So i get right to point. What do you think about activities (woodcutting tanning leather, smithing, harvesting crops...)
Do you think that if you have a mushroom and water you can make a soup or do you have to eat a mushroom and drink water?
Here is an intresting interview from a german magazine. In the end of http://www.gameswelt.tv/19748/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/video-interview-mit-todd-howard.html
at around 8 minutes Todd starts to talk about activities, he mentions that in some activities a menu pops up (but there are no minigames) for example in cooking, the menu
shows your raw meat, incredients and cooked meat and lets you cook raw meat. So do you think that you'll be able to mix fish with bread to make a fish sandwitch?

Discuss

I don't really think that they will go into "activities" that deeply, but it is a interesting idea.

Did you watch the interview? He said so (roughly) there.

Well crafting is one of the things I really can't wait to see more of. I'm not sure how in depth it will be, but I think the skill based crafting (smithing, enchanting, alchemy) will be pretty robust. The other stuff like cooking, farming, woodcutting, mining, leather work will probably be simple fun diversions.

I would love it if it was possible to go that deeply into detail with activities like cooking, it would certainly be more fun eating if you can create your own meals with ingredients gathered out in the wilderness.

I'm all for extensive crafting, farming, cooking, etc., as long as they're not mandatory to progress through the story, etc. They're not for everyone but are nice little additions to have in an open-world RPG.

As far as I understood the 'activities' the Cooking will have menus to choose raw meat to cook yes,

But the wood cutting, crafting and mining, were just animations that the Player character would perform and then you would auto gather/make items etc, there is no 'mini game' as such (Like Fable)

I think that, if I want to do mundane things, I can do them in real life. Killing flying dragons, now, that I can't do in real life...
As said before, as long as it is not mandatory to do so, I couldn't care less...

I played a game last year, Risen, that had all of that stuff: cooking, woodcutting, etc... about the only "activity" I found interesting/useful, is that you could go to a smith and use a large whetstone to sharpen swords, and it gave your sword a damage bonus. The other 'activities", meh...

What is the aversion to minigames based on? Time consumption?
I think minigames would add to depth of immersion. Ingredient A + Ingredient B in a menu just seems.... really lame & fake. This is my arguement against hardcoe mode as a means of immersion- you don't really do anything but pop items instantly in a menu. Very much a half-baked concept.