Full Meals (thoughts on a different way to do food)

One of the things that's always bothered me about cooking and food systems in games is that all the attention is given to making the preparation of the food deep and interesting, and almost none is given to making the eating of actual meals fun or interesting. You might cook up a beef wellington, but all food, no matter how elaborate, is eaten the way you'd munch on Doritos or an energy bar.

This is one of the things I've enjoyed about Monster Hunter since I started playing it. Meals aren't a time-limited buff. Instead, they're a buff you get when your character sits down and puts together an order based on different ingredients, and rather than having to watch a timer, the limiting factor is the end of your hunting session. You apply the buff (eat a meal) before going out to hunt, and the buff goes away when you return to town.

I'm not suggesting that Nightingale should have a completely identical system, but I think the overall idea has merit for the Victorian setting in particular, as it encourages thinking of food in the way one would think of eating an actual meal.

Here are my thoughts:

1. Some food recipes are 'meals'. These could standalone recipes unto themselves, or could be multi-part preparations consisting of several individual foods.

2. Meals aren't a one-off consumable that's used from your inventory. They are placeable objects with a 3d model that need to be placed on an eating surface. They are subject to traits, the same as crafting benches or beds. Like beds, they have a comfort score (or something with a different name that serves the same purpose) that's affected by various things. And like benches, there could be augments that add specific effects. A player eats a meal by interacting with the placed meal object. The meal object is consumed and the player receives a buff, the effects of which depend on the ingredients of the meal. That buff goes away when the player sleeps.

3. You - and by extension the players - could get really creative with the effects of traits and augments on a meal.

* A 'rustic' augmentation provided by rougher additions like a simple table as an eating surface, simple chairs or stools to sit on, a simple stub of candle on the table, proximity to a campfire, etc.

* An 'elegance' augmentation that could come from things like a nicer table, fancy candlesticks, a decorative centerpiece, proximity to a fireplace, the meal being located beneath a chandelier, etc. If these augmentations were cleverly designed, it could encourage (but not force) players to set up meals in themed ways. With enough creativity, this could encourage players to design entire dining areas meant to maximize the positive effects of a meal. You know... like we often do in real life. :)

* Traits added to a meal based on environmental conditions. Something specific to having a picnic under the stars (hint: picnic blankets as one a table of 'table', and picnic baskets as augments), or having hot cocoa or coffee indoors while it's raining out, or even effects that just have to do with whether it's day or night.

4. When the meal is interacted with, show some sort of animation or interesting visual feedback, and have a small amount of actual time pass before the buff is applied. This needn't be long. Just enough to give us the impression that our characters sat down and ate a meal.

Of course, it would be a pain to have to manually place meals every time we eat one, and the fun should be in designing meals and the places to have them in, not in having to set the table every single time. So, it'd be nice if there were a way to quick-place a pre-configured table setting, food and candles and all. Set the table for a particular meal once, save the setup, and be able to place it in one go. Once meals are eaten, they could be filled-in again in the future like a blueprint, or by interacting with the table.

5. The current food system could also be layered on top of this, if we still want quick, consumable food buffs. This is also something Monster Hunter does. Out in the field, you can roast up a snack to get a smaller. time-limited buff layered on top of your regular meal buff.

6. This is sort of a separate idea, but I feel like getting rid of the hunger bar would have almost no negatives, for much the same reason as getting rid of the rest bar. If so much of my character's build is dependent on having active food buffs and being rested, lacking all those massive benefits is close enough to the idea of 'starving' to make it something that I really don't want to happen. I don't think much is gained, at least in Nightingale's case, by having me drop dead because my bar ran out. I know it's sort of a survival game staple, but a number of very well known survival games have dispensed with it and suffered no ill effects. Look at Valheim.

Overall, I think a system like this has a lot of benefits:

1. It retains the fun part of the food system - creativity in putting together customizable food buffs - while eliminating frustrating parts that are of dubious merit anyway, ie: more timers to watch, having to constantly re-apply the same buffs every few minutes, etc. This system makes it so that, instead of having to re-apply buffs over and over, we only have to engage with eating when we want to actively change the buffs we're using, or when we rest.

2. It could passively increase immersion by encouraging behavior similar to RL behavior revolving around meals and food. The vibe of a meal, as much as the meal itself, affect our well-being and state of mind IRL. This sytem would provide an in-game reflection of that while also encouraging additional fun reasons to use the building and decorating systems in new and different ways.

3. They fit the Victorian - and English in particular - Vibe by making not just the preparation, but also the serving and eating of actual meals a central mechanic. Imagine having an actual, beneficial gameplay REASON to prepare and eat an afternoon tea in a Victorian-themed game.

In short: It cuts out many of the fiddly, irritating things about food like timers and constant re-application, and adds some fun ones revolving around creativity, theme, and immersion. It could also, if you chose to keep a version of the current food system layered one top of this one, provide a solid reason that certain foods are actually themed as trail food. Imagine tack and cured meat actually being useful for what they're supposed to be useful for! :)

And last, but maybe most important, it gives Nightingale an additional way to stand out. It's another small thing people could point to and say, "This is unique. I don't see any other survival games doing things this way."