So I've been in a discussion where we were talking about how future Elder scroll games should treat Basic needs such as eating and sleeping. My personal opinion is that there should be basics needs with certain penalties but the opposing side stated that the general gaming public wouldn't support this.
So I'd like to see this forum give their opinion so I can kind of see what the average gamer has to say about this.

Thanks for voting, please leave a comment if you feel the need to add anything.

I'd be somewhere between 4 and 5, major penalties but not necessarily dying from not doing it UNLESS it's in a extreme situation, like dehydrating in a hot area (need to drink) or freezing to fading point in a cold area unless you wear appropriate clothing and have food resources to keep you warm.

So i guess mine would be "other".

I voted other due to the fact that if they implemented this, there HAS to be option there for whether or not they are going to be used. I would use them in a RP for example where I enjoy it being realistic, however other times I just want to be able to dungeon dive and not have to worry about it.

Sometimes I just fire Fallout or Oblivion up to run around and kill things if I am angry with something. So if I was in one of those moods and a pop-up message appeared saying 'You are hungry eat now or lose your strength', or something along those lines I'd be pretty pissed about it you know?

Oh let me guess now you even have to "dress right" :laugh:

No im jk thats a good idea, certanly is stupid runing around in your underwear at night not getting Pneumonia and having to light a fire would improve the roll playing experience

I'd rather have a set of switches in the options menu, where one could turn off or on the various settings (need to eat, drink, sleep, etc.) individually, and possibly adjust them to varying degrees of 'realism' (more dramatic side-effects, for example) via a slider or some such. I do know that if there are features like these in TES V, there had better be a way to turn them off, at least. A lot of people don't like such micromanagement.

Let me add the Optional answer...

LOL sorry to be a pain

There changed my vote, thanks .

np at all, it was stupid of me not to include it in the first place...

The ONLY one I don't mind is 'Sleep', thats it.

Any others, I'll play Sims.

That's pretty awesome. You should take that to the suggestion forums, I've only ever saw the debates about eating, drinking and sleeping.

Personally, I'd go for optional. I would use this on every character. But some people might not. It's really a matter of personal taste, and it doesn't harm anyone to make it optional.


You do realise that eating and drinking isn't just for realism? It's an amazing balancer. It may not seem like much, but when you're in Red Mountain with no teleportation and lacking in sleep, thirst and hunger, with massive attribute drains, it's pretty intense. This is from someone who regularly plays with NOM.

I actually did suggest that a while ago, made a thread on it... didn't go so well to say the least.

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a fan of the "make it optional" knee-jerk response, which quickly compiles way too many features and ends up encouraging a lot of extra effort and pressure from the developers in exchange for a bunch of hollow, meaningless shadow-features. I'd rather they just pick a direction and focus on making it good, instead of picking all of them and focusing on making them easy to strip away without significantly impacting the game.

I also don't think that the threat to "average gamers" is as dire as it's sometimes implied if we're talking about things like food/drink. If you don't take any healing potions or spells into a dangerous place, you will probably die, and it's entirely your fault. Supplies are hardly a foreign concept, and as far as Oblivion goes most players are probably already carrying food at any given time because if its alchemy uses. Because of its healing effects, players already sleep more often than a realism requirement would ask of them. If food is automatically eaten as needed at rest, we're talking about the average player needing to make literally no change. Keep in mind that alongside that form of realism, people also want a different form; slower time scale. Even if someone doesn't like a feature, if the game is well made that alone isn't going to kill it for them. When was the last time anyone played a game that had literally zero factors they thought could be better? That's just those who dislike it. Much of the rest of the crowd will be people indifferent to it, or people who like it and never knew because it's a feature they haven't seen before.

Perhaps it's just foolishness on my part, but I'm not going to relent to the "mainstream factor" in suggesting things. I'm not going to push for the Elder Scrolls to work as hard as it can to be indistinguishable from the rest of the market. The argument of "it's a good idea, but the average gamer might not like it" tends to stop being listened to after "it's good." "It's a good RPG, but people who like sports games may not like it." Who cares? I'll work with arguments on whether a feature is good for a sandbox rpg, but I'm going to have to snub the idea that the game has to pander to mass market appeal as much as possible in order to survive. Look at Dragon Age. For an RPG released these days, it's quite tough; combat is brutal and can easily kill you if one thing goes wrong, at pretty much any part of the game. Supplies are expensive and money isn't extremely easy to come by. The Ninja Gaiden games are well known for difficulty but seem to be doing just fine for themselves. Making certain things difficult may not be the gentle foam padding that mainstream wants, but it certainly doesn't seem to keep a game from being successful.

Needing food and water aren't just about realism; done correctly, they add challenge and strategy. Discovering a new ruin is a more exciting thing when exploration itself takes effort, and isn't a matter of "run to the east until you've crossed the entire continent and marked down every single thing along the way. I find it disappointing when a major boss is too easy, and just as disappointing when NPC's talk about a foreboding desert and I get there to find that the developers just spilled the yellow all over the map and it's exactly as dangerous as everywhere else. But, at this point, I'm rambling. I won't go into detail here on how I'd implement the system, but I'd support a stamina system that needs food, and would not support it being optional.

About the "correctly implemented", there can even be more and it can be helpful.

If the game would feature natural regeneration of health, magic and endurance it could be tied into it. If you keep your character well fed and rested he regenerates faster, if he doesn't the regeneration stalls and comes to a stop, not eating or sleeping at all can go into negative effects.

As a role-player, no. I find this obsession with realism to be far too much. It's a game, not real life. If people want real life, then we should also take away fast-travel, magic, elves, and beast races. This is a game, and not a Sims game. As for the optional part, I don't agree with it either. Everyone seems to want to make everything optional, now. It doesn't just work that way. Bethesda needs to design the game with game mechanics in mind, and if almost all of them are optional, how will that work? Also, adding in all these options that people who play TES games as they currently are and always have been who won't be using any of these options might notice the game is lacking in some content due to development time being put somewhere else(in all these optional mechanics, not just mechanics for realism). Everything can't be optional, which is why it hasn't been in the past, but there has been food in the series since Morrowind, so just eat that, occasionally. By the time my character has to use whatever was used as bathrooms in TES universe, bathes in the nearby river, eats his breakfast, drinks some water, and takes his allergy medicine, it starts to rain. Then I need to go back to my house(without any fast-travel) in another city to get my umbrella or I get sick. At that point, my character needs to eat and drink again and go the bathroom again. My character needs to sleep. In the morning, there's a blizzard outside, and so I need to wait inside the inn until it clears up so I can get to my house and get some warm clothing, without risking getting sick. After I come outside again and get back to where I was before(with no fast-travel), I need to go the bathroom, bathe, eat, drink, and take some more allergy medicine. I go to my destination, I get stuck in realistic quicksand, my character can't do anything to get out, and he dies, but the game is so realistic that I can't reload.

Over exaggerating does not make a good argument.

Features like this and mounts only detract from meaningful development time, so I hope it is not featured, and players must decide the degree to which they role play. I don't know about the rest of you, but I rp characters, not real persons, which means I only need to get the character part right, not watch them poop or sleep or cook or dress them for the cold weather.

So your opinions are considered more valid?

Still, I don't need that. Being tired / fatigue can't be altered, you have to do. Being hungry / thirsty / bathroom you can stretch it. I remember working with my dad, 10 hours straight, never ate but drank a bottle of water. So in a video game, the game will make me do so but in real life it can be altered except for being tired. Maybe some can stretch tiredness but I can't, as for hungry / thirsty / bathroom I can stretch it.

The opinion expressed there was in opposition to an over-exaggeratedly unreal level of realism that nobody has ever suggested. All opinions are equally invalid but generally they both need to be kind of relevant to the subject before they can start butting heads.

Like I said in the suggestion thread, I'm not really fond of the idea of having to eat all the time, I would only agree to having it in the game, if not eating, didn't mean you became weaker, but if you did eat, it would make you stronger, or more whatever seems appropriate.

Same with sleep. I played far cry 2 with the malaria disease constantly needing a fix, it was a pain, same with the shivering isles quest where you are addicted. I wouldn't mind weather playing a role, like cold weather giving damage over time unless you wear thick clothes, or other elemental hazards.

But mainly I'm not fond off having to deal with bodily functions like hunger/thirst/bathroom stuff, or general hygiene.

I am a role-player too. For Oblivion i loaded every hardcoe needs mod I found. I think it is much more immersive and gameplay gets a survival tone too. I also think it shouldn't be optional. It should be part of the game from the very start. People don't like it because they think such a thing would be very intrusive. If you play with it from the start it is very easy to get used too. Of course it should be carefully balanced (meaning appropriate timescale, progressive penalties and proper odds for diseases due to environment -proper meaning catching a cold due to cold weather 2-4 times in a 60 hours pass and only if you don't already have a disease-). Making it optional means it wouldn't have a great impact to the rest of the game anyway. Basic needs such as hunger, thirst and sleep, combined with a realistic fatigue model make it much better

You know what, I have no idea what you are talking about and I guess Daniel_Kay too. I see nothing wrong with Seti's post.



If they put this in as not optional, sorry Bethesda will not buy. I already have Sims 1, 2 and 3, and these games were for my wife. I just like making the houses but to play, 'Not really'.

Where are all of you taking bathroom needs from?

Nobody mentioned anything about bathroom needs before some of you started ranting.

If any of you play with the darker nights mod like I do you'll know that doing anything at night is virtually impossible. Even with a torch you can really see only a few meters around you, night eye is better but still not that same as day light.

If you're anything like me you like to RP a bit and since you cant see anything during night you might as well chill out at the Inn for the duration of the night.

Now would it be horribly difficult for you to pay 10 gold a night to rent a room or buy a house and sleep during the night, since you cant see anything anyways and then grab a quick breakfast in the morning and head out to adventure and occasionally fill your water tank in the nearby creek when you run out of water which you take a quick sip every once in a while and then once a day stop really quick to eat your lunch and then continue your day normally until dusk when you need to head back into a settlement to grab some dinner and then go to bed again?

Whether you did or didn't suggest this, we are saying this. Remember Developers come the forum and read, so if they see that we don't WANT this, they will not put it. Just remember this is a SUGGESTION thread and is about NEEDS and bathroom is considered one.



Such as, not ONLY and you said basic needs, I go to the bathroom more than I eat.

Gotta say, I'm anti-tedium. If you want to RP your character eating and sleeping at regular intervals, you already have the option. I personally don't see the need to take my character into the woods every 4 hours to lay pipe.