Alchemy (Potions) in Video Games

Ouch me also known as potion making also known as potion crafting also known as brewing also known as annoying ship taking up space in my inventory What a disaster And so obviously i’m not a fan nor have i ever been a fan but the other day i was playing skyrim and i looked up at the alchemy skill tree and thought what kind of sick [ __ ] actually puts points into this i’ve always found to be

Boring or tedious but i wanted to see what other people thought i set up a few polls and seeing how this is my first time providing my own data i should mention i’m not professional these polls and charts most likely have tons of logical and ethical layers i’m going to fly by

Any level of professional data collection i’m hardly even adult let alone an analytical genius and no one should ever take me seriously ever okay with out of the way let’s look at what i found out i took two polls one of which i’ll pretty much just be ignoring completely

Because i asked the rpg board which in hindsight i should have obviously seen coming that they would be biased towards enjoying it so my second sample was scrap.tf a place i frequent often and since they’re generally just a group of gamers i like to think the sample was less

Biased plus it also got like way more actual votes so you know there’s that so the one with the least votes here is being frustrated with alchemy and that totally makes sense because usually even if you don’t enjoy alchemy having it adding depth to whatever game you’re playing isn’t

Really a bad thing but at the same time if you’re a casual gamer who wants to get potions but it doesn’t feel like looking up tons of guides i can totally see how testing ingredients for in extreme cases hours to get some dumb potion of [ __ ] sucking

Or something stupid like that can be very very frustrating the other three are a lot more even than i thought lots of people just can’t try not to [ __ ] with alchemy at all or at least usually because they’re not familiar with the world’s ingredients and either don’t care for the potions themselves or

Just don’t care to put in the effort to learn it all with maybe the occasional super common potions like health of men and whatever and uh yeah this is what i thought would be most popular because like this guy said being invested enough in the game to find the 999 different

Herbs you need to be efficient at alchemy is uh uncommon to say the least but it turns out more people actually enjoy alchemy than i thought like way more i honestly thought that most people just wouldn’t [ __ ] with potions at all but it turns out it’s almost the complete

Opposite which is super cool because it means that the extra layer of depth that these devs are putting into their games aren’t going unnoticed i do really hope that the people meant they actually like alchemy and not just the presence of alchemy in their game otherwise this whole poll is null

So uh these polls got me to thinking if it’s true that potion making and herb gathering is fun and i’ve tried it it can be fun why do i usually just not bother so at this point i was really invested in this stupid game mechanic that

Decided i would make a video about it by this point this whole venture was fueled by game or curiosity but now it was in way too deep this was after i started my alchemy only run in skyrim by the way anyway i thought for a while about why i

Don’t typically care about alchemy and i’ve come up with a few reasons the first reason is a pretty obvious critique with the alchemy and games in general and we’re all probably thinking it so i’m just gonna say it consistency consistency alchemy is made up potions don’t exist in the real world

Well unless you count the witch doctor ryan over there with his vials of uh questionable substances so that means every game has different ingredients often completely contradictory ones too it’s unbelievably inconsistent and is someone who doesn’t limit themselves to any one game taking the annoying amount of time to search up how

All the 469 herbs combine with each other to make different [ __ ] and then having to fight knowledge from other games to learn this new one just isn’t worth it for me another thing that has to do with consistency is a lack of clarity as to how these potions are crafted in the first

Place some games like skyrim try and solve this with a taste test ability and you know this was a great attempt i intentionally tried not looking up guides when i tried testing an alchemy run and it works okay but that’s an exception usually i’m forced to look up guys which

When you think about it kind of sucks uh anyway the second reason alchemy games is a bother is clutter it’s cluttering my [ __ ] inventory this leads me to often deleting ingredients and because i don’t like to memorize the recipes for potions i often find myself on expeditions to find one ingredient

For some super niche thing i’m up to what’s this you didn’t know you needed the butt plug plant for a [ __ ] burger eating potion so you deleted your stack of 64 half an hour ago tough [ __ ] This can all be fixed if i care to do my homework on the games i play but that’s the whole point this whole video is basically me saying i want devs to make half their potions easy for filthy casuals like me then another half more complicated for the die-hards of their stupid game

So uh lots of people mention noida and by lots i only mean like a few people whatever i remembered noida as that game with the spider legs and how it used potion alchemy way back but i had no idea of its extent so many potions can be made but what’s

So much better is that the ingredients are the potions themselves it’s like mixing color this is genius because the resulting potion makes intuitive sense when you’re making it and it removes that grinding for a [ __ ] trolls penis juice aspect of alchemy in most games Genshin also probably has some new alchemy stuff i i don’t know it’s an anime game i’m sorry i’m not doing my [ __ ] research on it go do your own research skyrim yes yes baby oh yeah like i said earlier you can try ingredients to test their effects and build your own little

Catalog of sorts with the ingredients skyrim was able to make trial and error fun what experimentation is rewarded with neat potions unlike other alchemy systems where the only reward you get is wasting your [ __ ] time over looking up a guide the ingredients also don’t clutter my inventory because

They’re all based on weight and not slots which is a way better way of using inventory in general like why does this map take up the same amount of space as 64 [ __ ] blocks of pure solid diamond what back to skyrim skyrim’s alchemy tree lets you upgrade how potent your potions are

This is something i wish i knew about before going on this little alchemy venture because it gives some real incentive to make your own potions i’ll still admit that grinding for the items is boring but that’s just kind of something i’ve accepted at this point with most alchemy systems

So uh whatever uh well actually i do have another problem i know i just i just never shut up i don’t like consumables and rpgs in general i could be fighting the final [ __ ] boss of the game but i’m so frugal with my potions i’ll save them

I keep being told it’s overpowered by these rpg gamers but to me just makes me feel pathetic having to rely on potions i don’t know i just want to feel like a badass without a potion of jesus that only lasts for four minutes and then i’m a cockroach from a developer perspective

Consumables are great since they are a great way of making the entire game feel more dynamic it’s great for the player of your game to carry abilities that would they all be on your player constantly would make the game more flat and less fun so why am i like

This it’s come to the point where i find a rare potion instead of thinking oh wow this is cool i think the [ __ ] this is going to take up space in my inventory forever because i’m so bad at analyzing optimal moments for consumption i’ll just never use it in fear of

Voicing it and that’s stupid i always feel weaker when i use a potion i lost inability i won’t get back i can never tell if it was a requirement for me to use that potion if i just wasted it that feeling is the main reason i don’t

Care about potions and the ironic thing is that this could mostly be fixed if i just learned alchemy since then i would have an abundance of potions and i don’t because i don’t like consumables because i don’t know how the alchemy of any specific game i’m playing works

It’s just complete checkmate where i either miss out on an interesting depth of most rpg games or i spent the best years of my life studying fictional ingredients for all the games i play in my mind alchemy is the last thing a player masters in a game and since it’s

Usually overpowered that kind of makes sense and if you think of it that way maybe it’s a good thing that every game is inconsistent with one another on what ingredients there are and what they do every game is unique and special and you know what [ __ ] clutter 1965