Post by SongRune on 2022-08-31 17:12:52
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I feel like FFXI hit the sweet spot, with most foods being 30 minutes, with some shorter (3-5 minute candies) or longer (3 hours, but equivalently expensive to produce, and didn't stack in inventory). It was timed around the content in the game, more or less. Most of the time, you'd eat before a fight, and that food would last you the whole fight (or for particularly long fights, you'd just eat twice if you didn't want to use a longer food). This tuning also meant, though, that if you planned to run different content afterward, your food would usually wear off by the time you were ready for the next thing. (There was an 'Antacid' medicine, if you really wanted, for those rarer occasions where you wanted to get rid of your current food to eat a different one.)
The result of this system is that food had meaningful buffs and everyone would use it most of the time, certainly for anything hard, but it tended not to get in your way, either as annoying maintenance, or a hindrance to moving between types of content.
Ashes will have more to consider when tuning this, with getting food buffs, presumably at least the stronger or more customizable ones, from Taverns at fixed locations away from the battlefield, however, but it might be more so that that's where you get the fully custom, or longer lasting meals, and you get something more 'normal' (to me) from the food in your inventory. There's a lot of dynamism here wherein you choose your prepared food vs tavern meal based on the content you're doing now, the content you're doing after, whether you need something extra specific, and various other factors of cost, convenience, and inventory space. Intrepid has some good options here for making all sorts of food options meaningful.