Food in MMOs

Until the day comes where our brains are connected via cable to the VR games of the future, food in games will remain something you’ll just have to imagine as being tasty. Yes you’ll never get a lick of that three story extra chocolate cake you somehow scarfed down in 0.1 seconds. I wanted to write a piece on food in MMOs because I was hungry, but also because I figured it’d be something fun to think about, whilst also bringing light to a topic that’s largely skimmed over. What place does food have in MMOs on a design level? 

Typically food will be used for 1 of 2 purposes, restoring health or giving temporary buffs, or combination of both, or situational variations of all the above. Food’s counterpart, potions, can share the same uses of food, often sharing the same space but inverse effects (healing vs buffs).

-        In Runescape food and food can be eaten at any time and the effects are immediate, restoring health. Potions mainly give buffs or restore other stats, with 1 or 2 exceptions.

Warriors and Food go hand-in-hand.

-         In World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 potions can be consumed at any time and are primarily used for their instant healing during combat. There are also a few potions with long lasting buffs that are used in end-game content. Food on the other hand is always consumed out of combat, giving healing overtime as well as small buffs if consumed over a short period of time.

 

And then there are the weird cases where eating impacts character growth (which ironically is more realistic). In Haven and Hearth eating directly gives stats, how that makes any sense I don’t know but it’s a thing. Eating 20 pumpkin pies makes you strong apparently, without ever needing to do pushups. However, these odd cases are far and few between in MMORPGs, despite diet effecting growth being very RPG-ish.

There’s no single “correct” way of having food in MMOs, but I do believe there are “wrong” ways of having food. For one vertical progression that you’d typically see in theme park MMOs have food and their ingredients become outpaced and outperformed by the food and ingredients available at the end of the progression (end game). The result is having a majority of the food items becoming obsolete. You’d think there could be an argument made that lower level food is cheaper or easier to obtain, and while this is sometimes the case, it usually isn’t. This can be said for most crafting professions, but the act of obtaining the ingredients for low level items and high level items are virtually the same. In FF14 I remember struggling to find the ingredients to train my skills on the market, yet had no problem finding the items for end game crafting. This is terrible for the economy (and thus the game), as it gate keeps lower level players from participating. Runescape is better at handling power creep, (but not immune to it) by having more foods be situational, special properties and gimmicks compared to just being flat out better, as well as incorporating lower level ingredients in higher level cooking. For example the Tuna Potato consists of a potato, butter, corn, and a tuna, all being relatively low level to obtain, yet the recipe demanding a relatively high cooking level.

Meta in early game Haven
 is an easy to kill giant fish.

In Wurm Online I heard that pizzas are the meta because a little bit of everything can put on them. This reminds me a of Haven Hearth where the meta is cheese, because cheese is powerful. This is really a balance issue and the answers to them are on a case by case scenario. Encouraging people to eat a balanced diet can be very, very hard.  

In conclusion until we can come to meta-physically taste in-game food, food will not have much inherit value outside of what benefits they offer, be it healing, buffs, or stats. To circumvent content becoming obsolete, I recommend having different foods have different situational uses, as well as including ingredients from all tiers of levels into different recipes.