Seasons, Survival Mechanics, Your Thoughts

ArchivedUser

So I’m clueless as to whether or not Ashes has survival mechanics and the extent of those mechanics if they exist. Or if players would enjoy seeing survival mechanics.

Seasons

I understand there are seasons, but are the seasons purely cosmetic or do they offer some sort of different gameplay throughout the month?

Survival

In the event that the seasons aren’t simply cosmetic then there’s obvious implications behind each season.

Temperature

Could temperature play a role? Does it matter whether it’s summertime or whether it’s Winter? Does my character move about the same way regardless of the season and does the world offer different conditions that could affect gameplay itself?

Food

Does growing and gathering food change during the seasons? Does food even play a big enough role to our gameplay mechanics that it needs other systems surrounding itself? Such as decay? 

When winter comes Would there be a food shortage? Will the towns have to stockpile enough resources to last the week? Will crops not grow at winter and perhaps will players have to rely on hunting or fishing? Would hunting or fishing be a viable source for food, and the biggest question for food is still if food even has a relative enough impact on the player to even bother with any of this. 

I read up on the other thread about decay and I thought, well before we even talk about how food functions we have to discuss seasons because seasons should obviously have a large dependence on whether or not food needs to decay or not. Or how food and how it fits in the game overall.

Incentive

There’s are two ways games go about implementing food, or survival mechanics.

Either survival is imperative, the debuffs to the player are significant, so that every player playing the game adjusts their gameplay to meet whatever the developers deem satisfactory, to meet a baseline where they can perform at their normal level that they would any other season.

Or two, the effects of seasons, temperatures exc. affect the player in close to no way, players could play the game without touching these systems and the buffs provided by the systems are negligible. 

Take Skyrim for example. What if the only benefit you had to gain from sleeping was just the well rested buff. Even though sleep is essential in our world, and isn’t in the game, the buff provided is negligible and most players could go without even doing so (excluding all other reasons to rest).

So I’ll just ask, what’s your view and wishes for this game or games in general to implement, or what you’ve heard about these topics.

ArchivedUser

Seasons will have an impact on different mechanics in the game confirmed. Not just cosmetic. There will not be survival aspects to the game such as required food/sleep consumption. Resting/logging in certain areas will confer buffs. Food/drink consumption will have varied effects and buffs. Certain terrain modifiers will affect freehold production statistics. Was mentioned in a livestream that placing your freehold near a river might give a boost to farming, while near the mountains a boost to mining related stuff. We have no confirmation of how much of an impact seasons will have on combat abilities. Pure speculation/wishlisting at this point by many. Things like stronger ice spells in winter have not been confirmed.

ArchivedUser

I believe all of the above are in the game.
I dont think its a hard survival game though.
More for the flavour.
A softcore version if you will where adapting will be less penalising and more rewarding..