Hey,

What are your thoughts on consumables in a 3rd person rpg game (nowadays era)? It has semi-open maps and skills+attributes etc (not a dungeon crawler nor an rogue game).
I am really pondering if I should add them or not, and if so in what form. So far I am leaning to adding them but only scarcely for health and maybe some special stuff like drugs/medicines.
Any thoughts or ideas on this would be welcome!

I would add simple consumables, for example food that recovers part of your health or stamina

Tnx for sharing your thoughts.

I would add heavy drugs to have a reason to use strange post process shaders

Gothic II was an great example on how to deal with consumables and their side-effects. Trying different things has been fun to do, so definitely a yes

, haha, you mean this shader ?:


Screw it, I think I am going to add it

, that would be pretty fun indeed

perfect pp

When I saw the title ("consumables") ... I thought this thread was on Zorro

Health, mana (in a fantasy game) and that's about it for me. I tend to avoid using things with temporary effects. I love the idea of upgrading skills or equipment (permanently) even in little tiny increments.

, thanks for your opinion, it helps

I like the idea of consumables, just as long as you dont have to wrangle through menus to use the item. Many games make you pause the game, navigate to the restore item, use the item, then unpause the game. This always felt wrong to me. A quick button for healing/using a potion/using an elixer for some effect, but also one that hampers your movement or action, that would be pretty cool.

In general, for 3rd person action games, Id rather not be in the menus. The Last of Us on the playstation, let you look into your backpack for your items and consumables, but the world didnt pause. Using your first aid kit played an animation while the world and its enemies were still moving around.

Consumables that do things like permanently increase your strength by 1, dont really need to be handled in combat with a quick button, so you should be safe to make the player use these items within the menus.

, yeah agreed, that is why added a hotkeybar where you can link items etc to so you can press a key/number to use an item or activate an ability.

Health consumables can be very troublesome. In some RPG's you're not only trying to finger dance during combat to move, strike and switch weapons. You also have to try and trigger all those power-up and health potions.

I don't like button mashing the health potions more than the attack buttons. I hate the death by wrong button thing, you know when you miss the health hot-key and instead hit the one consumable that is totally pointless in your current fight. Then you smash the controller and blame it for the brain-finger misfire that was the real cause.

But much like has been pointed out it's not consumables that are issues. It's how the design integrates them. Overall I vote Hell-Yes on consumables.

Haha yeah using the wrong potion than being confused that nothing happens.
What helps for me is to the put the vital stuff at the edge (1/2 or 9/0) or specific easy to reach keys like q or f. On a controller you have less controls ofcourse which makes it a bit more difficult (atleast that is my experience).