Let me correct this statement so it sounds like it is coming from someone who actually knows what "rpg" means:

"None of my characters are interested in cooking", or "I don't RP my characters that much".

This is, like I said, an RPG. It's not YOUR desires that matte in making a choice when role-playing, it's your character's desires that matter. This is an RPG, not hack-and-slash game.

Okee, well I'll rephrase my thought so I may qualify as a rpg'er: "My Breton ranger is too busy to eat. There are dragons on the prowl, and the last time he was at the "Bee and Barb' in Riften the fare was too bland and offered no appreciable benefit"

It's pretty useless yeah, only 2 of the stews are useful if you ask me, the one that's 1hp every second for 720 seconds, though it's not needed, more of a quality of life thing, and the one that gives you back 15 stamina & 10 health, simply because it's incredibly easy to make.

Should've been higher end food tbh, like Dragon steaks and such.

Veggie Stew and Venison Stew are both subject to a bug that lets you do power attacks essentially as often as you like. You only need one stamina to do a power attack or a shield bash, meaning that with a single Stew you can either bash an enemy into a wall forever, or power attack them till they die to death.

Even without that, however, they can be quite decent. An extra health per second is better than a potion of regeneration until near the end of the game, and i believe they can also stack.

Now I like rpg's as much or more as the next guy, but I'm not interested in cooking/eating until they buff it up more. They did such a great job of modeling the food, I feel they need to compliment that with better, more sustained effects.

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.

It is very useless where stat boost is concerned. But they made food actually look tasty this time. It's fun cooking ingame when you are hungry irl.

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*

Food gives characters that have an aversion to magic a chance to heal quicker without usign potions and spells,

Now I like rpg's as much or more as the next guy, but I'm not interested in cooking/eating until they buff it up more. They did such a great job of modeling the food, I feel they need to compliment that with better, more sustained effects.

Let me correct this statement so it sounds like it is coming from someone who actually knows what "rpg" means:

"None of my characters are interested in cooking", or "I don't RP my characters that much".

This is, like I said, an RPG. It's not YOUR desires that matte in making a choice when role-playing, it's your character's desires that matter. This is an RPG, not hack-and-slash game.

I wish there was a hardcoe mode where you had to eat. It'd make it much more useful and immersive.

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.