Cry 3 and thinking how novel that was...

But where was I? Oh yeah, the practice kind of sucks and is boring. Not that the actual act of getting items is boring- I think the hoarder in all of us can appreciate the muted thrill of filling up our bags with goodies- but with so many different games playing up the 'looting' of area chests for boring crafting materials and 'valuables' that you slap together for ridiculous crafted items: it's just all the same! The idea of crafting something homemade and valuable out of junk you find in the game world sounds crafty and resourceful on paper- but so many of these modern open world cookie-cutter games resort to implementing these ideas in the most boring way possible. You'll pick up plants in the world, or auto-loot corpses or rummage through ancient chests and be afforded items that exists only as notaries. Empty Lighters, Tin cans, cigarette packets? Doesn't matter what the item is, because to you it's just mulch to be shoved together into... a pipe bomb? Yeah, doesn't matter if that makes any sense, those containers are now a pipe bomb- deal with it. Nothing in these systems are at all important for what they are but for what they can make. At least a scant few games do away with the lip services of trying to make varied loot and just label pilfered goods under the catch-all label 'crafting materials'.

And every modern open world title feeds into the 'looting to craft' gameplay 'system' by some basic degree to the point where crafting systems are becoming something of an industry-wide cliché. It bothers me so much because the idea of clutter and what that brings to the world of your game is worth so much more than these companies allow it be. Bethesda's open world series', The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, have both featured worlds full of interactable loot and junk, sometimes with crafting systems to take advantage of- but the simple difference here is that every item in those worlds are tangible. That is to say, they have 3d models and can be placed into the world. They populate the shelves of blown out post apocalyptic Super Duper Mart or the fantastical medieval kitchens of Castle Dour. That simple step, of making these items real set-dressing props for the world, allows them to mean so much more when you pilfer a few and turn your home into a shrine from Giddyup Buttercup or whatever other insanity takes you.

Even when Fallout 4 came around with it's catch-all crafting systems that allowed these items to be mulched into their 'raw components' in the crafting of stupidly advanced nonsense like fusion generators and explosive turrets- the fact that each item existed outside of loot menus made the collecting of those resources more interesting. You wouldn't just thumb through a menu, but dig up and down shelves, turn over wooden crates- searching for that extra bit of adhesive or copper. Just this extra touch of interactable tangibility turned what was otherwise a tacked on and forgettable side system into an active activity that players engaged with. Having it all be optional is just another boon of a game like Fallout, where your play style is largely your own choice. 

A recent new contender to the pantheon of open worlds has opened up a whole new potential avenue in crafting that I simply have to talk about right quick, because Tears of the Kingdom really has rewritten the rules with this sort of thing. In Tears pretty much every object in the game world can be manipulated and fused with anything else, which turns the entire game world into something of a tool kit to be played around with. Everything from planks of wood to rocks on the road to ferns in the bushes can be attached to your weapon to some unique effect, which has the consequence of making the very art of exploration itself the fun draw of what we can charitably call 'looting', but which might be better classified as 'world crafting'. I get my kicks out of seeing what combinations work best, and that is the childlike joy a system as robust as Tears of the Kingdom's can bring.

But if we can't commit to the large-scale clutter filled world of Fallout or the totally revolutionary 'combine anything' world of Tears of the Kingdom, there's still some measures that the every day open world can take to ensure that crafting doesn't get stale quite so quickly. In fact, I think one of the Assassin's Creed games pulled this off decently well. Moderation is the word of the day. Simply by toning back on the number of crafting items you need to get or can get from the world, and making the sources for getting these materials more interesting activities- that can infer more value to the process. When upgrading your ship in 'Assassin's Creed: Black Flag' required the player to engage with the whaling side activity to get the whale hides, that was whole 'worlds' more engaging than the 'loot chests for random nicks nacks and hope you get something good' system that Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood employed before it.

Perhaps the worst way these systems go wrong, and I see it often in the games I play from Ghost Recon Breakpoint to vanilla Cyberpunk, is when these materials are placed with so little care that they make no thematic sense within the world around them. Even just having these materials be listed loot items instead in 3d modelled clutter is disappointing enough, but refusing to manage loot tables so thatdildos start spawning in the middle of Arasaka bases? Or that you'll find caches of crypto currency in aboriginal native chests? Talk about a slap in the face to let everyone know how little you care about implementing these junk systems. I know they're mandated by the publisher and no one on the team cares enough to even brainstorm how these systems might fit in with their respective games anymore, but for the sake of everyone you need to at least feign an effort!

Looting is a fact of life just like crafting systems, online cosmetic stores for single player games and battle passes; but that doesn't mean we have to turn into automatons going through the motions when we implement them in our games. Innovation comes from tackling the same problems from a new angle, and if you've already given up in the face of cliché the moment you face it then you'll never get a chance to overcome it but rather just fumble and fall. Anyone who thought that looting is inherently overplayed and lacking in creative potential had their mouths shut tight when Tear of the Kingdom dropped, and Nintendo may be the best of the best but in my mind- exceptionalism is just a reminder for everyone that the world isn't brought and sold completely just yet.