In this post, we will continue our conversation from last time. If you missed the previous post, you can read it here.
Continuing on from last time: I won’t write an essay about every profession, but I will give a general overview of what is coming for the others, and some of the problems they are trying to solve.
When it comes to resource gathering, there are a lot of different areas of the game which players have completely different opinions about. Some think it is too hard to make money, while others have so much they don’t know what to do with it. Some hate how random it can be to acquire high quality items, while others take such a slow approach to playing the game that they just end up with everything they need. Some players enjoy certain mechanics, such as fishing, while others can’t stand it and hate having to engage with it at all.
From a development perspective, these are seemingly impossible problems to solve. Every solution to one person’s problem potentially ruins something that someone else was already enjoying. However, the Professions system gives me a way to hopefully address a lot of these polarizing areas of the game.
Many of the gathering professions are skewed into clear directions meant to cater to different groups of players. For example, each one has numerous perks that just make getting high quality items easier (even more-so than having a maxed skill before this update). There are players who hate fishing, and all they want is to get the items that are required for progression as fast as possible, and never touch it again. For those players, they can choose perks that increase bite speed significantly, stack every perk that improves fish quality, and even choose perks that retain more bait if they want to just coast off of their current supply for longer.
However, another player might really like fishing. That player might choose more 2x item perks so they get more fish to sell or cook with. They might choose perks that make fish sell for more gold, so they can make more money doing what they enjoy. They might choose perks that make treasure more common.
In this way, players who enjoy the skill as it is have ways to make it even more worthwhile to engage with, and players who don’t enjoy it can just get what they need and get out. There are even options for players who want to just passively focus on crab pots, or players who don’t like learning all the seasonal differences and want to just catch random out of season fish, however rare, over a less calculated period of time.
Many of the Professions are designed with this philosophy of letting players lean into what they like, and cut down on what they don’t. Some notable examples are:
Ways to break rocks or trees faster
Ways to deal with less mining hazards and have more control over which ones you get (and the default rates increasing a bit, for those who would rather skip these perks and have more hazards in exchange for other perks).
Ways to get more crucial resources, such as coal, wax, green mushrooms, forageables in general, wood, stone, bones, bricks, ore, and more.
Ways for animals to produce products in the rain
Ways for the player to earn more gold in a large number of ways
Ways to speed up casks and drying racks
Ways to get way more bugs
Ways to get higher volumes of resources for crafting/cooking
Ways to conserve certain ingredients when crafting
Ways to use certain ingredients as substitutes for other ingredients
Ways to lean into particular playstyles (such as making artisan goods vs selling raw items)
Ways to earn more gold
Ways to get higher volumes of resources, or more easily acquire quality items
And much more!
And that’s enough for today! Stay tuned for part 4, where we still have one more profession to talk about…