![]() ![]() They’ve taken their cue from the alchemists themselves who, to conceal knowledge from the unworthy, would encode their writings, and they have made their alchemy system a secret. Nolla Games, creators of the game Noita, have found a solution. With such vast power, how could there be any challenge? And if in a game you made a system where it always did, you’d have a major problem of balance. In reality, no matter how many people claimed they’d made the Philosopher’s Stone, alchemy just didn’t work. Alchemists of yore weren’t trying to grant themselves a 50% resistance to fire damage they were trying to shatter the fundamental laws of nature and find hidden truths about the universe. Isaac Newton believed he could use alchemy to prove that God was running the universe. Their ultimate goal, the Philosopher’s Stone, was a purifying force that would work on humanity as well as on metal, healing any sickness and creating gold. ![]() They sought powerful artefacts: named substances, like the universal solvent that could dissolve any matter. It’s a regular problem with video game alchemy: the results are ever so generic, and you can get by just fine without them. Merely raising your skills or boosting your damage, they are uninspiring, lifeless, and not even particularly powerful. The trouble is, while Skyrim’s alchemy process is more interesting, the potions themselves are not. Through the unorthodox method of scoffing down ingredients, you can discover their properties, then combine them to produce your own potions. Its implementation is better in some ways, allowing you to perform alchemical experiments. Alchemy in the Witcher, and in so many other games like it, isn’t magic – it’s a hard science, the formulae set in stone long before you even showed up. But though the game’s concoctions have interesting effects and evocative names, they’re fixed their recipes are always 100% accurate, with no room for experimentation, discovery or disaster. In the Witcher universe, potions are an important way for Geralt to augment his supernatural monster-slaying abilities. I don’t normally champion historical accuracy in fiction, but in my opinion video game alchemy would be more interesting if it looked to its roots. Instead of a powerful form of occult knowledge, it ends up, like most crafting mechanics, feeling just a bit dull. Sneaking in by way of the now-ubiquitous red health potion, it’s become the more fantastical counterpart to blacksmithing, a crafting mechanic in untold scores of RPGs.īut the thing is, video game alchemy usually feels like an afterthought, a sideshow to dabble in, nothing to write home about. Seeking to achieve perfection in all substances through chemical processes, alchemy captured the imagination, persisting for 2000 years before it was discarded as foolish superstition.Ī history buff with an affinity for the stranger parts of the past, I ought to be pretty pleased that alchemy has found a firm home in video games. And so alchemy was born: an unlikely combination of an ancient, mystical art with an experimental, almost scientific method. ![]() I'm not saying they should do that, but if they keep the randomness, they should 1) make it easier to obtain (but still somewhat difficult) and 2) tone down the Lively Concoction power (which also smells strongly of testing).A very, very long time ago, some Egyptian workers, skilled at making fake gold and silver, began to wonder if they might have it in them to produce the real thing. In order to get the recipe you need to travel to a specific location and purchase a specific book, or get lucky and find it somewhere in the world (most people buy it because by the time you find it chances are you've been hit with an infection or three). Caves of Qud actually has something just like this, where there's a cure for a commonly obtained fungal infection, and the recipe is randomized every game. Now, hopefully it doesn't stay stupid forever, but nobody can read the future. I dabble in coding a bit, and the current state of alchemy is far more indicative of "let's add thing and see if we can get it working" rather than "here's some secret mechanic that isn't going to change." Should I remind you that half the time the recipes involve something that's impossible to get (like soil or cement)? It's clearly just a rough and cut mechanic that hasn't been fleshed out.
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