Sure, but if it's too powerful then it deprives from the challenge.
The other things could work so that it's harder or not possible to backstab certain enemies.
But still, if it's too easy then it's a one hit kill button.
Well, at least not for beasts, wildlife and undead though.

Very easy. Simply follow the precedent set by modern Fantasy novels, from http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Serpentwar_Saga








How many times do the characters eat in LOTR? On the order of 10. Divide that by how many days occur in the series (on the order of weeks at least, maybe months, can't recall). Point being that eating in LOTR is used as a plot element, not as a tedious interuption (we gotta find food three times a day every day). Eating should be used as a plot element, as should sleeping around a camp fire or in an inn. That's why upgrading taverns could be a great addition.

But I was more referring to combat, magic, danger, etc. Also, read from the novels I listed. There is a very homogeneous degree of "realism" in almost all modern Fantasy. Armor, for example, isn't OPTIONAL in a fight with weapons for most characters, which is as it should be. A sword through the heart is probably going to kill most mortals. Magic is terribly powerful, but even great wizards are mortals who can die and so they have to be smart about combat. Caves aren't magically lit without a single torch in sight. Arrows can subdue an enemy very quickly if he isn't fully protected by armor (i.e., it shouldn't take 20 arrows to kill someone).

Follow me more clearly now?

To me, realism needs to strike a balance, and that balance depends largely on why the individual is playing the game. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, Bethesda altered the focus of the TES series from a RPG/combat game to a COMBAT/rpg game, and the fans of the former and the fans of the latter are often at odds over such details.

In my opinon, having food, water, and sleep in the game with specific effects, but NOT having them as an "essential", strikes a balance. Giving long-term bonuses to natural healing, magicka recovery, or fatigue recovery would make it beneficial to occasionally address the issue, without having your character suddenly drop over in his or her tracks just because they skipped a meal or night's rest.

One problem with "needs" is that the rapid time-scale of the game would force almost constant eating, drinking, and sleeping every 15-30 minutes of playing time, which is downright annoying even if you LIKE "hardcoe" options. I played both Morrowind and Oblivion with a slight mod to the timescale, making it 8:1 instead of 30:1, so a game "day" lastes 3 hours of playing time, not 48 minutes. Meals (twice a day) are nearly an hour and a half of playing time apart, so I only need to concern myself over it about twice in an everning playing session, not 6-8 times.

Good ideas. Making it just an option, with a little bit of a bonus for doing it once in a while, rather than a requirement. (like what they did with visiting shrines, etc)


Another thing they could do is make an animation of your character camping/resting/eating-an-apple whenever you go through your journal or whatever, instead of just showing the pages.

Oblivion level realism was fine, besides its a fantasy game

I think you're posing a very diverse question, and very difficult to answer in a straight manner.

Realism can be perceived in many forms and different ways by different players.
And I think a more appropriate question would be what kind of realism is good for a game? instead of the quantity of it.
No offense intended.

None taken, though I still think the questions are viable for this game.

Oh, and welcome to the forums.

Yea, the "intended" gameplay of the Sims always seemed tortuous to me, especially since it could be challenging (for an 11 year old) I just did not have time to clean the dishes before I needed to sleep, then wake up for work, etc. I guess some people like the "achievement" aspect of earning the money to build a bigger house, but I'd always use a cheat, build a huge mansion, or set up a devious death trap involving alcohol, fireworks, and no doors.

However, the big thing with realism in an action game is "Survival." If you don't eat, you will die, much like if you don't wear armor, or if you don't kill your enemy. Eating requires the acquisition of food. So, without any scripting, you have a quest. Do you hunt an animal, do an odd job for a single coin, just steal the bread? This introduces elements of role play which are entirely important to the game.

That's why I hate the "bathroom argument." There's no "quest" aspect, except for finding a bathroom, which in a medieval society could be in the middle of the road (okay, actually the edge of a road, for politeness' sake). Also, a warrior doesn't pee differently from a mage or thief, etc etc etc.

I count two broad forms of "realism." One is simply the limitations that make the game challenging. If I can create a new character and run around and kill everything I face without fear of death and can follow any path through the game without concerning myself with the consequences of decisions, then there's really no point in playing at all. Life in an RPG must be dangerous - risks must be taken, success must be rewarded and failure must be punished, or there's no reason to even bother. I can't get enough of that "realism," or, more accurately, Beth doesn't provide me with enough. In fact, with each new release, there's been noticeably less of that "realism," and, sadly, I don't expect this one to break that trend. But, predictions aside - I want as much of that sort of "realism" as possible. There's a point beyond which a game is unplayably hard, and of course I don't want that, but I want the game to be as close to that point as possible. It should be noted though that that should only apply if one follows the path that leads one to such things. Obviously, if I decide to live in a comfortable house and farm my days away, I'm not interested in a moment-by-moment fight for survival. But if I decide to leave my comfortable life and go delve into dungeons, then yes - I should be fighting for my life every step of the way, rather than just waltzing in, killing everything that's there, looting all their stuff and waltzing back out again.

The other form of "realism" I see is injecting the day-to-day drudgery of living into the game - eating, sleeping, bathing, going to the toilet..... I have no interest at all in any of that. I can barely sustain interest in it in the real world - it's just stuff I do because I have no choice. I don't particularly want to have to do it in a game too. I can see an argument for at least requiring eating and sleeping and having some sort of stamina penalty for failing to do it, but the problem I see with that is that it would have to either be so complex as to be an enormous hassle or so simple as to be pointless. For instance, I'm in a dungeon and start to feel hungry and lose stamina. Either I have to drop everything and go outside and find a safe spot and gather wood and build a fire and hunt something down and cook it and eat it, which would be a fat pain, or I just open up my inventory and eat one of my 37 loaves of bread, which would just be a pointless diversion. If they could work such a thing into the game in such a way as to make it complex enough to require some forethought and preparation but simple enough to not become an onerous burden, that'd be fine I guess. I really don't see much hope of that though, so I'd rather they just left it out. Those who want to add those elements to the game can mod them in, just as they have in the past.

And so on....

Pretty true, but you're forgetting that a hotdog stand still healed you.

But other than that, yeah.

See my post above. Eating is not "drudgery," it is a matter of survival, just as much as dodging the swing of a sword. Go without food for a couple days, see how excited you get at the idea of an apple.

Read the rest of my post.

Not to be really blunt, but a LOT of other boards frown on doing this, it's called necroing the thread. On many other boards, it is concidered to be very bad to necro a dead thread (at least 2 pages buried) unless you have something EXTREMELY important or useful to share. When you have somebody that wants to refresh the whole thing, a new thread is good.

My apologies.

Here's a system. First of all, most food sources would have several "portions" that is, you don't gobble a loaf of bread in one bite, it would be between 2-4 portions, enough for you to survive on for a day. So for example, you would have a haunch of venison, rather than one venison chop from an entire deer. As long as you have the food in your inventory, you do not need to select it to eat it, although you may receive a notification. Also, fire would not be required, although if it WAS, finding the wood certainly would not be. All these task are implied, which explains why the timescale is not 1:1.

A fantasy game can by definition not be realistic. Realistic means close to reality, fantasy means far from reality. For that very reason the word "realism" is usually frowned upon in role playing communities.

However, a fantasy game can be logical, and that's something I do want. So, if the same phyiscal laws apply in the fantasy world as on earth, and people are acting like people on earth, there should only be cultural/geographical/zoological differences etc.

If we add magic to the equation, we don't ignore the laws of physics, we simply change them so they can include magic, gods etc. This does generally not influence normal daily tasks unless magic is directly involved; that means physics should still behave as expected unless a mage is present and active or devine intervention is taking place.

Now adding other 'races' to the equation, that should also not change very much as, at least in TES, they behave very much like human beings, with some minor differences. That means that relationships and society, warfare and politics, should be similar to those on earth.

Part of good game design is to keep all that in mind.

This means in TES, there is no reason why a sword should not act just the same as a sword in real life. There is no reason a broken arm should be any different from a broken arm in real life, as no such thing is part of lore. This means that I do expect 'realism' or rather, logic, to an extend that getting hit in the arm by a sword would be a very serious condition. I do not expect TES to include real-world geography etc., though, and I do not mind the existance and use of magic, because those aspects are set to be different by lore.

Thank you.

What I mean is that, the quantity of realism is an important question. But so is the "genre" of realism the quantity is held in. Some realism might seem unrealistic in a game world, for example eating food when your character is feeling hungry. I'm not very in touch with my characters hunger and never has it been portrayed in a game realistically (at least not one that I have played)

Lets take for example Commander Keen, it has some realism to it, but the quantity of realism is very lacking. Dirt is brown, grass is green, there are some trees, you're able to jump and bounce on your pogo stick which gives you the idea that you're on a world that has gravity. These are very basic "realities". They are visual and physical. The combat in Commander Keen is very emotionally void and very un-instinctive (so to speak)

Imagine Commander Keen was set in a beautiful 3D world with amazing vistas, the pogo stick felt even more real, combat was much more violent and traumatizing, this would reinforce Commander Keens' place in the world from your perspective, you might even imagine that you were Commander Keen crashed in an alien world and had to fight for survival (I think this is quite unlikely in the old commander keen game)

So now we've got a sort of emotional realism added into the game, and the quantity of the physical and visual realism has been increased. We could go for the New Vegas hardcoe-realism, or maybe we should call it biological realism or survival-realism. Naturally if I crashed my spaceship in an unknown world full of nasty aliens I would be worried about my survival, and if this was real life I would even be psychologically traumatized. This could be portrayed in the game by the character becoming weaker as he would have a hard time finding provisions, he would also be hurt from combat where he might get various wounds, like bleeding, bones being broken, concussion, infection, there is a whole world of diseases and injuries to choose from. However the way this was portrayed in New Vegas was mostly by the pip-boy literally telling you that you are hungry now, or your limbs are damaged. Never was there any emotional or visual realism used to display this "biological-realism" however it was displayed with physical realism by having your characters statistics lowered and having him or her limp or preform actions with their body poorly. This realism is often very inconvenient and usually implemented in a way that the player cannot feel or see the character strive with by any other means than a bar on the user interface or a convenient warning.

I would also like to suggest the theory that treating hunger and injuries (hunger especially) is quite instinctive to a certain level. If I'm feel hungry I automatically go search for something to eat, I won't be very picky about what to eat depending on how hungry I am. Perhaps a character afflicted with hunger would simply pick something out of the inventory (or surroundings) to eat as the player continued controlling the character, of course you wouldn't just start eating in any situation, perhaps limit it to automated eating events outside of conversations, outside of combat and outside of peoples houses. As for treating injuries, games always have some convenient medi-pack or magic that doesn't require any specific medical knowledge of how to apply the treatment, wouldn't make sense that the character then treated his injuries just as conveniently as these medi-packs or healing spells would allow? (talking strictly limb-damage here, not health-pool damage)

It is for some of us. In a game. I don't want to deal with it in my game. I put up with "eating for survival" in MGS: Snake Eater, and I tortuously endured it in New Vegas' hardcoe mode. Those are the only two games I've ever played that *required* you to eat to survive and I never want to do it again in a video game. I hated it. Both experiences svcked in their respective entireties.

Eating IS drudgery to some players. It's an everyday thing, eating is. Getting a sword swung at your head is not an everyday thing. So in terms of survival, I'm okay dealing with the "dodge the minotaur" act because I don't have to deal with that kind of [censored] day to day. I am most certainly not okay with the "omg I need a [censored] apple just to live" act because, you know what? I have to eat every day in real life. No need to duplicate it in a non-sim video game.

I have faith that Bethesda will not force this kind of crap on us. And that makes me happy.

How did those games handle eating? What's funny is that actually many games "require" eating in order to survive. Food is used as a health booster in place of potions and medpacks. I actually hate the ubiquity of "health potions" in ES games. They should cost hundreds of gold and only be used when you are about to die. Day to day "wounds" should be dealt with by eating (okay, equally unrealistic, but once again we are assuming things like bandaging, elapsed time, fatigue rather than actual limb-loss)

And eating is only drudgery in our modern world. We have schools, jobs, tv, and we have to occasionally interrupt that to ingest some processed garbage that is fully prepared by other people and purchased by us for very little. Of course, you can always cook your own meals but that consumes even more time.

However, in a fantasy world, we don't have McDonald's and Hot Pockets. We've got deer, bread, and some produce. Also we aren't working a 9-5 job so we can't just swipe our card at the local Grocery and buy a meal, if we haven't raised, harvested, or hunted it ourself, we need to earn money to eat, which involves questing, or stealing. That's the big part, how you eat, it's one of the things that define what role you play in a role playing game.

@gpstr

Thanks. I definitely think making it unobtrusive is necessary, it would be a pain to constantly open your inventory, or visit the market once a day. But that's the beauty of it, is we already have bandit caves that have bread, cheese, and apples as random loot...and the only people who take them are alchemists. So yea, grab the gold, grab the diamond, and grab the apple. Apple goes in the inventory, hunger arises, apple disappears.

hardcoe mode is the best way to add extra realism for those who want it. So, some things (like eating and sleeping) should definately be in, but optional.

Actually, I think that would be a great way to address it. I hadn't considered it, but putting eating essentially in the background would probably be the best way to deal with it. Set it up so that if one is either in a city, with a ready supply of available food, or in a forest or such, with things to be gathered, one doesn't need to concern oneself with it at all - it's just a given that one eats when hungry. If one goes into a cave or a dungeon, then one has to bring a supply of food, but the actual eating of that food just goes on in the background - the only gameplay requirement is that the supply must be there. I think that's fine. As noted, my objections are to either making it a complex process and therefore burdensome, or making it simply a matter of being cued by the gui to open up my inventory and click on a food item and close my inventory again, and therefore merely an irritation.

Good idea....

I couldn't disagree more vehemently.
Most fantasy games present an augmented/twisted- reality. You can think of it as two cumulative layers:
- Basic layer: same as our reality. Obedience to laws of physics and so forth. The question of realism applies to this layer.
- Augmented reality layer. Some laws that either contradict/suspend/enhance previous laws in explicit ways.Time travel, for example, where in every instance it has been employed it was an explicit defiance of natural laws via some sort of gadget or power. Every other law still aplied or was broken in an explicit shown way.

Take Jurassic Park. Dinossaurs are extinct and tehrefore it is a fantsay world. However, no rule in the basic layer is ever really broken. They just add in a thin fantasy layer that acomodates for the existence of these creatures.
*STILL* thse creatures perform according to evrysingle rule in the realistic layer. Their bones move in a predictable gravity-obeying way. Flying reptiles do so as one who has never really seen a flying reptile fly might imagine based upon bird flight observation. So the question of *plausibility* , or extension of realism, applies.

In an augmented reality world, common world rules still aplly except where explicitally broken.
A sorcerer still need a Twix candy bar from time to time.

The progress seen in video games is all about realism, plausability (extended realism) and immersion, the three core concepts.

That's only a matter of definition then. You define a fantasy world as created upon the real world, I define a fantasy world - at least one like TES - to be unique and only assume normal physical laws to apply where nothing else has been stated because otherwise the game world would be completely unpredictable and thus the game unplayable.

But that's just juggling with words, really. Be it realism, believability, immersion, simulationism, logic or whatever names there exist for it, it needs to be there.

No.

Fantasy games can, need and should be realistiic - obey common world laws in a as high fidelity as possible. So, in accordance, real time lapses, hunger and sleep depravation consequeneces and so forth, are all desirable effects to emulate, though technical compilcations will guarantee certain concessions.

For example, in the dungeon example given above, the author foresaw the potential problems of fighting in a hungry state. What he forgot to mention is that in real life, human beings and other mamils have ways to cope with this, namely entering a sort of euphoria adrenalin driven state that suspends the normal physiology of hunger. Now, that is an *EXTREMELY* hard process to emulate, or so i would think.

Bottom line, be as realistic as you possibly can when realism applies.
Be as plausible as you possibly can when fantasy applies.

There really is no necessary contradiction between the two.

I want see my legs, and my shadow in first person view... but pure REALISM its a bad idea, why play games? to forget the real life (or kill everybody)

Do you imagine a Mario Bros with REALISM? he will try to break the floating blocks and will break his head xD

So... Realism =/= A good game. But this is an extreme situation

I thing realism in games will be more animations and only First Person games (NO! you can't see yourself in real life)

Eh, that all depends on the fantasy world. The Elder Scrolls games seem to be set in a "high magic" universe, where potions & spells are commonplace. Deciding on the level of magic in a world is one of the things a game master has to define in a pen-and-paper game - you can have a D&D campaign set in a world where you'll see one healing potion in a year, or it can be set in a world where they're sold by street vendors. And as long as the world is built to deal with that (less combat & damage in the first case, much more in the second; etc, etc, etc), then it's fine.

Of course, it's then the player's decision about whether thay want to play in that world. The developers/GM won't always alter their setting to cater to the player. :shrug:





Sounds really unpleasant, and a game style to avoid.