I'd hope so.
I also want to add something for people who do not want to be bothered with having to wipe their characters behind.
Toggle-able food consumption, so it only needs to be in the inventory. And no notice for running out of food. Just the plain simple "I don't seem to be running as fast, and why did I get weaker?"

Never mind......

In theory, having to hunt deer and pick berries out in the wild to survive sounds awesome. But in actuality you're never more than 5 minutes away from a major city in the game, negating the reason for me needing to hunt deer in the first place. Having to eat might be fun at first, but like atedk said it would just become a tedious cycle that would eventually cut into actual gameplay.

Nothing is more immersion breaking than being in the middle of an intense fight and having a message pop up saying "you are hungry" then having to open the menu and eat just to bring your stats back up to normal. Yes, you can make the argument that I should have planned my eating schedule better, but that just makes it even more tedious and I already have a million other things to worry about in the elder scrolls games.

Ahh here we have one of the major thinking problems on this whole issue (not mocking you but pointing out the main issue most people overlook).

Most people think it would work similar like diseases on the games so far, you get it and WHAM, your stats are down.
NO this is NOT the way it should work, it would not be instant but PROGRESSIVE. When you get hungry you don't INSTANTLY go "strength -10, health -50" or so, it would be "you're hungry, maybe find something to eat in the next FEW HOURS", then when you don't eat in that time you get a sliiiiight decrease in your regeneration (assuming that is implemented) which slowly gets worse over the next few hours. You only start losing "stats" after you haven't eaten in maybe 2 in game days and even then it's not that you suddenly drop dead. You could hover out without eating for quite some time but in that time your regeneration goes down gradually, some of your stats go down gradually and when you're at the worst point, completely starved, your health could go down gradually.

Now you may say "then what would be the necessity", long term effects.
If your character is starved out most of the time his regeneration takes longer till it reaches peak condition again and stats don't come back instantly they take a while to come back to full power. That way eating something in regular intervals has a REWARDING effect (more constant and faster regeneration) while only eating now and then only means that effect is weaker. Only not eating at all would be harmful.

It's ALL really about things being gradually and not instant.


Diseases should go that way too, not WHAM, but you get it, it gets worse and then takes time to heal.
Poisons too, while they can work a lot faster an idea was that the more damage it did the longer it takes to fully heal that damage.


PS: Oh yea and on the "but I don't want to carry food round" issue, open your Oblivion file, look at the stuff in your inventory and count how many of the potion ingredients you carry around are edible AND if you could maybe leave that extra axe behind to make room for a sandwich.

At some point the game works on a time scale and wham, stuff happens. I'd say a 12 hour delay for not eating or drinking.

And since it came up.
Have a toggle option for eating / drinking. Where after about 6 hours you chug some water and eat some rice automatically. All you have to do is keep the supplies up.

To take care of the Pop-up issue, don't have a pop-up. After 12 hours without substantial food the stats like speed, endurance, and agility drop. Then after a while longer you loose willpower intelligence and personality, while worsening the first three. If by a full day you have not noticed stat drops somehow, then a strength drop is right around the corner.

Oh yea on the time issue.

First if you like say have a 6 real hours in game day and to eat "regularly" would mean once a day, that means you'd only have to eat every 6 real time hours which isn't like you have to do it constantly. In reality you can take quite a delay to eat too after all.

On another issue I'd have an idea for a small "patch" so to say, waiting.
While you wait the need to eat is either paused or severely reduced, simply going under the assumption that your character does that WHILE waiting. That way you could wait for something to happen without "risk" of getting hungry, just assume your character takes a snack while he waits or leans against a wall and dozes a bit to fight tiredness.

I was thinking along those lines, yeah.
Also, basic water and food stores could be assumed, with meals providing buffers or anti-debuffs from hunger.

The more I talk about this the more I think the feature (hunger) itself should be toggle-able. If MW had it as part of the game play skeleton I would not be playing MW today. Fallout worked out nicely because the rad meter was directly liked to radiation, not time.

I change my vote, or I guess there is not an option for it, but eating could provide a bonus buffer much like FO3 did for being well rested, and not actually getting pissy at the player for doing what they want.

[edit] Nope there are voting options, I am just blind.

oh man!! I had totally forgotten about diseases! Where they even in Oblivion?? (bar vamprism) I loved the inclusion of diseases in TES, was something dreadful but exciting about it...

I'm easy on the idea but thought once daily would be enough to satisfy my yearning to eat...

hell, another good point oo: ...

I stand firm with a hardcoe option on the difficulty slider, which perhaps controls ONLY the hunger system.... I feel as if there should be some small insentive reward to enduring the extra hardship though ^_^ Perhaps an "achievement" if you are so inclined to collect them.....

Pop up could easily be replaced by a growling stomach noise (hungry), slight cough (thirsty) or yawn (sleepy). If you don't eat anything for a week (which would be like 20-25 real time hours) you die. Same if you don't drink anything for 4 days (around 15 real time hours). Of course these are the extremes. Like previously said, there are gradual penalties. A low fatigue (induced by slow fatigue regeneration caused by low endurance) means slower movement speed, as well as slower yielding speed (meaning you are less effective with a weapon if it is coupled with a nice combat system).

I believe that a choice of Casual, Normal, hardcoe difficulty at the start of the game should be enough. The slider (if included) could be used to raise the difficulty in the given level of difficulty: For example in hardcoe, raising the slider means what it meant in the lower difficulties + more severe penalties for hunger/thirst/lack of sleep (hardcoe only features).

There are a LOT of good ideas, the point is how much effort is required from the dev's part. More complex things = more developing hours. If a game was to implement all of the good ideas over here, it would likely take 6-7 years.

Optional

Oh, and who made you the ultimate decider on what every player in the world decides to be "fun"?

In case you haven't noticed, there's quite a few people here, who think that eating would in fact, be very fun.

What people aren't realising, is that most of us would settle for a simple need to have water and food in your inventory. Every 6 or so in game hours, you'd have to eat some bread and have a drink automatically. There would be no long animations, and no long minigames. A simple "You have eaten a slice of bread to satisfy your hunger" would do us. If we don't do any of these when we need to, we'd have a stat drain. It would take a week or so to accually starve to death. I mean, sure, we'd love to have something more advanced, but we would settle for this system.

And another thing people seem to forget, is that none of us expect this to be compulsory. If there's a simple button to activate eating/sleeping/drinking, you won't have to do these things, and it would be set by default to "off" for those of you who can't figure out where the options settings are. Also, no one expects you to have an intense need to eat/drink/sleep. There would be an intensity meter. When selecting whether or not you want needs on, you'd have the option between "off" "on" "Survival" Survival mode would mean, if you fail to do things, you die.

Yet another thing people seem to forget, is that a piece of ham weighs what? 1 whatever the weighing system is? It's not like You'd have to take off all your armour and weapons and run around in the nvde to keep healthy.

Not so. ArcaneMember at least stated it shouldn't be optional. I'd have no problem with an optional survival system being included but it wouldn't be a particularly high priority for me in terms of what I want developer resources spent on.

No, Not at all, I think I'd much prefer YOUR idea of fun: Press the I WIN button and be done with all of the tedium and boring "gameplay" nonsense. Can we leave out all of that other useless stuff like weapons and armor too? Yeah, right. It sounds to me like you're intentionally trying to get this tread locked to avoid the entire issue, by generating hysteria and resentment with your exaggerated responses.

Seriously, though; a few simple eating, drinking, and sleep options (or minor "bonuses" instead of penalties) would add a lot to the RP aspects of the game with MINIMAL inconvenience to the "hack and slash" players who only want to run around and kill things. That's why I chose "optional", because while I chose to add Necessities mods to my games (both in MW and OB), others OBVIOUSLY don't want them, and some are very vocal and annoying about it.

I'd personally like to see a minimal "needs" system that gives a modest healing and magicka recovery bonus (+10% or thereabouts) for being well fed and well rested, and would first vanish after a couple hours, then become a slight penalty (-10% or so) if you let it go for more than a full day or so. You'd be able to ignore it indefinitely without killing the character (at least in an unmodded game), but there'd be an advantage to having eaten or slept within the past 24 hours. Any more than that and you start to burden the players who don't want it (an optional checkbox on startup could disable both the bonus and the penalty for those who don't want to bother). That's still not tough enough for even the most mild "hardcoe" players, but it at least gives the "feel" of a needs system.

Having a simple, non-intrusive (if done even passably well), and "optional" system, where your character can occasionally spend ("waste", in some opinions) 15 seconds of your precious time every gameday or so, beats having a bland and boring "nothing", which is what it would replace. Having a "purpose" behind going out and killing things or foraging (or even for walking into the local inn to buy a meal), and having a reason to take the thought for provisions and supplies (even if it's not life-threatening for those who choose to ignore it) helps turn just another boring first-person "arcade" slayer game into a unique and interesting multi-faceted RPG.

As far as being intrusive, how I'd do it is with a stamina bar, similar to the daily fatigue Shades mentioned. Fatigue is your standard energy meter that goes down as you do stuff and regenerates at rest, except taking a step back from Oblivion to Morrowind in that this actually means something. Stamina is another meter below that for your overall wear and tear, and the two are tied together. The lower your stamina, the more slowly fatigue recovers, along with a drop in max fatigue. It decreases very slowly over time, based in turn on your fatigue; the lower fatigue drops, the more stamina's drain rate increases. Someone who conserves energy in general will keep their stamina up longer than someone who exhausts themselves to the point of collapsing every single time they do something. Instead of regenerating on its own, stamina is refilled by food at rest. Remember how in Morrowind (I forget what Oblivion does) where it shows your skill levels, if you highlight one you get a small popup with a 0-100 showing you how close to increasing it is? The stamina meter could do the same. Hover over it and you see your Satiety, 0-100, showing how hungry the character is. The lower it gets, again, the faster the stamina drain. Food refills some stamina and, obviously, makes you less hungry. Once it's at 100 food no longer refills stamina, keeping it a balance between food and sleep.

This wouldn't get in the way at all. There would be no need for ANY "notifications", because you can see your stamina whenever you look at your health/fatigue/mana. If it's looking low, you can check how hungry you are. There are no sudden stat penalties, just a very gradual drop in overall performance. As has been mentioned, people already sleep for the sake of regeneration or waiting for a certain time far more often than stamina needs would ask of them, and a checkbox to auto-eat at rest on the same little popup you get for how long to rest would remove the vast majority of any of that dreaded effort on the player's side. Zero satiety would not kill you, but would put you in "starving" mode, which is a larger penalty than simple low satiation, and makes you more likely to die from the general dangers around you. The stamina meter could even be used to reduce total popups with color notifications, like turning green if you're poisoning instead of the game declaring "You are poisoned!"

Environmental dangers could be treated similar to injuries (like in Dragon Age, if you've played it, only not random of course). Spend too long in a desert and you can get "Dehydrated" status, cured with a water item. Too long in the cold and hypothermia has you looking for, or creating, warmth. Once again, the general system would do little to nothing to interfere with "general" gameplay, and is mostly there to increase the danger and, dare I say it, FUN of exploring the wilderness.

So to interrupt:so far the results of the poll are majority wanting the basic needs (thats eating, drinking, sleeping) to be optional about a quarter wants to keep it old school and another quarter of variable opinions about the basic need mechanics

This is what I think is really going to happen, New Vegas will come out and hardcoe mode will either make some people change their mind or claim the idea was [censored] all along, either way I think Bethesda will be doing something similar to hardcoe mode in TES V

So tell me if I got it right:
1)Fatigue stays the same as now in Oblivion.
Affected by:
Max Fatigue by Stamina.Quantity, Rate of Regeneration by Stamina.Quantity

2)Stamina is introduced which is your overall wear and tear during the day
Affected by:
Base drain rate by Endurance attribute, Additional Drain rate by Fatigue.Quantity , Quantity directly by food, rest, drink which i guess are other "gauges" altogether.

Stamina in turn, is what decides the penalties to stats (except endurance of course).

And all that with just 2 gauges directly on screen, showing: Fatigue and Stamina. Everything else is under the hood. Set the values right and you got a pretty good model. Not bad.

Am I the only one who doesn't like hardcoe mode? I want to have the need to eat, dirnk, etc. but I don't want to have enemies kill me in one hit to do it. The eating/drinking/sleeping options should be seperate to the actual game difficulty.

Pretty much. They wouldn't be the only things affecting each other of course, stats and relevant skills still apply. Endurance helps things, and if you're terrible at combat skills, you'll drain fatigue in combat faster than someone competent. It could also be used to balance other things, or further differentiate quality levels. The fatigue potion of a novice might restore fatigue but lower stamina because it's increasing metabolism and letting you burn energy quicker, while a skillfully-created one is purely restorative.

Somewhat unrelated, the concept of changing the color/appearance of either bar would, I think, be a better approach for unconsciousness. I never liked that it was directly tied to zero fatigue; while that of course would make you collapse in exhaustion, it's not the same as being knocked out. Simply being "tired" or "alert" doesn't make you more or less susceptible to a lead pipe in the noggin. Anyone who's played games for long is probably familiar with layered health bars, where it goes down but another color is underneath, so once the bar is empty you have to start lowering it again. Similar could be done for being knocked out, with one of the meters dropping to show how close you are to being knocked unconscious but overall being a separate thing from total fatigue. It would likely go both up or down more quickly than fatigue, and with the inclusion of locational damage could be tied to blunt trauma to the head, letting you directly try to knock someone out instead of having to punch them 40 times and hope they don't regenerate fatigue too fast.

I think having to eat is a stupid idea. Really takes away from gameplay IMO. And it has nothing to do with Roleplaying, and adds nothing to it in my opinion.

Then don't use it. It's an entirely optional decision, and it takes hardly any resources when looking at the entire game.

Closed for review/clean-up. :stare: