There has been much discussion of a "hardcoe mode", "Realism mode", "Survival mode" "Immersion Mode" and so on over the last number of weeks. This is what I have always dreamed a "hardcoe mode" would entail.

Fast Travel changes -

Morrowind style fast-travel with some added tricks. No more instant teleportation to various parts of the map.

Boats docked outside cities (Doubt there will be many cities near the shore in skyrim).

Horse Drawn carts that will be stationed outside the city gates. These carts will constantly be on the move, sometimes you will have to wait a few minutes for one to arrive. While out exploring the wild sometimes you will run into a Horse Drawn cart on its way back to a city you can pay to get a lift. You can even chose to watch the ride in "real time".

Time scale slowed down.

To maybe 10 minutes = 1 hour in game. You can "wait" or "sleep" as usual.

Basic survival needs

The need to eat sleep and drink each day to stay alive. Water being the most important thing. I always thought it should be similar to world of warcrafts hunter pet mechanic. For those that don't know it would be like this. Eating a huge meal and being 100% nourised would make you do 150% damage (Well nourished). As long as you stay well nourished you will stay at 150% damage. Eating normally would make you do 100% damage(Content), eating just enough to survive would be 75% damage(Hungry).

You can survive for a long time without food as long as you are drinking water. After 3 days of no food your damage will go down to 50%(Starved) and will go down 10% each day after that until death (0%).


Sleep would use the same mechanic but instead of Damage it would use fatigue. Sleeping 7 hours a night can give you 150%(well rested) fatigue, letting you run, swim, jump for longer.
Sleeping 3-5 hours each night would give you 100% fatigue (content) and sleeping ony 1-2 hours a night would give you 75% fatigue (tired).

After 3-4 days without sleep your fatigue will go down to 50% (fatigued) and will go down 10% each day until death (0%).



Leaving cities should be a big ordeal.

Leaving the confines of a big city should need preparation. You won't have constant food, beds and warmth. You will need to make sure you have enough food and water for the trip, your bedroll and whatever else is needed. Leaving a city to spend a few days in the wild should be dangerous. The player should be wary of disease, injury (from getting attacked) and starvation.


Weather to effect player.

Sleeping in a snowy region out in the open may give you diseases such as frostbite (-20% fatigue). The player can perhaps cast spells (Frost resistance?) to shield from the cold or wear a fur coat under his armor. Perhaps the player will need to find an Inn or a cave to sleep in to shield him from the cold.


All of these things can easily kept in order but if you let it get out of hand you will find yourself in a tuff spot. Imagine being in the middle of nowhere an Inn miles away and you have 25% fatigue (No sleep and frostbite), 50% Strength (Starvation), you can only run for a few seconds before you have to walk again and if attacked you don't do much damage. Not an ideal situation.


Maps

Maps in "hardcoe mode" will not be explored. Major cities and the roads connecting them will be shown on the map, everywhere else will be grayed out. Places you explore will no longer be faded out. You may find maps on your travels (in caves, on dead bandits etc). After finding these maps you can click "compare" and anything new will be added to your map (locations such as caves, hideouts etc). You can buy maps from traders, inns etc or you can even ask random people "places of interest" and perhaps you will add something new.




I think I have left out a few things but I'm in need of some food myself (75% fatigue at the moment) so perhaps I'll update later. What do you guys think?

Maybe to make it that much more 'hardcor' no maps at all, and you have to draw your own based on exploration (like ral explorers back in the day) or just like Dungeon SIege 2 where the map is covered in cloud that is removed as you explore

It's sad we need a hardcoe mode for this... Anyway, maybe sleeping more could affect your Luck?

hardcoe is virtually worthless unless towns are far enough apart to make you need to bring supplies with you.

And resources are rare enough/expensive enough to be an issue. New Vegas hardcoe is a joke.

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I can actually agree with a lot of what you said. I honestly think that hardcoe mode could solve a lot of problems in modern games. I thought it worked pretty well in New Vegas. It wasn't just a difficulty slider that made enemies harder to kill. It added different dynamics that required more of your attention. Such as if you were starving and had no food, you couldn't fast travel without dying and you might not make it far walking if you did find something to eat soon..

If someone was new to gaming then they could choose to not accept hardcoe mode and things wouldn't be quite as complex. However, for the seasoned gamer, that could make it much more complex and rewarding by selecting yes to hardcoe mode. This could really help the trend of "dumbing down games" because of the industry's need to reach a wider audience. Toggled features may be the way to go in order to satisfy both camps.

That might have mattered if there wasn't something edible sticking out of the ground every twenty feet. And fresh water nearly everywhere....mildly irradiated water at worst.

All this talk about a hardcoe mode will make the disappointment all the greater when Skyrim arrives without one. And chances are it will, it might be an easy thing to implement but Bethesda never bothered to do so. And if they havent at this point then I doubt they'll bother to add it 10 months before its release.

There will probably be a mod for hardcoe mode a few months after release

Yeah I wouldn't get hopes up for a hardcoe mode. Let's not forget, NV was Obsidian. Fallout 3 was Beth, and it did not have hardcoe mode.

Probably but that won't do my 360 any good. I could get it on PC a few years down the road like I did with Morrowind and Oblivion. But I still haven't played them yet, I just can't play these kind of games on a PC.

This.

Maybe it will be an official DLC, it would be a heck of a lot better than horse armor

IMO hardcoe mode is really nothing more than an annoyance. My vision of a perfect hardcoe mode would be none. I would like weather to have an affect but everything else just ends up being a contstant little annoying task you have to do every ten minutes. To me it does not add any immersion into the game.

If they really want to make it hardcoe they need to make it if you eat too much then you start to get fat and slow down and if you don't eat you lose health and slow down and if you have not slept for days you slow down and start to halluncinate. Until they can make it where it actually matters I am not interested. Fast travel does not bother me for hardcoe mode because I have an active imagination I can use to get around that. The way NV did it made it nothing more than a petty task.

On the issue of hard core you also have to ponder the question.. how often does each race need to eat and drink and do they all need to sleep?

Does an orc need to cook his food to eat it? Do high elves need to as they never get sick? Would cooked food actualy make a woodelf sicker then raw?

And on sleeping in the snow.. do nords get cold? do elves ever get cold?

Then why dont you just disable it? You could support others that do want it, like myself, in demanding it. Who knows, if done right then you might even use it in one playthrough.

It's all a matter of balancing the game properly. I have some mods for FNV that did wonders with the hardcoe mode, it actually became fun and challenging.

If modders can, Bethesda can too.

The OP's idea seems a bit too extreme, both on the positive and negative sides, in my opinion. I'd prefer having food/water/sleep only restore to 100%, except perhaps for a brief "well-XXXX" condition which would only last about an hour, and give a 10% bonus at most (if that's even worth bothering with). The "150%" thing is not to my liking; in RL you don't get a huge surge of strength by eating a meal; if anything, it actually hinders you while you're digesting it. Each hour, you'd reduce your hunger/thirst/fatigue pools by a number of points, and unless you replenished them periodically, your stats would slowly start to decline hour-by-hour after the pools reached some "threshold" value (with no actual "penalties" before that threshold, if an otherwise well-fed or rested character delays a meal or nap by a couple of hours), until they eventually reach 0 and you pass out from exhaustion or die from hunger or thirst. Obviously, this would need to be an optional setting, because about half the players would "freak" over it.

The timescale should be adjustable, or selectable from about 3 or 4 choices. I typically set the rate of time passage in MW or OB to about 8:1, so an hour passes in about 7-8 minutes of play, not in 2 as with the 30:1 "vanilla" settings. When you briefly duck into a shop in the AM to pick up a few supplies and come out 8-10 minutes of playing time later to find that the day is just about over, it's blatantly obvious that the timescale is "wrong".

FT should be a togglable option, with working alternatives. There obviously needs to be some alternative to "hoofing it" everywhere, and some signs of "routine" transportation in the world to make it look believable.

At the very least, Bethesda REALLY needs to keep the game mechanics accessable by mods, in order to allow modders to add these features, and a lot of other stuff, without all sorts of "workarounds" because of limitations of the scripting commands.

He says he doesn't want it and your response is "Support a feature you don't want for people you don't know and don't care about." Huh.

Although I do agree that anyone who doesn't want it could just disable it.

I support it if it is done correctly and not where as long as you eat and drink every ten minutes you will never have an issue and you are given bonuses.

we're asking for a hardcoe mode not a hardcoe game

I don't know about you, but after I eat a "huge meal" the only thing I'm doing 150% damage to is the can.

One of the best things I did to Fallout3 was get the excellent "Fallout Wanderer's Edition" mod. It has most of the features of NV's hardcoe mode, but they are *all customisable*. So you can tweak everything to your exact preference. How often do you think you should have to sleep? Eat? How much damage should you do relative to the bad guys? What about fast travel options? And so on.

If there's no "hardcoe mode" for Skyrim, and if the vanilla game doesn't offer a level of "reasonable" difficulty, I'm sure the modders will have something for us. Assuming they can mod the game in the first place, of course.

Wouldn't really be every 10 minutes with time scale slowed. 1 day = 4 hours with the time scale I mentioned. so every 2 hours go into inventory and click something. Hardly every 10 minutes.

The 150% benefit would last for like half the day. Its not a 20 second benefit you get after eating.

That would make it better and less of an annoyance. NV really turned me off to hardcoe mode but if Bethesda totally re-worked it and made it more than a simple chore you have to do every once in awhile I am all for it. I just want it to actually matter in the game. To have more of a point then just eating just to eat.......really develop it out and make it an intergral part of the game and I am all for it.