It's really encouraging to hear I am not the only one who thinks so. It's kind of my dream to build a game with that sort of depth someday.
For now, I'm trying to solve subsets of the problem in a more limited scope by creating a crafting/building game that understands real-world material proprieties.
The upshot of this approach is that the player can experiment with crafting say, a bow, out of any of the materials they have on hand. Some may work better than others, based on the properties of the material. I'm hoping this approach enables more player creativity because it's much more flexible.
I suspect though, that it will prove to be tremendously difficult to balance the game as there will always be edge cases where very overpowered items can exist, but maybe that's half the fun.
/r/outside was like this, then some asshole discovered that ramming together two heavy elements really hard was massively OP and ruined the game for everyone.
For now, I'm trying to solve subsets of the problem in a more limited scope by creating a crafting/building game that understands real-world material proprieties.
The upshot of this approach is that the player can experiment with crafting say, a bow, out of any of the materials they have on hand. Some may work better than others, based on the properties of the material. I'm hoping this approach enables more player creativity because it's much more flexible.
I suspect though, that it will prove to be tremendously difficult to balance the game as there will always be edge cases where very overpowered items can exist, but maybe that's half the fun.