Holy hell.

Look, I know I'm probably throwing an argument-bomb here and I'm not looking to insult anybody, but is it really that interesting to role play this sort of minutia? I like the food stuff lying around as props, and I sometimes cook some of the stuff that gives you benefits that last for five minutes or so, but I can't imagine role-playing these trivial aspects. Sure, I have a character, and there's a concept to him, and a general sort of psychology. He isn't going around stealing and murdering people for their shoes. That large stuff is interesting enough to actually connect to a concept of the character...but food? Taking the time to stop and eat two or three meals a day, and so forth? Verisimilitude is great, but there's a limit. Gathering food and cooking dishes when the in-game effects are trivially small just for the sake of role-playing the details...well, when you're out in the wilderness, do you find a bush every couple hours so that you can role-play relieving yourself? Or, rather, role-play your character relieving himself?

I mean, you could go a lot further. The nights in Skyrim are unrealistically bright; in real life if you wander around in the middle of the night out in the middle of nowhere, you fall over and hurt yourself. Do you run around with a lit torch at night?

I'm not altogether averse to role-playing the larger aspects of the game; the Dead Is Dead idea is an interesting concept, although I certainly won't be even considering giving that a shot until I've beaten the game at least once. But still, I can understand such a concept. I even hoped, before the game came out, that they would make the menu system (except for the actual system menu) not freeze time, so that if you wanted to stop and consult a book or root through your inventory in the wild, it would behoove you to find a secure spot to do so, somewhere you wouldn't have a wandering wolf or troll surprise you while your attention was diverted. It would give the world a real, tangible sense of realism. It would mean that while you could pause the game to save or reload or even go pee or get a Coke, you couldn't pause to root through your stuff to find a healing potion in the middle of battle, or change out of those magic leather sneak boots into your steel srs bsnss boots once the battle started. Verisimilitude in the important things is a good thing.

But an interest in cooking? Really? Doesn't that get a trifle tedious when there are bandit strongholds to be raided, giant cave-bears to be hunted, and dragons to be slain? Why try for verisimilitude in the boring things? Eating in real life is awesome; eating in Skyrim loses the good part and leaves you with nothing but the expense and the time expended. It's like having to drop six bucks and five minutes to "make" a "ham sandwich", and losing the pretend-money and the real-time, but not actually getting to eat the ham sandwich. I'm all for real ham sandwiches; I can do without the virtual ham sandwiches that I still have to spend time making but I don't get to actually taste.

To each his own, I suppose. I'm just waiting for the day when some bright young guy says "You know what we need in a mod? Well, nobody ever washes the furs on their beds in Skyrim. Do that in the real world and you get bedbugs and everything stinks. We need a real laundry-doing simulation aspect for the srs bsnss RPers, you know? And why are there no toilets in Skyrim? What, nobody poops in this magical fairy-land? Really? DURNED BETHESDA!"

I kid. Again, to each his own. Just commenting a bit before firing up the game.

I found a fishing pole earlier today, but I couldn't pick it up. I was sad = (

I don't think you need it; I know you can just catch the fish by hand.

In fairness, it depends on the moon cycle. Full moon and I can walk around like it's day time. New moon and I get an experience more like what you described. There doesn't seem to be a moon cycle in Tamriel, which is a bit much to ask anyways IMO.

Well yeah, it svcks.
Hope we'll get some nice mods envolving cooking, don't know if the CK will allow this, but maybe even a cooking perk tree.

Well, yeah, but that's not as cool as actual fishing. I realize fishing is boring, but I wish I could play Skyrim when I was drunk(like I am now) and still be able to be productive. My main concern with playing drunk is doing something stupid(killing somebody I didn't want to in the long run). I wouldn't mind tossing on some music and fishing though.

Actually I think they could have a moon cycle fairly easily in the game; it's just calculations after all. I don't entirely know that there would be much point to it, but they could certainly do it.

And even under moonlight the light is limited. Yeah, once your eyes get dark-adapted you can certainly easily walk around on a sidewalk or street or lawn without blinking. But running, and running on Skyrim's rather broken ground, strewn with bushes and boulders and ditches and small streams and tree stumps and mammoth skeletons and the like? You'd end up on your butt in no time. And when the moon wasn't out, or under dark overcast, you'd be hard pressed to walk slowly without falling. Certainly running would end in a broken neck. Go out in the country some time, way out in the country on a moonless night, and see how dark it gets.

lol Well, :foodndrink: to you, buddy.

While I can see your point, I would think there would be far more interesting games to play drunk, although I could be wrong.


Actually, just go all Grand Theft Auto in Skyrim while you're drunk...and just don't save. Have fun doing ridiculous stuff and see how many guards you can take on before they wear you down, then reload after you die.

OT, but there is actually such a thing as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pollution

I used to live someplace where I could actually see the Milky Way at night; not so much now.

Yeah, you can see a lot more of the sky on a clear night out in the sticks. You just can't see the ground well enough to go running around broken terrain in the dark - even under moonlight.

I agree on there not being much point to it = )

For the second part, I live out in the country. I know how dark it can get. Something worth bringing up in this discussion is that the game appears to have to adjust for going from bright to dark areas, if only for a couple seconds.

But yeah, running through a forest, even under bright moonlight, isn't a good idea. But running in an open field? Works out okay. I can't say for a region similar to Skyrim, my area gets cold in the winter, but it's all glacier scraqe. No mountains, cliffs, or any of the sort.

Hahah! Actually, I intend to make a separate character for that. One that uses heavy armor, and probably a shield.

As long as I make a double backup of my main sober character, I should be fine. heheh

I don't find it useless...

I eat twice a day in Skyrim, after all. Great for the realism touch. :twirl:

I think for me, the "problem" with cooking is that aside from 2-5 items, nothing has any effect worth the time investment. In the 10 seconds it takes to cook and eat something, I could have regenerated as much health by... not going in the menu. If cooking provided effects that alchemy couldn't, or at least provided them cheaper (ie, alchemy gives you +20% to regen for 60 seconds, cooking gives you +10% for 45, but the ingredients cost 25% of what alchemy require), it would be... not exactly useful... but "viable in a non-roleplay context".

I guess I just feel like cooking in Skyrim could have been more like it was in the novels, where cooking + alchemy resulted in things not possible with either alone. As it is, it consumes time that I could be doing something interactive with.

Yeah, I did notice that your eyes take a half-second or so to adjust to light levels. It's more a graphical touch than anything tactically relevant, but it would be kinda interesting if they made it so fire spells or torches at night screwed up your night vision, and it took (for example) two minutes to re-adjust. It takes a good bit longer than that in the real world to get dark-adapted, but time is compressed (obviously) in Skyrim.

Food was useful early on when my hitpoints were minimal, you could fill up your health bar by eating a few items but quickly my needs outgrew any food I could find and cook. I loved cooking early on but quickly out grew it and turned to alchemy.

A really simple solution to make food a lot more useful would be if you don't eat every 8 hours your regeneration stops on health and stamina and magicka regen rates get nerfed. Well fed/well rested perks should buff all this stuff out giving players incentive to rest and eat. If I saw my health bar not regenerating I'd freak out and eat something, and then hunting would have more glory.

its not that useless i cooked a bomb and made a dragon eat it, they do some pretty good damage

Yeah, I thought about this but it just makes it too much of a hassle. Think about how short a day is in Skyrim, and how many times you'd have to stop and eat in a given session to avoid the game telling you "you're hungry" or whatever. I worry that it would be a real hassle rather than anything. Sleeping has benefits in-game, but lack of sleep has no penalties, after all.

No it doesn't, since the amount it heals for is utterly worthless.

The food would add to immersion if it served a purpose, i.e. if you actually had to eat to survive.

The good thing about these half-baked features is that it'll be easier for modders to flesh out the ideas we already saw implemented in Oblivion.

Vegetable Soup is good, all the ingredients are common and gives a nice boost to regen for 12 minutes or something. All the of the rest of it is either a waste of encumbrance, or has ingredient requirements that dont allow you to keep it readily available, especially early on when Salt and Garlic are somewhat scarce and needed to level Alchemy.

Mods should help a lot with cooking.

There is a lot of strange food; creme tarts, taffy, some sort of fried bread on a stick, etc. Kinda neat from and atmosphere pov, but not real useful. Struck me as odd.

I can see it's usefulness for characters without restoration and alchemy.
I've been cooking a lot, the way I do it is finding your favourite dishes then pick up the ingredients needed for that.
I only pick up foods needed for vegetable soup (nice buff) and salmon steak (5 hp a piece, 0.1 weight).
If I were to make more dishes than that then my inventory would just be full of foods weighing me down.

Story of Bethesda's life: damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Roleplayers: We want more immersion! More elements to flesh out our characters and give the world a real feel!

Other players: That's fine, so long as it doesn't impact my character and it's not forced on me.

Bethesda: Try cooking! The ingredients can be found, stolen or bought, you can create a few dozen combinations, and it's not necessary to play the game!

Everyone: cooking is lame.

*sigh*

lol

That's admittedly got some truth to it. I think they'd have made more people happy if they had dropped the idea of cooking altogether and created a more involved smithing system that let you turn a profit without full vertical integration of the process - you can lose money crafting some items even before you take into account markup on the purchase of the raw materials and mark-down on the sale of the finished item - and that let you make more customized weapons and armor.

If you think about it, every skill/activity in this game is "useless" to someone out there...

TES is a sandbox. Bethesda gave you the tools to carve out an experience that suits you.

And to answer the OP's question, no, I don't think cooking is useless.

I can find free ingredients everywhere in the world, and can then sell the cooked food to whoever will buy it. A little extra coin, no matter where it comes from, is never useless.