Greetings, glorious adventurers! If you're joining in our Alpha One spot testing, please follow the steps here to see all the latest test info on our forums and Discord!
Options
Food and drink - What level of impact should it have?
McMackMuck
Member
Intrepid want Food and Drink to be a component of the game.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Food_and_drink
I'm keen to see a valid business case for food and drink based businesses (Taverns, etc.) in Ashes as I believe it could add a vibrant dimension to the game if implemented well.
To what extent do you think food and drink should impact the game?
If you didn't eat and drink recently how disadvantaged should you be when compared to an equivalent character who has had 1) common food or 2) legendary food?
What should be affected? Movement speed? attack ability? resistances? hp reduction? other?
and what level of reduction? 10% 20% etc.? or some descriptive guidance for the devs?
Intrepid talk about buffs for the consumer, is this just "positive spin" semantics if the non-consumer is effectively de-buffed in comparison?
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Food_and_drink
I'm keen to see a valid business case for food and drink based businesses (Taverns, etc.) in Ashes as I believe it could add a vibrant dimension to the game if implemented well.
To what extent do you think food and drink should impact the game?
If you didn't eat and drink recently how disadvantaged should you be when compared to an equivalent character who has had 1) common food or 2) legendary food?
What should be affected? Movement speed? attack ability? resistances? hp reduction? other?
and what level of reduction? 10% 20% etc.? or some descriptive guidance for the devs?
Intrepid talk about buffs for the consumer, is this just "positive spin" semantics if the non-consumer is effectively de-buffed in comparison?
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
3
Comments
The effects themselves shouldn't be the focus really because those can be changed on a fucking notepad... That'd be the lazy route. It'd be much harder to implement or adjust the mechanics and the system's depth. I think that's what the discussion should be about.
I have no idea what discussion has taken place prior to this, but I can imagine there are some hardcore tavern-only players wetting in their dream thinking about this system, so I bet there's plenty that has taken place. That said, there's probably nothing new I can add to this beyond expressing my concern with keeping the thought train on track.
The post was essentially about making food regional, and letting food spoil over time. Then there would be a couple different ways to preserve your food, with preservation lowering the food buffs, and having fresh food give you better buffs.
What I would personally like to see with food, is having to see an actual chef to get something like a 5 hour food buff from, that way players will have to interact and go to taverns or wherever a chef sets up shop. Just more interaction with players.
Yeah I agree with this, I like the idea of having food and drink in-game. I'm especially behind the idea/concept of allowing players to find and craft new foods perhaps even possibly creating new recipes with new results, however if it goes down the route of dehydration and hunger that goes too much down the survival route imo.
As discussed before, too much beer, wine or spirits would decrease your abilities and perhaps make your screen go blurry.
The point isn't for you to manage everything. The point is for the community to manage everything. Everyone needs to rely on everyone for a piece of the puzzle. And really we're clicking buttons on a screen how is that remotely like real work in the kitchen
Same can be said about taming, building ships, gathering herbs, cutting down trees, mining, making armor/weapons, fishing, and the list goes on. Why bother with all that when we could work on combat and environment. Actually, scrap the environment - why bother when we could have a little arena for combat and call it a day? No1 likes to move around like they do in real life anyway.
What will be the point of fishing if there's no foods (that give buffs) to make out of the produce? Same with gathering herbs and all the rest of the mechanics aside from combat... what's the point in all that. And then we need to remove the trading system altogether because now we have nothing to trade. And what's the point of nodes now? No resources to fight over. Everything's available in 1 node (as in nothing at all because there is nothing apart from combat to begin with), there's absolutely 0 point going anywhere else now. The game dies because there will be nothing to do... Game turns into something worse than Rust, a totally mindless PvP hub... in that little arena. make it instanced, too, saves production costs further. A creative mode with a button to spawn in mobs in the arena. That should do it. And those skins you bought? Hah... .jpg files to store on your desktop.
Obviously I took it apart too much, but I'd like to think it gets the point across that much more effectively.
The way I see it, "food and stuff" is one of the core mechanics. You might be thinking too small. We might be getting an actual MMORPG for once.
1. "taming, building ships, gathering herbs, cutting down trees, mining, making armor/weapons, fishing, and the list goes on." All the things we dont do in real life or for fishing, not everyone does it in real life. Its a game, I dont wanna do the same things I could do in real life on screen, even if it just clicking buttons. I could have played farmville or whatever the name of that game is then.
2. I dint say that food, their buffs and stuff shouldn't be there at all. My comment was regarding the maintenance and degradation wrt to time aspect of it. Why does it have to be so complex?
3. One guy proposed introducing dust and cleaning and maintenance of your freehold, housing, gear, etc as way of furthering the immersion. Do you really wanna do a maids job in the game too? Then why stop there and introduce janitoring as a job as well. My point is where does it stop?
AoC isnt an RPG exclusively. RPG is just an aspect whereas PvX is main focus of the game.
The cons of these things:
- Further needless complexity is introduced in the game.
- Every player would have to bother with these regardless of if they are interested in the RPG aspect or not if min-max is associated with maintenance.
- It will just worsen the learning curve of the game which is going to already be quite complex with how indepth the "important" professions are going to be and the dynamic nature of the world.
- All these needless features would end up delaying the release of the game by years if things like these keep getting inserted.
Seems like I misunderstood you after all. My bad.
Nah, yeah, the problem of taking things too far I can agree with. Though when it comes to the farmville analogy, given how popular it is, I can quite see some1 wanting to tend to a farm on their freehold... That'd be a worthwhile option, necessary even, though I myself would hate to be forced to do it. It would need alternative options to choose from, whatever they might be.
Not sure if that adds any game play novelty since most players just want to stock up on foods and drinks before heading out, like a hundred of this and hundred of that - good to go.
I would like to think that in terms of buffs, a chef could offer combat and non-combat perks. I.e. movement speed, gathering buffs, reduced agro radius, life skill proficiency boost - plenty of options.
From a player's perspective, you'd have the choice of investing your resources on this, or something else it's just another outlet. But I think there does need to be a vertical element of progression to it i,e, it can make you stronger at something.
I always think of the vastness of the Guild Wars 2 in terms of the sheer quantity of recipes and detail that went into it. That is definitely a game I would be aspiring towards with my cooking I think the way they have done it would have some positive aspects to it.
I never considered that angle, I agree it'd definitely prevent certain scenarios if food didn't last indefinitely.
Damn... I don't like the idea either.
Now we need to add the decay mechanic to everything else as well for the sake of immersion and conformity or else it'd be out of place artificial gimmick serving an out of place game mechanic. How would you explain the decay mechanic on one thing but not the other?
Compromise would be a to make that timer super long, like weeks and months. It could be explained by the use of magic, for example.
Compromise of canned goods being lower maximum attainable "buff" perhaps in exchange for the longevity? And of course you might save "time" or even money overall going for this alternative route.
Also why not just tins, can go with smoking, salting and pickling!
Perhaps mounts, too? Give them a 10-year life, that ought to be adequate, though in years 8 & 9 they slow down.
I'm in favour of food decay. But this is also a great idea. Like the poster said above. Give the fresh stuff a slightly higher buff. The canned one slightly less.
For those that are pushing for every competitive edge I'm sure they would be interested in even a single 1% increase in a combat or movement related stat prior to a formal PvX event.
For more casual / less competitive players I'd like to think Food and Drink won't be a mandatory RL time and in game gold/resources sink.
Within the wiki:
"Ashes of Creation is not a survival game. Characters will not need to eat food to stay alive."
Source: Livestream May 2017
Suggestion:
The legendary food/drink with the best buffs spoil within a day or two.
The poor food/drink with a minimal buff (i.e. trail rations) take ages to spoil, if ever.
Obviously the ingredient costs (and/or difficulty to obtain) can be scaled to the quality/quantity of buff and food shelf life.
Then players can decide how much effort or gold they want to contribute to be buffed via this mechanism.
I hope that there will be a selection of different duration shelf life food and drink options so that players can decide which ones are worth the effort (or gold cost) for them, including not engaging with the mechanic at all.
More like an optional advantage that either time crafting or gold can be spent on. Even better if it's a service that other players can provide. That'll be fun. Like the party has a meal at a tavern before heading out on a quest.
Well to be a devil's advocate. Why should you NOT suffer as much for not buying from the best chef in node as: 'not using a mount to travel a to b', 'not using crafted armor from the best blacksmith in node', 'not using the best weapon from the best weapon smith in node' Can you fight/travel without any of these things? Yes. Can you fight/travel WELL? Erm maybe, but you really should be contributing to your local economy and make your gameplay experience smoother. It's just leaving gold per second on the table at some point.
Food is nice because it gives some freedom of difficulty manipulation both more and less. But you should definitely be decently more efficient at getting things done when you are fed than someone who is not fed with the same gear and build.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yhr9WpjaDzw
Food should also have distinctly different buffs over potions etc so there isnt much overlap. Food should prob last 4-8 hours so they represent the character being nourished for a particular task or adventuring session. But duration will depend on how it feels to travel to taverns back and forth and that whole dynamic.
All these terms are subjective though but i think i managed to convey my general idea.