Items, Crafting, and Loot Systems

With my arrival at SIE Bend Studio, item-related systems quickly became one of the first things that I gravitated towards. Our intention was always to reach this balance of a world where one could thrive in, but it would do everything it could to knock you down. Items, inevitably, became crucial to that vision with bandages, molotov cocktails, scrap, enhanced melee weapons and much more being a staple of the Days Gone experience. Each of these items were gathered in different ways, as well: be they sold from a merchant, dropped from an enemy, picked up from the ground, or crafted from materials on hand; I have a hand in everything the player touches.

Items
Two major factors contributed to my design for items: the gritty realism of a world already picked clean and the need to MacGuyver your way through it. This led to a system where you didn’t explicitly need one item for a crafting recipe but, rather, something that could work. This was done by items having, and crafting recipes needing items with, tags. I will discuss this further below, under Crafting.

Continuing the theme of realism, item placement was a major priority for us. I led a small group of the Open World Team that handled populating these items across the world by hand. We did this with a variety of tools that I had developed including a master set of rules and a tool called the Item Grabber (described here). Items were placed with attention to detail and devotion realism in addition to game balance and player need.

The rules included simple things like what regions could have what items, what kind of areas within these regions they could be placed in, how densely populated areas should be, what exceptions there were to these rules, etc.. A notable exception, for instance, included enemy camps which might have already claimed important nearby items, signifying their presence and giving an incentive to take them on. This method, while time consuming, allowed us to meticulously place objects in ways that they might be found in this reality and help sell the idea of a living world.

After my, and others’, departure from Days Gone, items were dramatically simplified as the studio simply didn’t have the man-power to maintain them at the necessary scale. However, many of the items remain in a state that feels very natural.

Crafting
A key component of crafting in Days Gone was the danger inherent in doing so. Because it took place in real-time, the player was at risk of being swiped by Freakers or flanked by humans during these crucial periods. This heavily encouraged players to prepare for encounters in advance, but it also heavily inspired by Tag System mentioned above.

For instance, a bandage can be crafted with a rag, but what is a rag? In the final product, a rag is an item called a rag. With my design, however, we could satisfy these with a number of items (like a hand towel, an old shirt, etc.) that would all condense into “rag” and we could place more realistically than any singular item.

Despite the simplification of items, my system and design can still be seen in the game with the craftable attractor that requires an alarm or a car alarm using my Noise Maker tag.

Loot Systems
Looting from enemies, given the sparse nature of items in our world, was critical; for a time, it was intended to be the only renewable source of items. Despite items respawning over time in the final product, two of my loot systems are still active.

The first was the Need Based Loot System that was as simple as it was subtle. In Days Gone, there is an unseen counter that tics every time the player loots something. This number represented the last time the player was “helped” by our invisible hand and, as it rose, the percentage that this system would trigger would increase. When it did, the player’s inventory would be looked at for what we considered to be the “big 3” items types: Scrap, Healing Items, Flammable Liquid (now specifically Kerosene). Whichever the player was lacking most, based on our weighted calculations, would then drop guaranteed. This went a long way as we could still sell our unforgiving world with a lessened risk of players being frustrated by a constant lack of that certain something. As well, Instead of feeling as though they were receiving a handout, players would instead feel that sense of glee at that “lucky drop.”

The other was a Rarity Based Loot System that gave players the chance to get that “lucky drop” more consistently. I developed this system after being dissatisfied with constantly receiving the same amount of an item whenever that item dropped.

With this system, each individual item had a base rarity and a rarity for the number that would drop when chosen. The graphic to the left, while simplified, illustrates how it works. First, the item’s rarity is rolled and a random item of that rarity is chosen. After that is selected, the drop itself has its own rarity to determine how many of that item is dropped.

By doing this, even looting something as common as Scrap can feel rewarding and things as rare as Kerosene can feel even more incredible.

Using this method of item, item rarity, and quantities at drop rarity, manipulating loot tables also became far easier to implement and maintain. When previously creating a loot table that included scrap, for instance, we had to add several different permutations with different quantities and drop rates of the same item. Because of this, making sweeping changes meant going into every loot table and change every mention of said item. With this method, however, it was as simple as adding “Scrap” to the loot table and altering “Scrap” across the board could be done in a single location rather than dozens.

This reduced the time it took to iterate from upwards of an hour down to a few minutes while also having the benefit of drastically reducing the likelihood that something would be missed or entered in error.