Ight, Imma Head Out
Hi, I have not really played for long here, but I don’t really feel comfortable playing anymore. Regarding that one issue regarding the hatchling dragon drinking thing, I appreciate the community’s attempts to try and sway me over into accepting it, but the method of doing so was lacking. Admittedly my own reservations were lacking in body, so I’m going to roll up my goodbye and my thoughts on the matter into one, since one is the reason for the other.
The hatchlings have a voice that heavily suggests they are prepubescent or physically immature compared to the adult form, alongside the underdeveloped wings, neck, tail, and large head which suggests a lack of physical maturity for one. Another is that there is nothing in the lore that supports reasoning for them to drink that young.
One of your developers cited a map showing a minimum age for alcohol use across the world. While I appreciate what they were trying to say, it felt like it was taken out of context and therefore missing crucial information regarding the execution of those drinking laws.
I looked into the places that did have younger drinking ages, mostly the 18-19 range since those are the most common and likely who would look at your game if you manage to find a way to advertise to a larger audience. 18-19 counts as being an adult in the majority of those places, the keyword being adult in that they are mature enough mind and body to handle the responsibility of alcohol, they likely are out of high school, pay taxes, able to live without a parent or guardian, and capable of holding down a 40 hour work week if they wish to. In a number of places cited on the map, while beer is fine for 18, they must be 21 for spirits. I also looked at the countries that allowed drinking at 16-17, while I cannot speak for some places, I know from reading the source of the map that had been provided that in most developed places that allow this the minor must be in the presence of a parent or guardian while drinking- this means they are not adults and are not responsible or mature enough to have alcohol on their own. Let us also consider that many of these are also on premise purchase age, meaning they are from a location that does have a liquor license - this could count for your game’s taverns given the need for permits for certain vendors on player property.
Let us also not forget that in most cases when it concerns minors and alcohol with a parent letting them drink, usually the parent is not letting them slug down an entire bottle of fireball or vodka. As well, any spiritual or religious ceremonies requiring alcohol usually only ask for one sip from a ceremonial vessel, not to drain the entire bottle of holy wine in one go.
From an outside perspective, it looks like a coding mistake- especially after I had looked into the archives of this forum to try and research into this and found that alcohol and taverns were added by request from the playerbase after launch which suggests that maybe there had been no alcohol in game at launch because it may have looked suspect to have a character that looks and sounds a lot a young child being able to purchase booze and drink. While it is fine to experiment and explore, companies usually want to appeal to as many as possible for the sake of sales if they’re intentionally trying to bring their game to an international level, from what I can tell from you developer’s plans to move the engine to unreal or unity, along with steam support, I assume this is also your intent.
Maybe in 2004 this was fine since there were no adult dragons implemented yet, as I know that hatchlings were initially the only form of dragons in game, but after 15 years I would have thought if you all wanted to keep that in maybe there would have been something added in-game (not the headcanon vomit I saw in the discord, actual canon) to have it make sense. I would also address how the hatchlings being allowed to gamble in the aftermath of EA’s stint with loot boxes in child games would likely go if you managed to get the game on steam, but that is besides the point and I figure the outcome of that would be obvious if a larger audience took notice given current events and would derail what I am saying.
For an example of this done right, I have one game to offer. There is one game that managed to pull this kind of mechanic off without feeling like complete skeeve. Dwarf Fortress, an independent title, and the reasoning for alcohol being a staple of diet from birth to death being that it was part of dwarven culture and it is important to their overall happiness and productivity though they can survive on water cited here: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Thirst
The dwarves are also classified as an alcohol dependent race according to lore.
I know some have also said people don’t like politics in their games, and while that is true, by having a playable child character able to drink alcohol, you kind of walked into it anyway.
Games, so long as they take things from life and that game interacts with other cultures, will start making statements that seem political whether you intend them to or not. The Dragons and Sslik not having genders, for instance, can be seen as political regarding transgender rights and gender identity, there are other recent games that have the option to choose a gender other than male or female and they sparked plenty of online debates. I could also get into how Blizzard has two versions of WoW in order to appeal to both US market and to the Chinese market in removing visible bones and gore from their undead models on the chinese version of the game as those things are considered a taboo in their culture.
While it may pain some of you to hear, often respecting the mores of other cultures does win you a lot of perks including maybe, just maybe, additional income.
Some may also wish to bring up that technically it is wrong for child characters to go gallivanting off on adventures on their own and wonder why I’m not creeped out by that. To that I wish to cite the canon of Pokemon, ten year olds can run around on adventures and have literal pit fights between powerful creatures - but they also are not draining every bottle of sake they find. There are also other types of media that feature minors fighting evil and facing some real disturbing things which can be readily found in mainstream media; the Goosebumps TV show, Mystery Shack, and Steven Universe to a degree - child alcoholism however cannot be readily found outside educational PSA videos and probably for good reason. It is an issue people would prefer to stamp out than promote.
So long and you all have fun with whatever you’ve got going here, I’m going find something else to put my money towards.
