Design Philosophy
As discussed in previous blog posts, we’ve looked at Professions in a number of different ways, trying to find a balance between a passive system and a more involved one. With Magical Cuisine, we wanted to lean more into the chaos of attempting to run a kitchen -this allowed us to create a much more involved system, one where you have to balance between a ton of different stations and really dig in to learn each recipe.Without further ado, let’s jump into how our new Magical Cuisine system works.Your Kitchen
You’ll find that your kitchen is now filled with a variety of stations, all of which create very specific items used for the Magical Cuisine Profession. These stations include things like the Cutting Board, Stovetop, Oven, and more. In each recipe, you may need to perform certain tasks on the base ingredients in order to progress. For example, you may need to get chopped lettuce by going to the Cutting Board and chopping it up. While the knife magically levitates to chop up your apples, you may move over to the Oven to put in a pie crust to bake. Once you have both done, you’ll want to head over to the Counter Top to put it all together to make an apple pie, which you can then use while fighting mobs, or give to certain NPCs! But how will you know how to make a certain recipe? The finest culinary minds across the isles have been hard at work devising a system to display the steps you’ll need. Introducing the Culinary Codex! Culinary Codex
As you can see above, the Culinary Codex provides important information in regards to how to make each item, including the intermediate steps and items needed. You can easily click with a simple wave of your hand to flip between the pages, making reading recipes in the kitchen easier than ever before. You’ll be able to pick whichever recipe you’d like to follow, and display that as you work - It’s as easy as pie! (Maybe even easier!)Food
Finished items will be used in a variety of ways - you’ll want to use them to gain long-term buffs for fighting, especially for Dungeons & Gauntlets, but you’ll also want to use food in other ways, too. NPCs may request food items through the Living World Initiative, or even for a quest. Who knows what other rewards lie behind you mastering the kitchen! That’s it for now! We’re having a lot of fun designing the playtest, and we can’t wait to show it off soon!