How does the alcohol work?

Recently we’ve teased you with random notes about one of the systems we’re incorporating in the game and we thought you might like to know more about it.

So what were we working on that day? As most of you guessed, it was an alcohol system. We want to approach all these things a bit differently than in most games, so we studied how it works in real life and then transferred it into the game with only a few simplifications.

That means we’ve introduced several basic mechanisms. When you will drink any alcoholic beverage, you will naturally raise the level of alcohol in your blood. It won’t be any artificial number as it will be counted in a familiar way, in promile. The effect will not be instantaneous, it will take about 1 hour to reach the peak level of alcohol in your blood.

At the same time, another two processes will start. First, the body will begin to break down the alcohol, so you will be slowly sobering - you will need about 7 hours per promile. Second, dehydration kicks in. From each drink, you will get as much water as you drank, but minus the alcohol content. So if you drank half a liter of 40% vodka, you will only get 0,3 liters of water in your system. And you will dehydrate a lot more, as alcohol has that effect. Depending on the percentage, it might be 1.3 to even 5.3 times the amount of what you drank. That might sound harsh, however you won’t drink a liter of 80% moonshine. And if you do, dehydration will be the least of your problems :)

The current curve in the game is looking like on the picture below and it’s precisely calculated for the respective percentage of alcohol content rather than in steps. The process of dehydration also takes time, you will be dehydrating until your body breaks down all of the alcohol in your blood.

And why should you drink alcohol in the first place, when it has these negative effects? There will be several reasons, actually. Alcohol will be helpful with some of the illnesses and it will even increase your health a bit. Then there will be the social aspect. You will be able to succeed in some conversations better if you will be in “just the right mood” :). And besides, some of the more peculiar characters might not even talk to you if you will be sober. Do you see other cool uses for alcohol in game mechanics? Let us know in the forums!

What you will see in the game will be most probably very different in terms of durations, as it would be very uncomfortable to play couple of in-game hours when everything is swaying around in blurry double vision. You can imagine how difficult it would be to play with something like that from the gif above.

We hope that the you will like this and other mechanics made in the same spirit. Let us know what you think in the discussion. As with everything, we will be closely following your feedback and try to adjust it so it’s the most fun possible.