The crafting system in SWTOR has some interesting choices. I’m not sure how I feel about it overall.

Crafting is accomplished by what are called Crew Skills. There are 3 categories: crafting skills, gathering skills, and mission skills. Crafting skills do what you expect: these are the ones that make items. Gathering skills allow you to gather resources out in the world, but also allow you to send your companions off on assignments to gather types of materials. Mission skills arelike gathering skills without the gathering part: you send your companions out on missions where they bring back certain types of materials. These are usually your rare components for the higher quality crafted items.

The first thing you’ll notice about this system is that everything is done through your companions. Your character doesn’t do any of this (with the exception of gathering materials in the wild; you have the ability to do so although it defaults to your companion). And all of this takes time; time which your companion will not be at your side. This has the benefit of letting you craft or sending them on missions while you are questing, at least if you can handle the area by yourself. On the other hand, this adds a constant distraction as you have to micromanage your companion every few minutes. You can queue up to 5 items to be crafted, but can’t queue any of the missions. I would much rather allow some long term (up to 20-30 min) queueing so you can focus on what you’re doing instead of clicking windows every few minutes.

The categories themselves are a little odd: you have 6 crafting skills (Synthweaving for Jedi armor, Artifice for weapon mods, Armsman for weapons, Armortech for non-force armor, Biochem for stims and medpacks, and Cybertech as a sorta-engineering skill), but only 4 gathering and mission skills. On top of that, only 3 of the 4 gathering skills directly tie to a crafting skill. Slicing is seperate from the rest; it gets you recipes for the crafting skills and augments, items that go into a bonus slot on critical crafting successes. Also, Bioanalysis only aids Biochem, and Archaeology gets you force-related items, so Scavenging ends up feeding a lot of crafting skills. The mission skills are fairly straghtfoward; you can usually choose from 2 types of rare materials or some companion gifts/random treasure. Diplomacy is the exception as it lets your gain light side or dark side points in addition to materials.

Another component of the crafting system is the ability to reverse engineer your crafted goods. Generally, you are given a green quality recipe from the trainer. You can reverse engineer the items you make with that recipe to unlock a higher quality version (blue, then purple). There are two different types of reverse engineering: consumables just increase in quality with the purple teir being an item that has unlimited uses, where the equipment gains stats as your go up in quality. This, quite frankly, sucks for those making equipment. When you RE a green quality item, you have a chance of unlocking 3 different blue quality versions. Worse, when you use those rare materials that only come from missions to make the blue quality items and RE those, you are confronted with FIVE different purple versions for each blue. So each green recipe can eventually unlock FIFTEEN blue and purple quality versions; that’s a crazy amount of materials if you’re a completionist. In some ways it’s worse if you only want a certain set of stats as you’re at the whims of the RNG for not only the chance to learn one of these variations, but which variation you get. It’s entirely possible to unlock the four purple items you didn’t want!

You can also get a critical success, which opens an augment slot on the equipment for an extra enhancement. This combined with the reverse engineering system means bad things for the crafting economy. In Final Fantasy 11, you could get a crit success for +1 on a crafting item; these ended up being the only way to profit from your tradeskill. A similiar thing will happen in SWTOR where only the purple tier of items will sell, and only those with the augment slot will fetch a profit. I believe this will hit Biochem and the consumables market first; since the purple tier also has the benefit of unlimited uses for consumables.

All in all, the crafting system adds a couple of layers to the standard “grind till you reach the skill cap” model. While they seem like good choices for short term enjoyment/fun factor, I believe they will have detrimental effects on the long term and on the ability to generate a profit.