Hunger and thirst

Hello people

I wonder if it would be possible to add hunger and thirst to the game, for players and their mounts.

Thank you

Find more posts tagged with

Staff

Comments

Parsalian

My first thought is "why?" Hunger and Thirst mechanics are staples of the 'survival' genre, which Ashes is not. If it were able to add something tangible for players then I guess maybe, but it's not really a part of MMO RPGs for a reason - it just doesn't serve a purpose. The driving force of survival games is...surviving. Having hunger and thirst in those games makes sense as it pushes the player to seek out ever-more-efficient means of procuring those items. That's not really a thing in Ashes (and personally I hope it never is). It just doesn't seem to me that it would have a place.

I'm curious as to why you would want it though. Since you're asking for it, what do you see in those mechanics that you think would benefit Ashes?

BaSkA_9x2

Big no. If you can choose to eat/drink to get temporary buffs, all good, but thankfully this is not a survival game.

daveywavey

No thanks. We're already full to the brim with ever-flowing Essence!

RottenStray

That's a hard no from me. I don't need my character to need to sleep, eat, or wipe his butt. Should we have a breathing mechanic for running or a shower mechanic for baths? XD

Bullvinne

Yeah big no. Food for buffs, yes! but if you could potentially get disabling effects or death because of not eating/drinking/etc. then no.

CroakerRPG

There should not be hunger and thirst like a survival game but, as others have said above, food should certainly buff stats over a duration.

Balance encounters around having food active. If the boons from eating are worthwhile, more often than not you will want to be fed. Food buff durations should be balanced to how easily one can acquire the food, and the stats given should be well worth the investment to obtain.

The Elder Scrolls Online did food alright. 4-6 hour food duration, stats buffed significantly, differed food types altered different stats at varying levels. Long durations were an issue though. A full stack of food would last you a month of constant gaming with no breaks and were relatively inexpensive to purchase.

Hatham

No, this ain't a survival game -> there are plenty of those already. We need new mmorpgs not survival games

SongRune

GetDatGreg wrote: »

There should not be hunger and thirst like a survival game but, as others have said above, food should certainly buff stats over a duration.

Balance encounters around having food active. If the boons from eating are worthwhile, more often than not you will want to be fed. Food buff durations should be balanced to how easily one can acquire the food, and the stats given should be well worth the investment to obtain.

The Elder Scrolls Online did food alright. 4-6 hour food duration, stats buffed significantly, differed food types altered different stats at varying levels. Long durations were an issue though. A full stack of food would last you a month of constant gaming with no breaks and were relatively inexpensive to purchase.

I feel like FFXI hit the sweet spot, with most foods being 30 minutes, with some shorter (3-5 minute candies) or longer (3 hours, but equivalently expensive to produce, and didn't stack in inventory). It was timed around the content in the game, more or less. Most of the time, you'd eat before a fight, and that food would last you the whole fight (or for particularly long fights, you'd just eat twice if you didn't want to use a longer food). This tuning also meant, though, that if you planned to run different content afterward, your food would usually wear off by the time you were ready for the next thing. (There was an 'Antacid' medicine, if you really wanted, for those rarer occasions where you wanted to get rid of your current food to eat a different one.)

The result of this system is that food had meaningful buffs and everyone would use it most of the time, certainly for anything hard, but it tended not to get in your way, either as annoying maintenance, or a hindrance to moving between types of content.

Ashes will have more to consider when tuning this, with getting food buffs, presumably at least the stronger or more customizable ones, from Taverns at fixed locations away from the battlefield, however, but it might be more so that that's where you get the fully custom, or longer lasting meals, and you get something more 'normal' (to me) from the food in your inventory. There's a lot of dynamism here wherein you choose your prepared food vs tavern meal based on the content you're doing now, the content you're doing after, whether you need something extra specific, and various other factors of cost, convenience, and inventory space. Intrepid has some good options here for making all sorts of food options meaningful.

CroakerRPG

SongRune wrote: »

Ashes will have more to consider when tuning this, with getting food buffs, presumably at least the stronger or more customizable ones, from Taverns at fixed locations away from the battlefield, however, but it might be more so that that's where you get the fully custom, or longer lasting meals, and you get something more 'normal' (to me) from the food in your inventory. There's a lot of dynamism here wherein you choose your prepared food vs tavern meal based on the content you're doing now, the content you're doing after, whether you need something extra specific, and various other factors of cost, convenience, and inventory space. Intrepid has some good options here for making all sorts of food options meaningful.

Honestly, full meals providing hours-long buffs - only available in safe locations, taverns and the like - and some kind of "trail food" for shorter, quick buffs while in the wilderness would be a really interesting way of simulating the rest mechanics from Steven's tabletop game this MMO is based off of.

DeadDuckling

could be a fun idea for a single quest. Kind of like Eventide Island in BotW. Stranded on an island and you have to find food and water while gathering resources for a raft

maybe a little too brutal for main game

Warth

come on boys. That account was less than an hour old when he wrote that.
Dont pay attention to the troll, or they will just keep coming back.

PapaWhiskey

That is a great idea! At least for the folks that want to be in a Tavern drinking ... !! Sounds like fun times! Lets see .. if Taverns being the center of the community will have games (quests) and challenges (eating or drinking .. or ... who knows ).
I assume there will be zones where the level of danger and risk is so that you would be graciously thanking the Devs for not deploying thirst and hunger into the mix ...

Food and drinks for buffs and hopefully to remove debuffs sounds good. We just gotta wait and see what the Devs come up with.

tautau

Food and drink will give buffs, and taverns will be a hot thing.

But the survival mechanics, I will join the 'No' voice.

CROW3

Ashes isn't that type of survival game.

Savic Prosperity

i can see a minigame around the idea but probably not in the game at large cause then you have to balance everything around it

renadedante

I would have to say absolutely not. This is an MMO not a survival game. While it may have some similiar elements, there is already enough going on.

Vaknar

Parsalian wrote: »

My first thought is "why?" Hunger and Thirst mechanics are staples of the 'survival' genre, which Ashes is not. If it were able to add something tangible for players then I guess maybe, but it's not really a part of MMO RPGs for a reason - it just doesn't serve a purpose. The driving force of survival games is...surviving. Having hunger and thirst in those games makes sense as it pushes the player to seek out ever-more-efficient means of procuring those items. That's not really a thing in Ashes (and personally I hope it never is). It just doesn't seem to me that it would have a place.

I'm curious as to why you would want it though. Since you're asking for it, what do you see in those mechanics that you think would benefit Ashes?

Fantastic comment and great follow-up question ^_^

Strevi

Parsalian wrote: »

I'm curious as to why you would want it though. Since you're asking for it, what do you see in those mechanics that you think would benefit Ashes?

Bias by my own wishes.
I want to play a survival game soon.
Same bias makes other players to say they want more PvP instead of PvE. But by the time the game is released, they might like PvE more. Opinions change based on what we want.

Parsalian wrote: »

Hunger and Thirst mechanics are staples of the 'survival' genre, which Ashes is not. If it were able to add something tangible for players then I guess maybe, but it's not really a part of MMO RPGs for a reason - it just doesn't serve a purpose.

It is indeed not part of MMO RPGs.
In games where you have to eat and drink, you typically hunt, fish, take care of animals, you have seasons, rain, snow, plant crops and even crop rotation.
But I saw that somebody might try something new
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1172710/Dune_Awakening/
Maybe will not have hunger and thirst but has the mmo and survival words in the description.

Parsalian wrote: »

My first thought is "why?" Hunger and Thirst mechanics are staples of the 'survival' genre, which Ashes is not

What is Ashes?
Doing quest after quest after quest?

Parsalian

Strevi wrote: »

Bias by my own wishes.
I want to play a survival game soon.
Same bias makes other players to say they want more PvP instead of PvE. But by the time the game is released, they might like PvE more. Opinions change based on what we want.

That's fair, but it's not quite accurate I think. Or at least it's not quite what I was asking. The desire to play survival is definitely understandable, but that's a genre of its own. Hunger and thirst exist as pieces of the mechanical challenge in those games as CORE functionality. In a non-survival game, I don't see how they fit. I'm not saying they can't, but my question was more posed to see if you had some idea of how exactly you imaged that they would play out.

As most other commenters mentioned, food does exist in MMO RPGS as an alternate buffing mechanism (nothing new), but not in a survival or necessity capacity. And like others mentioned, it could be tied to a quest or quest-line in which you do need to manage hunger and thirst, but over the lifetime of the game I can only see it being a net negative and tedious for most players.

It is indeed not part of MMO RPGs.
In games where you have to eat and drink, you typically hunt, fish, take care of animals, you have seasons, rain, snow, plant crops and even crop rotation.
But I saw that somebody might try something new
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1172710/Dune_Awakening/
Maybe will not have hunger and thirst but has the mmo and survival words in the description.

I think this is a miscommunication on what "MMO" really means in the context of the game. MMO really just means there's a 'larger than normally expected' number of players on a single server, but doesn't actually describe the game in any way, so having both keywords "MMO" and "survival" tagged doesn't really mean there's overlap in game play. It's possible that Dune will end up being more like Rust or Conan: Exiles but with FAR more players per server than either.

What is Ashes?
Doing quest after quest after quest?

Ashes is an RPG. It's a genre based purely around character growth. The entire core concept of an RPG is to see a nobody or a weakling transformed after overcoming a multitude of obstacles into something akin to a hero (or a god in some games). The expectation isn't that you worry about the day-to-day life of that hero, it's that you play on a larger scale. The story could see you through years of game time. Survival games count each day/night cycle most of the time. Different creatures attack during different hours of that cycle. Weather and plants impact you on a scale that's much more minute. These things could happen in an RPG, but the scale is more macro than micro. Being attacked by wolves during a night phase in an RPG doesn't usually result in you having to give up on loot in favor of staying alive, it just means the flavor of monster you fight is wolf instead of boar (as an example).

Since you mention "quest after quest" I feel I should point out that just because that's how games within the MMO RPG genre have historically done things doesn't mean it has to be done that way. I'm not saying that it will be any different in Ashes (obviously there's going to be a lot of questing), but it should be noted that a genre doesn't define how a game actually plays, only the style of game (or the focus of the content, if you will).

Dolyem

Child Item