Crafting: What's working and what isn't

Nightingale's crafting system has a lot of untapped potential. Its unique features—allowing materials of different qualities and using workbenches for unique effects—are uncommon in most crafting systems and make it stand out. Still, they're not fully leveraged in terms of progression. For instance, your tool's level determines which materials you can harvest, but you can’t refine a crude axe to farm higher-level materials; you just need to unlock a better axe. Since the Atelier series is the only other franchise I can point to that has similar material inheritance, I would point out how in that game you absolutely *can* make lower level items very powerful by refining the component materials and being very selective about the inherited traits. Yes, the later unlocks tend to have better base stats but they also accept more materials in their construction: something that the foundation for exists here.

I am not saying a higher quality blueprint shouldn't be better or even necessary, but I am arguing that the benefit to a higher quality blueprint is that it uses better components, and that the value of more components is the larger opportunity to boost base stats. As an example, perhaps the basic axe can use metal or stone, it has an inherit upper limit based on its primitive design: two basic materials. The value of a higher quality blueprint is that the refinement process to produce a pole and an axe head is that there is more steps to improve the final quality. This is, in my opinion, the unique selling point for the systems that have been laid out and what sets Nightingale apart in a crowded genre of more developed games.

This has a knock-on effect to other systems, finding basic materials can help you craft something you haven't unlocked all the blueprints for at the cost of less control over the refinement process. Unfortunately we see a huge inconsistency here too. The game allows you to produce small components like hinges, buttons, or buckles, yet most blueprints (even ones that obviously need them) just accept ingots or glass. This makes those components pad out blueprint unlocks rather than offer an opportunity for loot, trade and co-op play. After all, if the trader sells wood poles, being able to refine higher level ones *is* a benefit. Right now the potential exists, but given how sparsely these individual components are actually used, it reduces how interesting it even is to find them.

A more complex and thoughtful kind of progression would enrich gameplay and make the tech tree feel meaningful, as material progression would become as much a part of the process than unlocking a new blueprint. This, I am also arguing, would make the crafting stand out. As it currently is it feels padded out like No Man's Sky with a lot of intermediate steps that don't do much to affect the final product and, more importantly, are so inconsistently used it feels like you might as well just bung the base materials into a crafting grid and have an axe pop out. I use the term unique selling point because this seems to be what Nightingale is struggling the hardest with: having good ideas on paper, but seemingly unwilling to demonstrate or commit to them in earnest.

Thank you for your time.