During a recent conversation with my lovely spouse, we were discussing Stardew Valley. It's a game we both enjoy, but neither of us consider it to be the "best thing ever" despite its seemingly universal appeal. She found Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town to be more enjoyable, which I myself also love along with the series' initial debut on SNES.
Peak Gaming: Harvest Moon (SNES, 1996)
When trying to figure out why she finds Mineral Town more enjoyable than the more featureful Stardew Valley, my spouse's conclusions were that she didn't like having so many time-limited mechanics (such as needing to collect seasonal ingredients to advance the story) and what she especially disliked was its crafting system where the player needs to gather ingredients all over the game world to craft important objects to further the game's progression.
In my understanding, it seems the goal of adding a crafting system to a game is to incentivize players to engage with each of its aspects. Using Stardew Valley as an example, the game's core farming aspect relies on the use of tools which can be upgraded using metals. Metals are obtained from mining, a secondary activity. Farming also relies on the use of saps and small fish which obtained by foraging and fishing, respectively. Mining often relies on the use of food items, which are obtained using a combination of farming, fishing, and foraging. To get the most out of fishing, the player needs to defeat insect enemies in combat (which occurs during mining) to craft bait which yields higher-quality fish. Every distinct gameplay system in Stardew Valley feeds back into the others, creating its signature gameplay loop. The benefit is increased variety—players who always move from one aspect of gameplay to another will scarce get tired of any single system.
The advantage of such a system is that it can naturally encourage players to engage with the game in a holistic sense. The disadvantage of this kind of gameplay design is that it often imposes "shit work" (yes, that's a technical term) onto players.
Don't Give Your Users Shit Work (zachholman.com)
Stardew Valley allows players to craft chests (using wood, a common ingredient obtained from foraging) to store their excess items. Each chest can hold a few dozen item stacks, with item stacks numbering to 999 for those which are permitted to stack. Players can also place chests wherever they want as well—though the usual place will be on their own farm, often in a shed building which also requires crafting ingredients to construct.
The sheer number of items in Stardew Valley effectively necessitates the use of many chests. Keeping track of where everything is stored is a game in its own right. Late enough into the game, a player who wants to craft something complicated using rare materials will likely need to move from chest to chest to grab the necessary ingredients. I would often find myself even hitting the same chests multiple times as I'd realized I'd forgotten some ingredient or another. The need to micromanage spoils eventually grinds the entire gameplay experience to a halt, and then I usually go find something else to play.
Many games in the past decade and a half have begun to implement crafting systems for purposes which I assume are similar to what I outlined earlier with regards to variety in Stardew Valley, itself now 10 years old. The slightly older Fallout 4 also introduced a crafting system which touches on all aspects of how it plays. Zelda got a pair of crafting systems in Breath of the Wild where both cooking and armor upgrades require crafting ingredients, though it omits chests in favour of a single inventory that has far too many items in it to adequately manage. Tears of the Kingdom added construction—usually of vehicles—to the pile as well. Pokémon Legends: Arceus as well as Pokémon Scarlet & Pokémon Violet both introduced crafting systems in the same year! In PLA, crafting is used to construct just about every useful item in the game such as Poké Balls, medicines, and items to assist with stealth. Scarlet & Violet's crafting system was a bit more sparse; Items dropped by defeated Pokémon creatures could be used almost exclusively to craft TM items to teach moves to the player's own Pokémon, which is a system that is already in line with how players were incentivized to engage with prior Pokémon titles.
In my opinion, the single source for this trend would probably be 2011's Minecraft—the game composed entirely of mining for ingredients and crafting them into other things all for the purpose of building things in its blocky world. I got into Minecraft in 2010 while the game was in alpha, but haven't touched it for years and have little interest in returning because it always ends the same way—I get too busy gathering materials and get too bored of building things whose purpose is either to look pretty or make it easier to get more materials. It might be a solid gameplay loop for some players, but for me it's just a blank canvas that is too tedious to paint.
Automation Games and the Need to Build
This is ultimately why I think most crafting systems fail, and why I am so loathe to see them in newer games. The situation has reached a point where the presence of a crafting system is often enough for me to immediately lose interest in any new game, which may be a reason why I am so disinterested in most new releases nowadays—especially those which can only design by slapping together the most popular game mechanics du jour.
Despite everything, the fact remains that crafting systems have a certain appeal both from a design standpoint and from a gameplay standpoint. Games become more enjoyable when players are incentivized to eat the whole plate put out in front of them.
The Whole Plate: How Nintendo's Sandboxes Are Different
Incidentally, I did stop playing Pokopia for a time due to tedium in sorting through multiple storage chests. Since the game was updated along with the release of its first DLC, I've picked it back up again and found it to be much less so.
There are a pair of games where I regularly engage in their crafting systems, using storage when necessary without also endlessly accumulating resources. In these games, crafting rarely becomes tedious even without "quality of life" features such as bulk crafting.
These games are Paper Mario (N64, 2001) and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door (GC, 2004). What I have to say applies to both of these games.
Crafting is expressed through cooking. In either game, the player can ask a specific character to cook a meal using one of the items in their possession. Around the halfway point, the player may gain the ability to cook by combining two of their items. As RPGs, the results of crafting in the Paper Mario games lean towards healing items with a handful of possibilities for offense as well.
The simplicity of this system is remarkable, but it would not mean a thing if players still needed to wade through endless inventories to find what they needed. Paper Mario's mitigation against this is limited-size inventories; Mario can only hold 10 items, and the storage system available in shops has only 32 slots. As items are aquired naturally through gameplay, the player will pretty quickly find themselves carrying more than they can use. Like all inventory systems, the space limit creates a constant pressure to use items in order to conserve free space to pick up better ones. Where Paper Mario shines is that the total number of inventory slots available is enough for most players to easily keep track of without ever being overwhelmed.
Paper Mario's crafting system itself is also perfectly sized in the game's overall design. The game's difficulty is balanced so that the player is not expected to use cooked meals in order to win battles. A player can go through the entire game largely without needing to touch the system. For players that are less skilled at the game's battles, cooking can provide an advantage that can turn a difficult challenge into a surmountable one. The game thus becomes less about mastering attack timings and more about figuring out what to use and when. For skilled players, cooking can be the difference that allows them to easily coast through the game on a replay. In this context, the challenge goes from being whether the player can finish the game to one of how quickly the player can complete it. It is an excellent example of a crafting system that is entirely optional but still has a place in the overall game design without ever introducing unwarranted tedium into the process.
I could talk about the Paper Mario games for hours, but suffice to say that I think they provide a good counterexample against hate toward crafting systems. I don't however think that future games will learn from the successes of what came before. The likely outcome is a total backlash against crafting. Pokémon Winds and Pokémon Waves are a wildcard; As open-world games, they'll want something to keep players invested in the game world so dropping the crafting system would likely lead to some suitable replacement. The next Animal Crossing will probably drop crafting altogether or drastically overhaul it to solve many complaints made toward the system introduced by New Horizons.
Crafting systems can be good and even interesting, but too often grow to swallow the game they are meant to serve. A balance can be found, and previous examples have shown the way.
I really hope the Ocarina of Time remake doesn't introduce a crafting system.