i thought drinking them svcked and was imbalenced in all games- BAM I HAVE HEALTH CAUSE I PAUSED THE GAME!!!!

perhaps you could drink potions via selecting them. then your charecter drinks the potion (sort of like how the guys in bioshock give themselves eve hypos) and this should take a second. this would mean that you cant suddenly gain lots of health in the middle of swordplay but it would allow you to prepare for a big fight.

I guess, but I would find it annoying after a while.

I think that would be good as long as it was fairly quick. Or at least make it you have to wait one or 2 seconds between consuming potions.

I would like this. Always thought it was a bit strange, at least in Oblivion you couldn't just keep drinking potions all the time, but it was still weird that you just consumed them like poof! I am also in general wondering how inventory will work. Maybe they have done it in the same way as conversation so time does not freeze anymore. :whistling:

I agree.

You should only be able to drink one potion at a time, and you'd need to wait for the drinking animation to finish before you can drink another. Also if you're being beaten then the drinking could be interrupted, and the potion could drop to ground and break.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1167524-potion-animation/

this is a time where game mechanic vs realism must come into play your idea of immersion and reality must give way to a mechanic that makes the game more enjoyable for the majority to play, while yes this may be more "immersive" (a word throw around these parts more often than Reagan at a GOP meeting) and realistic a mechanic like this could detract from the flow of combat and significantly change the way the combat equation flows. every game has a combat structure in a game like halo its called the golden triangle (grenades, guns and melee) in the elder scrolls its more magic, archery and melee but all of these are somewhat supported by the idea of instantaneous potion use. Game play and enjoyment before random immersion factors my friend every day

Well thats nice idea for hardcoe mod or see how NPC will do it in combat, but for default vanila game better to use oblivion style with limited number of drinkable potions at one time, thats number can be changed with alchemy skill level or via perks.

I guess it makes sense. I played other games where the drinking had an animation and I don't remember losing a fight because of that. It simply adds to immersion, for me at least. I'd also like that every potion I make requires an empty vial or a vial of water.

Drinking potion animation IS a game mechanic. It's a way to make sure potion spam isn't THAT effective at making any fight trivial provided you got a good backpack.

10000% agree, alchemy was too OP and the game was basically reduced to a potion spam fest

and the pause in the middle of battle really killed the immersion .

I always loved in NWN how potions worked, it actually sometimes made me think "I better try to get this spell of rather than heal first", the restriction can force you to play in a different way.

This one time on my druid I had 1 potion left and a heal, and I was fighting a dracolich with low HP, when I saw it preparing a spell, I quickly noticed the nature of the spell and realized it was not a damaging one and instead of chugging the potion I threw my last healing spell on the dracolich, WHAM the spell that would have healed me to full HP made it through the defensive spells of the dracolich and blasted it towards its death, the dracolich got off his spell though and it was a fear, and it also made it on me. So at the end of the battle I was running around feared with low HP, with the dracolich dead, and I realized that if I had tried to "play it safe" and chug the potion before casting the heal on the dracolich, then I would have died since that dracolich could easily have taken me down while feared even with full HP.