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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Hunger and thirst
Strevi
Member
Hello people
I wonder if it would be possible to add hunger and thirst to the game, for players and their mounts.
Thank you
I wonder if it would be possible to add hunger and thirst to the game, for players and their mounts.
Thank you
September 12. 2022: Being naked can also be used to bring a skilled artisan to different freeholds... Don't summon family!
1
Comments
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?
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 want to play a fun game
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.
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.
I want to play a fun game
maybe a little too brutal for main game
Dont pay attention to the troll, or they will just keep coming back.
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.
But the survival mechanics, I will join the 'No' voice.
Come check us out!
Fantastic comment and great follow-up question ^_^
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.
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.
What is Ashes?
Doing quest after quest after quest?
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.
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.
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).
If I wanted to do that, I'd play a survival genre like 'Ark'.
Ok, I give up on the hunger and thirst idea.
If the raw food: fish, crops, milk, eggs... are meant to prepare buffing food and potions, to be used before and during combat... then how about a buff effect which has long duration and builds up over 4 seasons?
For example if you are a thief and you want to increase your agility, you would use naturally more often such kind of buffing dishes. Those could give an additional buff of up to 10% by the end of the year if you consumed products made from fresh raw materials.
The short time buffs would be the same, only the long term buffs would be different.
That means, gatherers or intermediate traders would have to chose if they build up a reserve to last a few years or if they ship them with caravans right away to places where dishes are prepared.
Another possible variation could be that these long lasting effects to start appearing after a season.
Then the player would not be able to determine right away the freshness of the buffing food.
This way, some players will stay as loyal customers because they trust the chef who prepares those dishes.
Imo that "trust" relationship would a nice thing to happen.
What do you think about this game mechanic?
This is an interesting concept, but leaves one major problem I can see which is effectively making new players in the future unable to ever actually catch up to veteran players (buffs have been built up over years that are only attainable via the same time investment). This is alleviated by some potential catch-up mechanics later but might be off-putting for prospective new players or upsetting for vets that spent time, effort, and currency building those stats.
That said, I do like the concept of having foo be more impactful than just a temp and short-term buff. Especially with the concept of player-run taverns being prominent in the game. It would be cool if there was some macro level mechanic that was applied that had some longer lasting effect. What exactly that would be I think can't be speculated on without knowing more about game systems but I like where that idea leads.
Could become only 5% of max player health next year if the player consumes dishes made from old grains or smoked fish...
That means the new players or returning players would catch up in a few seasons if they have the right suppliers.
Ahh I see what you mean. Yea I mean that's potentially an interesting concept. I don't know how it could be implemented but I definitely think the idea of food in mmo rpgs has been rather lacking for a long time so something to change their purpose or provide additional mechanics would be cool.
This!
It pushes for players to seek the minimum required. lol. Unless one grows ever hungrier, ever thirstier, ever all-consuming.
Which works well enough in Ashes of Creation; being beaten to near-death and committing genocide works up quite an appetite. Fighters especially may need tens of pounds of food to restore health, dispel exhaustion and go back to fighting with a bit of a pep.
Without food players may regenerate health and mana extremely slow and suffer exhaustion for decreased damage and less defense. They may even die!
Rangers could serve a critical role of Hunting. Animals may sprint away and escape without the advantages the Ranger class brings. Other classes may buy player hunted and gathered food; or have to figure it out on their own.
Mages may need to consume specific resources to quickly regain mana rather than slowly regenerate over a long long time, which means traversing dangerous lands, meditating, hiring a bodyguard, grouping out of mutual benefit to get 'mana crystals' or whatever, and buying overpriced items from the market.
Point being that resource consumption is how shit works.
It makes perfect sense to have it in an "immersive world" and fantasy game.
Not everyone wants to play the Fighter class and spam click their number keys for arbitrary progression numbers [XP] and ignore everything else.
Some people want to provide resources to the 80 IQ Fighters that are protecting areas and raiding others. That's just how it is.