Elden Ring’s Crafting System Feels A Bit Pointless
Did anyone else forget that Elden Ring had a crafting system? It’s explained to us in the early hours, labelled as a major mechanic that can be used to craft all manner of throwing weapons, healing items, and ammunition to help out in a scrap.
But I’ve hardly ever used it. Aside from crafting some items to summon friends or heal my poison and scarlet rot, it is one of the few systems in Elden Ring that could be removed, and I wouldn’t notice in the slightest. It feels complimentary to the experience as opposed to integral, helping out players pursuing a certain build or playstyle instead of being precisely baked into moment-to-moment gameplay. It feels like a bit of a missed opportunity.
Related: Before Elden Ring, There Was Eternal Ring
You can access the menu at any time, but after a handful of hours I had completely forgotten it even existed. I’m a loser, so I even crafted a bunch of random things in high volume in the hopes of bagging a hidden Trophy, but to no avail. So I embarked on my journey subsisting on healing items, armour, and weapons I found across the world instead of wasting time crafting my own. I even purchased all the recipe books I came across, hoping that maybe they’d inspire something in me to actually use the crafting system instead of ignoring it.
The thing is my apathy towards it wasn’t even deliberate - I straight up just forget it was there. This happened in Cyberpunk 2077 too. CD Projekt Red offered an incredibly robust weapon upgrade and crafting system that we were encouraged to use and experiment with. But the gunplay wasn’t challenging nor diverse enough to ever bother with it. You were always picking up new and more powerful weapons anyway, so taking time to curate a very specific
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