As always, I say no to this sort of thing. This is a game, it's about entertainment, not about simulating real life, so if a certain feature isn't entertaining, it has no reason to exist in a game. Now, sometimes, occassionally, players will ask for a bit more realism in games, but there needs to be some limit, because a completely realistic gameplay experience would simply not be entertaining, but in that case, where do we draw the line? "Fun" sounds like a good place. Would adding the need to eat be fun? No, I say it would not be, aside from the Sims, I have never, NEVER once in my life been entertained by needing to find food for my character in a video game before, even though I've played games with this requirement, I once even installed a "basic needs" type mod for Morrowind, it wasn't necessarily a game ruining feature, because it's not like you need to constantly eat, but it's still a feature that I'd rather not have, and the only reason I was fine with it in the Sims is because that's pretty much the point of those games, without micromanaging the lives of fictional entities, there would be nothing to the games.

If Bethesda MUST add this, then they should make it optional, like how Obsidian is making "hardcoe mode" optional in Fallout: New Vegas, that way, at least those who don't want it can turn it off, though personally, I'd say even programming the feature into the game so it can be enabled as an option would simply be a waste of time, but hey, it's better than being forced to eat and drink whether I want to or not, and it's the only way both crowds can be satisfied.



That's just one more reason why having the need to eat in games is pointless, it doesn't add any sort of meaningful challenge since, as you said, in a game like the Elder Scrolls, food is hardly difficult to come by. Yet while it doesn't add meaningful challenge to do the game, it does add additional frustration, and does it add extra fun? I would say no, so why should a game have a feature that is neither fun or challenging but is frustrating? The answer is that it shouldn't.



Those eating scenes were also not exactly the most interesting scenes in the story, I could argue, and when they were interesting it wasn't because it was interesting to read about the character's eat, it was because they actually served to further the story somehow, in other words, they served to contribute to the experience, now in a video game, on the other hand, unless simulating real life is the entire point of the game eating adds NOTHING to the experience and should NOT be necessary.



I disagree, on both accounts. Needing to eat is in no way fun and just the need existing would be invasive in its own right, I get enough of that in real life, there's no need to have it in a game too.



There's also the fact that once you start putting in the need to eat and drink, the only thing separating it from needing to find a toilet regularly is just how far into the realm of realism you want to go.

I Don't think Seti did this, he gave his opinion on 'needs' subject in realism.

I did exaggerate, but some of that stuff was mentioned in the New Vegas part of these forums(bathroom especially). All I'm saying is too much realism gets annoying in a game, and yes, I have been playing RPGs for as long as I can remember. We have the option to eat and sleep already, and they are there for those who want to use those things as role-playing devices. I grab a bite to eat and get some sleep when I can in Oblivion, but to have it be a requirement and to have Bethesda force me to do what I already do sounds unpleasant. I don't need a game mechanic to force me to stop at that inn on the road to take a break from my exploring(in Oblivion, at least, there are inns along Oblivion's roads, but I haven't seen any in Morrowind). I don't need the game to force me to gather around the table with my fellow Knights of the Nine to share a meal and tales of the day. I just do those things and I thank Bethesda for allowing me to do those things, but not forcing me to. My other point is that making all these forceful, optional mechanics takes away from the rest of the game, and I don't need to waste Bethesda's resources on making a mechanic that forces me to do what I already do. That is just my opinion, though, and I don't expect everyone else to share it.

Thats jsut a long list of personal opinion, but like I said im not discussing this issue further until I see it in action



He did do it... and even if he didnt he sure did exaggerate


and can we PLEASE drop the toilet thing, nobody wants to play characters that need to take a leak every 5 minutes

I would really like to see this added as an option at the beginning during character creation, it should be something that can't be changed after passing the character creation stage. I would also like it to include things like fast travel. For example you could have two choices.

Normal difficulty - similar to oblivion style gameplay, players do not need to eat/sleep/drink if they do not want to. Also fast travel will be like oblivion.

Hard difficulty - characters need to meet their basic needs in order to function properly. Fast travel will be like morrowind with limited types of transportation. Quest characters are no longer invincible etc.

This is off topic but I would take out fast travel competely and bring back the Morrowind system

+1. And cmon people don't tell me that going deep into the forest to hunt deers that you actually need to eat doesn't sound good to you...It adds so much to the exploration element. If you don't like exploring, I'm sorry but TES are open world games, and obviously they are not for you. And they are not intrusive in a sense that:
a)The game doesn't spam you with messages to feed your character
b)The character doesn't die of thirst/hunger/lack of sleep on combat sequences


this

Are you serious? Just because I don't want hunger need, TES is not for me. I don't mind to rest / sleeping but others, 'no'.

Learn to read. Here's what I wrote


In your quote you deliberately left out 'if'. You are trolling.

You said that after the eating in the woods, learn to separate thoughts by different paragraphs.

Oh just because I edited your post wrong in a quote in my post, now I'm trolling.

you obviously want a flame war. Read again what I wrote. You are telling me that you couldn't understand it and thus left out the only word that was needed to change the meaning of my post? Really?

What ever dude, you made the statement and not answering my question. You're causing the problems. If you didn't mean what you said then answer me, but instead you accuse me of flaming and trolling.

Who cares how I quoted you, I made a mistake in the quote, It's obvious what you wrote b/c you have the original words.

Instead of answering my question, you continue to made a big deal out of nothing. If I was wrong here, I would have apologized.

I love exploring, and I explore already. The person who needs to be forced to explore doesn't seem to like exploring. Those who want to hunt already hunt, those who want explore already explore. If you can't explore by yourself, then you must not like it. I'm sorry, but TES are open world games about exploration, and if you need to be forced to explore, then TES games are obviously not for you. I'm not speaking to you specifically, as I'm sure you already explore, but having to force someone to explore means that person just doesn't like exploring as much as those who explore already, without being forced to.

The thing is that with a needs system, you aren't forced to go hunting and thus you aren't forced to roam the wilderness if you don't want to. You can still buy or even steal food. It just adds a motive to go and do more stuff in the game. What you do to get food is completely up to you.



you didn't ask anything

Yes, this is a game about exploration.. and that's why we're proposing something that will add to the experience?

Like falling damage. Being on high cliffs and mountains feels more like being on high cliffs and mountains because falling HURTS you. It's more immersive. You might say "but I already try not to fall off cliffs, the game shouldn't force me to."

Or wild animals. Having to look out for them and being endangered by them makes the wilderness feel more wild. You might say "but I dont' want the game to force me to look out for these, if I want to roleplay running from that dangerous cougar I will but I don't want it to chase me and kill my HP and force me to reload".

Or climbing. I'm trying to get to that high spot up the cliff. But I can't climb just any surface, and I can't jump an unlimited height, I have to navigate and think to find my way to the top. You might say "but I don't want to be forced to navigate, I already roleplay not climbing a sheer cliff or jumping very high, the game should let me decide how high I can jump or climb".

See how this works? If a game is about x, then it should FORCE the player to interact with mechanics involving x, not let them pick and choose every single time there's an encounter. It breaks immersion to have SO much choice, and there's never any sense of danger or excitement if you're in full control all the time. That's why putting in penalties for not eating/drinking/sleeping has a lot of advantages over the player simply deciding when and where to sleep and eat.

I'm curious as to how often people opposed to hunger think they would be forced to do anything. One of the most frequent exaggerations I see is people acting like they'll have to hitch a hotdog cart to their horse in order to eat something "every five minutes," or that sandwich banditos will emerge from the brush and ruin all their food, and the sheer drama of the moment will svck all the nutrients from their body and the character will starve to death on the spot. Then someone says it wouldn't require much of any effort or micromanaging at all, perhaps to the point that they'd barely tell the difference, and they instead deride it as pointless...while remaining utterly opposed to this feature that supposedly does nothing. The ability to sit in chairs didn't have much use in Oblivion, we'd better scrap that animation at once.

The two sides of it are that in "normal" areas, it wouldn't be an issue, mostly providing immersion for those who like it and no hindrance for those who don't. Second, it's to add a sense of danger to things that are supposed to be dangerous. This is also a form of immersion, and immersion is more important than many people realize. The change in combat from Morrowind to Oblivion came about largely because of poorly represented immersion, and people not understanding if they were hitting or dodging or wielding a holographic weapon. The Thief games are often described as "intense," with a sense of danger as you grab some valuable and flee through the shadows with guards on your heels. That intensity is where the fun comes from. Do you want combat to consist of two characters meeting, and then the one with lower skills immediately falls over? That's certainly a lot less "effort" you have to "constantly deal with." Or do you want to experience it, and the edge of your seat brutality it brings?

The point isn't that you have to spend twenty minutes "preparing" your character every time they get out of bed. Keep some food in your inventory, an act which demands approximately nothing on your part, and you'll be fine much of the time. The point is to allow the player to experience the currently skipped-over wonder and accomplishment of discovery and exploration, just as clashing metal and recoils and blood are there to let you experience combat, defying reality lets you experience magic, as being at odds with the authorities lets you experience playing as a criminal. If I hear stories about some long-lost royal tomb buried in the desert, I want to underestimate the danger and be driven back by the harsh environment before I prepare and mount an expedition, passing the bleached skeletons of poorer explorers, and find the place shrouded in dust clouds and know that I accomplished something. I don't want the story to end with "oh look, you can see it from the window."

Badly done features are no fun for anybody, yet most naysayers seem to say nay based on the assumption that "badly done" is the only option. A well done needs/environmental danger system, by virtue of being well done, would not detract from other gameplay styles and at times might enhance them. I certainly don't want a horrible, frustrating combat system in a series with as much combat as TES, but I don't advocate removing it entirely just to escape that risk. If you don't like stealing, don't play a thief character, and if you're afraid of spiders, avoid the caves full of giant ones. If you don't want to experience exploration, don't march blindly into the forbidding wilderness and then wonder why your thieving and spider-killing skills aren't doing the work for you. It's not hard.

Ultima 7.... Ultima Underworld series are legendary, some of Todds favorite games if i remember rightly:p and they required eating. And if you didnt feed yourself or party members you TOOK DAMAGE until you died...haha, very heavy handed.

It needs not be so heavy handed, but some form of penalty or BONUS preferably would make coming in from out of the rain to sit down in the warm tavern worth its while... Otherwise they are just a place to recharge yourself.

The difficulty slider could be perfect for this.... Casual, Adventurer, and hardcoe....

I really hope that the devs read this and implement it in at least some way



Edit: No actually I prefer penalty to bonus

Are we going to require cooking? That also means cooking gear. Flint and tinder or matches or will everyone just use a cheap fire spell, (why not not a kill, clean, cook and eat spell?). What about sanitation issues and bodily functions?

Seriously, most food/water required games I have played are a bore.

There is little enjoyment to the endless repetition of a must acquire/cook/eat/drink food water cycle. As the game goes on, it gets more and more irritating. Especially when scarce playing time is consumed by little "realistic" rituals that border on the absurd when taken long term. " It is past dinnertime, you are hungry and thirsty. Are you going to stop fighting the lich, leave a dungeon, hunt something, do the necessary prep and cooking then eat? I'm gonna be ticked every playing second that I diverted from the real game action.

As far as exploring, anyone who doesn't climb every mountain, walk every valley is going to miss a lot of fun lairs. Anything proposed as additional incentives to force exploration is aiming at satisfying the wrong gamers.

While I voted no needs; I would not be averse too having a proper brew or meal at the already existing various eating drinking establishments for occasional entertainment purposes PROVIDED that the lame discussions dialogs and interactions are fixed first.

bingo! And there are lots of possibilities for cool things to happen, simply picking the apple tree on the way past etc. I think Oblivion had room for even casual gamers to manage the niceties of food. You dont need to 'learn' eating for instance..

And it allows room for new create food, or banquet spells, whether they be used to help the starving adventurers quest, to lure the beast from its cave, to impress a mage/tavern owner or lover, or to fill the kings table.

Gee I don't know, that hadn't been brought up yet :cryvaultboy:

I like optional. Do something like Obsidian is doing with Fallout New Vegas in the "hardcoe" mode.

So you want players to eat and drink and sleep...or they die?

What's next? If you don't push a 'foot treadle' your character doesn't breath and then dies of asphyxiation?

No, better yet the whole game should have included Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, where each moment of the game you have to make sure the character has air to breath, water to drink, food to eat, shelder to cower under, human contact to comfort them, and six to perpetuate their clan, The whole game should be about making sure the player is meeting the character's Physiological Needs, Security Needs, Social Needs, Esteem Needs, and Self-actualizing Needs in just the right amounts so that your character doesn't die every five seconds.

Gawd...are people really proposing this sort of dreary gameplay?

Lets not get silly now, your sarcasm isn't productive. I think a mild penalty system WITH perhaps a mild bonus system might work nicely. And you could select to use it or not, with the difficulty slider 'hardcoe' setting.... Best of both worlds

some necessity, bu not necessarily a major gimp.
Once you get to the rest/sleep option that should involve some sort of automatic food / drink routine. One that takes care of the necessity of living.
Then have a secondary "get the fuel tanks to full" from player input that puts minor gimps on attributes.
I'm thinking it would work like Fallouts rad meter. Where more exertion would create a bigger need for food. And with out that food (within a reasonable time period) there are drops all over the board with all 7 personal attributes.

Thats actually a good observation, in many respects, the rad meter is exactly like how managing food would be, albeit harder. With the rad system it actually DOES kill you, but it also gives you bonus if you let it... Its a bonus/penalty system.

Surely this is a good argument in favor of an optional simple food system?