The best crafting system is the one that's practically non-existent.
Beyond that, it's one that just uses alternate currencies to buy things from vendors and calls it crafting.
The worst crafting systems are those that require ingredient mixing/combination experimentation, where "harvesting resources" is a task itself (rather than, say, combat drops). And the icing on the shitty crafting system cake are those that require time rather rather than just happening (some games having all three great time-wasters of "place ingredients" [whether with physics in the main game, or just filling slots in a menu], "crafting takes time" [long animation of it happening or, worse, progress bar, or worse-worse, interaction required], and "crafting results are presented as a reward" [showing a post completion animation, fanfare, or complex confirmation]. Many games also take a "one at a time" approach to make it even worse. And, oy vey, then some games make your RESULT random (whether quality, or chance of success, or even what you get) so you have to repeat it even more. *spits defensively*
"Crafting systems" are one of the things that have really made games worse when they're present, and I hope they've finished running their course and will start going away from games. MMOs and TES games are largely to blame for this (or at least the ones I noticed having crap before it tainted other games), and these games do it precisely because it's padding to make the game feel like there's something there.
Example rubbish games:
Awful crafting is another reason on the pile of reasons why Breath of the Wild is a terrible game (and why I continue to refer to it without "Zelda in the title; because it's not Zelda.) It does pretty much everything wrong regarding crafting (and really everything in the game overall outside crafting too).
Crafting made late game Dragon Quest Heroes (both 1 and 2) a bore and made me just speed up ending the game. Ingredients were rare and hard to come by, with little to no control over getting them. While you could just pick what you wanted from a menu, there was an obnoxious animation and sound while it happened, and then it would do a spoils/rewards gained after.
Graveyard Keeper is a fine game, even pleasant, until you reach the points of needing to interact with its alchemy. It's practically impossible to progress that crap even following a guide, without it becoming a full-time job replacement. ingredient placement ✔, takes time ✔, random experimentation ✔, multiple layers of refining ✔, ingredients hard to come by with low control over them ✔. I really want to play more of and progress the game, but every time I've tried, I've gotten stuck when I had to start working with that bullshit.
I hated everything I've seen about crafting in WoW (I briefly tried it on a private server to see how it worked, see if the lore was worth it [it wasn't]), the Final Fantasy MMOs, and others. They often go way overboard on the materials acquisition as a task itself route, and usually have obscene amounts of time required for crafting.
Some counter-examples that come to mind while making this post:
Horizon Zero Dawn. Menu-based, common shared ingredients that you can target-farm, no waiting or animations or confirmation. It's just alternate currency. The main reason for it is to encourage you to fight more than a couple Thunderjaws or Stormbirds. It kind of broke with the northern area expansion with the powders stuff, but they did it to encourage exploration rather than combat up there. It could probably be streamlined a bit, but it's already pretty tight.
Guild Wars. I mean, most everything about this game was done right (except for the forcing it to be an MMO part, which later devolved into microtx). There are a limited number of crafting ingredients reused regularly, and the game even gives you special storage for them. Gear in the game quickly tops out and the crafting is just cosmetic appearances. And even with that, it's vendors exchanging target-farmable items for what you want. There are a few too many materials in the game, and a couple of them were used more than others and/or were harder to acquire than others, but that was part of them forcing it to MMO economy to use traders.
Stardew Valley. Pick from a menu. Happens instantaneously. Can bulk-craft. Most recipes use common ingredients. Everything is target-acquirable with considerable control over getting it. Recipes are learned automatically and common rewards acquired from the rest of the game's systems. One could argue the whole game is a crafting ingredient acquisition system, but it works here. It could be improved with a better UI/organization of the crafting menu though, of course.
And here's an example middle of the road game:
The crafting system in Grim Dawn is mostly good. Pick from a vendor menu, using mostly-commonly-available ingredients. Get blueprints as you progress in the game and as random loot drops to unlock new recipes. No time taken, or rewards animations. Where it falls apart: Dependency trees. Some items require other items, so you're often back and forth checking the original item, then making its components, and back, and sometimes those components use other components that you already crafted so you have to go back and make more of those. And, of course, the typical "some ingredients are bottlenecks". Chthonic Seals of Binding is the big one for me much of the time, but a few others (Ugdenblooms, etc) are always in short-supply. And they're theoretically target farmable to a degree, they're really hard to come by in quantities that you need. Even aether crystals (which the game also uses for its respecing) run low once you really get into it. You seem to have giant stacks of them and a neverending supply for the longest time, and the you run out. You can easily target farm them, but they get consumed so quickly and by everything (they're practically this game's "Gold 2.0") that you'll run out once you reach late game with more than a couple characters.
Fishing:
And while "fishing minigames" predate crafting systems generally, we cannot deny how tightly they are often intertwined. And, really, F fishing minigames.
EDIT: I think Ghost of Tsushima fit into the "OK" category. I have to think back to it more though.
Post edited November 24, 2021 by mqstout