a more consistent way of feeding your characters

[Vorad]

I really enjoy this game even after many and many hours and playthroughs, the devs have done a wonderful job to give us back some of those really wonderful moments of Baldur's Gate and infinity engine. There is one thing however that bogs me really and that is the "mechanical" way food/drinking is implemented.

 

Although we can use potions and scrolls in quiqckbars for fast access and rightly so because you only use these items when the timing is right and you need to have several 4-6 option, food on the other hand is supposed to be a more "long term" buff so we don't need to waste our quickbars on that. However if we compare it to resting which is just a single click away... keeping your entire party well fed is a bit of a "tedious" task. Usually one has to feed each character at least 4 different meals + 1 drink now multiply that by 6 repeat after the buffs are gone and then you begin to notice the cumbersome and tedious pattern.

 

I don't know how easy it would be to implement now a different approach to feeding the party but an idea that crossed my mind was the following(which I suspect could be implemented in a similar way to the durgan steel enchantment). So I was wondering what if there could be introduced a new item lets call it "dinning tent" for the sake of it. Therefore it presumes that after you have cooked, your party will raise a "dining tent" so they can all feast together.

 

You could have a functionality similar to the enchant option for this new item and instead of enchantment materials(durgan steel) it would require cooking materials. Therefore you can now load your desired meals into it and "enchant" craft as many of these as you'd like. When you feel like feeding your party you could use the "dining tent" exactly in the same fashion that one uses the skill scrolls which cover through aoe your entire group however instead of a +3 mechanics you would get the bonuses you "enchanted" the tent with.

 

To push this idea even further perhaps there wouldn't be a need to implement a new item to begin with, perhaps just through the cooking panel one could add more functionality, more recipes that would require pre-cooked meals, to prepare even bigger/better meals. For example one could add a new recipe lets just call it "banquet" for now, which would require 6 x [chicken, sweetpie, caserole, farmers spread, ale ] + coin etc and after you craft this "banquet" from the already existing mechanism you would get a consumable item that could have an aoe of say 4m and some duration relevant to the meals you included.

 

Or perhaps we could mix the two ideas and come up with another item "cooking pane" in which we could mix ingredients of our choosing and it would produce meals depending on those ingredients their quality etc without any hard prescript-ed meals, a random factor could be included as well for some interesting results...

 

Therefore with a single click you can feed your entire party without actually having to click them one by one multiple times for every meal/drink.

 

Thank you for the great work guys and thank you for the attention!