Harvestable Item Visual Queues

One thing I hated more than anything else about gathering in BDO was that some trees were choppable, and some weren't, and there was no logic to it. You had to run up to each of one of many nearly identical trees in a zone. "Is this one choppable? No. How about the identical tree next to it. Yes!"

There's no value to actively thwarting a player's intuition on this front. At the same time, allowing every tree in the world (even of a given type) to be chopped is insane and unworkable from a resource scarcity perspective. The sparkles on gatherables is a compromise for this. They tell you nothing about the potential quality of any drop, but they allow the devs to control scarcity as appropriate without causing that frustration.

I don't care how you solve it, but don't tell me "Yeah, only one of these three identical trees in this field can be harvested. Good luck!"

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To be clear: This is exactly what BDO has, and exactly what I'm complaining about. You can tell it's harvestable when you run up next to it and the "Gather" button appears (or doesn't). But which 10 of the hundred trees in this field should I run up to next?

"Good luck!"

SongRune wrote: »

One thing I hated more than anything else about gathering in BDO was that some trees were choppable, and some weren't, and there was no logic to it. You had to run up to each of one of many nearly identical trees in a zone. "Is this one choppable? No. How about the identical tree next to it. Yes!"

There's no value to actively thwarting a player's intuition on this front. At the same time, allowing every tree in the world (even of a given type) to be chopped is insane and unworkable from a resource scarcity perspective. The sparkles on gatherables is a compromise for this. They tell you nothing about the potential quality of any drop, but they allow the devs to control scarcity as appropriate without causing that frustration.

I don't care how you solve it, but don't tell me "Yeah, only one of these three identical trees in this field can be harvested. Good luck!"

Yep, I was just about to write pretty much exactly this. I do hope they manage to keep their current design direction of "not everything is gatherable" while having some good indicators of what is (considering the "no sparkles" quote from the video).

We have not received permission from Strevi to share the quoted post.

How would that work with inventory space/weight management during gathering sessions though? Do you just throw it on the ground? How often would you have to do that while gathering? Sounds kinda tedious to me, especially if there's 100 trees around and only 5-10 of them are worth anything while every other tree is "yet another bunch of wood that I gotta pull out of my inventory or click on it and then on "delete"".

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It's not immersive or realistic. There's no way you don't normally know when you go to chop a tree if it's at least useful for lumber or not. Sure you hit a dud sometimes, but if you have any idea what you're looking at you have way more hits than misses.

I personally still somewhat dislike it as a gameplay mechanic, even if it technically solves the problem. "Okay, okay, fine. I won't make you guess which tree in this field you can chop. Now you can chop all of them! But still only 10 of them are real. Good luck!"

The only thing that changed is instead of me getting to see before I chop whether the tree is harvestable, I have to spend the time and durability to chop it, to find out if the tree was "real".

I don't want to play slots to find out if the tree in front of me can be cut into at least basic quality lumber. I almost prefer the "90% of trees don't cut" option. At least it's honest about what it is.

A better solution might be to have trees of varying size and age, in the world. Rather than letting you cut down random trees, there's a certain size you can chop. Huge trees would be too much work for a person to cut down. Tiny saplings won't give enough wood to matter. This would give you a visual cue that all trees of a certain "age" (probably "larger saplings, starting to become proper trees") are choppable. The devs can simply adjust how many "sapling" vs "young adult" (choppable) vs "mature" or "elder" trees are in an environment. You don't need sparklies, but woodcutters have a clear concept of which trees they can usually hit, and devs can adjust the resource density of an area in a reasonable and natural manner.

I can't necessarily say how this translates to other types of gathering. Bushes and thickets might work for herbs. There's usually ways to show mineral veins in rocks. I think it would work for trees, though.