[Poll] Player Hunger: Survival Fun or Invasive Drudgery

Quick summary:

So at Starr’s request, here is another poll. This time to assess the demand for a player hunger system.

I will not be surprised if the community is a lot more divided on this issue. Although some people love the sense of realism and think it adds extra depth, others find it to be tedious and unfun.

Both sides are right to some extent. In game design there isn’t actually a dividing line between realism and fun as is often suggested, but there is a point where you must be careful you aren’t sacrificing fun for the sake of realism (and sometime visa versa depending on genre).

Two options here, vote your general feeling above or examine the proposals below and vote on the most important aspect to you and post suggestions for further improvements or alternative systems.

Why starvation sucks:

When most people give their gut reaction on this issue it’s usually reflective of one particular hunger system they’ve seen in the past. After further discussion they seem perfectly okay with a hunger system in principle as long as it’s not delivered like the systems that annoyed them. Let’s go over the main pitfalls that need to be avoided...

Rapid decomposition: Most hunger systems use a belly slider system. Basically a scale of 0 to 100 where 100 is full and 0 is dead, the value goes down over time and each food item has a value by which it increases the slider. It’s simple to understand but there are so many things wrong with this system it’s hard to know where to begin.

The main issue it’s tedious. Most games have the hunger clock set at a speed that means you need to eat a decent meal once a day or die... within a day. You can’t go over the cap of 100 to build up a reserve before you go questing and once it gets below 20 you have to drop whatever you are doing as finding food becomes your only priority.

One game I can think of has hunger decay of a rate by 1 per turn, the system has a sultana as one of the available food items, this has a value of 1. Eating a sultana takes a turn. There is nothing fun about that scenario.

Lack of Realism: I can understand the opposition of anyone whose experience with hunger systems fits this (most common) model. It isn't even realistic. You don’t die overnight from not eating (even thirst takes at least 3 days). You can overeat and get fat and store energy. If you are on the verge of starving to death stuffing food in your face at the last second doesn’t magically restore you to perfect health either.

This doesn’t mean a realistic system for hunger that is fun, practical and complements existing game mechanics can’t be implemented. Consider the inventory system as an example; the current plan for the game is not to have unlimited carry weight and let you cart around infinite items of infinite size. We aren’t up in arms over that because reasonable and fun models for that system are common, so we know it can be done and balanced well. The same is true for hunger.

Fatal results: If balancing the rate of hunger decay is the first barrier for designing a good hunger system, the second is balancing the penalties. Death is a severe penalty for something that given bad luck and circumstance the player might be unable to control.

It can be fun as Starr pointed out:

The whole survival genre is based on this idea, but there is a difference to how it’s implemented in those games being it is a core mechanic. It can complement other genres of games like RPGs as Starr mentioned, but even in those examples it is balanced so while death is possible, it is not really on the cards.

Halting player progress: Another common mechanism is the loss of strength and carry weight or mobility. If I am suddenly immobilised by hunger and am forced to sit there for several minutes while I starve to death then that is a terrible system, it is only slightly less terrible if I have to strip naked to begin moving again to find food. That is neither realistic nor fun.

Have you ever been walking along at a perfectly comfortable pace and then had your stomach grumble and find suddenly your backpack is too heavy to carry? The trouble with weight based inventory systems is they are usually integer based. So if you load up as much as you can comfortably carry, any minor dynamic change to your max carry weight will leave abruptly overloaded. This is poor design.

Too debilitating: Another annoying death by hunger is being killed in combat because you were crippled due to not shoving a cupcake in your face right before the battle started. However, there is a twist to this example… How much more annoying is it when you are killed by something you were trying to kill to eat? That extra irony burns, but it’s a double edged sword. How reliving is it when you survive that encounter and get to feast on your kill? How much more rewarding is that victory?

That’s the tight rope survival games have to walk, the ever-present risk of failure offset by the satisfaction of overcoming the challenge. Is that worth doing here? SotA is not a survival game but several RPGs have proven it is a fun element to include regardless as long as it’s balanced well. The trick is balancing to suit the setting of the world.

Making hunger work for you:

If we are making it suit the setting the first question is how does hunger fit into New Britannia, a world of magic? Can food and water be created with the wave of a hand? Can poor nutrition be reversed with a healing spell? How severe is death by hunger? We don’t know how serious death will be but we do know it won’t be permanent. It stands to reason we can’t be revived starving, so if we can be revived satiated couldn’t we magically maintain that state in the first place?

I’m also a strong believer that the way to make realistic systems fun isn’t to cop out and make them even more simplistic and abstract. It’s to dive in and make them more realistic, borrowing from the parts of real life that work in your favour. Take the hunger clock for example, how does that work in real life?

You eat a meal, the food is processed, the nutritional content used and stored. A meal now powers you later, immediate effects are exclusively in the form of comfort and psychological reaction. A healthy person can usually survive as long as a month without food, but afterwards it takes several months of healthy eating to restore them to a state of health where they could achieve such a feat a second time.

It is also a long time before the effects of hunger are debilitating, in that first week hunger actually sharpens your senses, hormones like adrenaline flow more freely and you are driven to hunt harder and better… Then the gradual slow down begins.

That is a damn sight different to starving to death overnight. We don’t know what the in-game clock will be like at launch. It is currently set to one real world hour equalling one in-game day, (Chris is pushing for 2 hours, I personally favour 3 or 4). Even at an hour a day it should take 14 hours of game time without eating before hunger should result in any real crippling effects. It should take over 24 hours of non-stop play to get anywhere near death…

Consideration that when you get resurrected your nutritional state would be reset to neutral (so you don't immediately starve to death again)… 30+ hours of continuous play is a long time to go without dying from anything (combat, swamp poison, drowning...) before hunger even becomes a threat. So what is the point of including? Well lore wise this actually works in favour.

Death by hunger is just an annoyance that sensibly speaking shouldn’t even come up unless you stand around at the bank all day and do nothing. In light of that I’d be hesitant to even include it... However, it does present a convenient form of discouragement for unattended macroing overnight or spending hours logged in while AFK.

Thirst, however, presents a much more imminent threat. Realistically thirst would debilitate a player after an hour and kill them in three. Most sources of water in the wild are toxic if untreated. Water is also damn heavy and you need a lot of it every day (3 times more then you do food, by weight).

It’s not a hunger system people should be afraid of but a thirst system. Still how does this fit with the lore? Food does contain water, but how much water is in a potion? Can a water mage sate their own thirst? Can they extract salt from sea water? Do you need the boil the water from a magic fountain/spring before you drink it to avoid disease?

Proposed systems:

It is hard if you make opting out an option in the interface but in a world of magic it doesn’t have to be a checkbox. Create food and create water spells give an effective opt out to mages and potions of sustenance and hydration create an economic commodity that carry over somewhat to other classes. However, if they have to carry consumables to opt-out, is it really opting out?

No but it gives an in-lore explanation for how an opting out mechanic could work - through enchantment. Allow the crafting of two low weight magical vials that fill with water and soup in sufficient quantities each day. Add idle animations to the character that show them taking a swig from said vials periodically and there is your opt-out. Don’t want participate? Buy and place the enchanted vials in your inventory and you don’t need to worry about hunger or thirst (that said, the vials should still wear out for the sake of the economy).

But if you can just opt-out like that why include hunger at all? As we discussed, given the time frames involved and the resurrection mechanic, death by hunger shouldn’t happen anyway… So why include a cooking skill and food at all?

A bit of ginseng plus garlic and a healing spell later you shouldn’t need to eat anyway, unless eating has benefits… Assume magical method of restoration return you to a neutral state of health. If we say that is average health, what is “good” health?

In real life a healthy diet (and exercise) gives you more energy, more endurance, they even say good food is good for the soul. I propose that maintaining a healthy diet in the game should also buff your character. Rather than one hunger bar divide hunger and food into 3 attributes: “Calories” (or energy) which bolsters stamina, “Nutrition” which bolsters health and “Flavour” which bolsters mana.

This would make cooking more interesting and open up role play options. Mages with sweet tooths or living off rich decadent high class foods like caviare. Warriors seeking high energy foods such as cheeses and roasted meats. Meanwhile everyone is on the look out for food high in nutritional value.

To work with the lore these shouldn't be instant buffs. Here's what I propose: maintain high positive values of these attributes over several days and enjoy gradually increasing benefits of higher HP, SP and MP and their regeneration by some factor, say as much as 25% (up to the devs). Depending on how character advancement is designed it could also increase the speed at which you raise Str, Dex and Int. After all, that is how it works in real life.

Good hydration improves the rate at which synapses in the brain fire and build new pathways. The in-game equivalent of this would be gaining experience faster and having a shorter cooldown times on reaction-based abilities (combat card draw rate maybe?).

Of course, if you don’t maintain positive values and go several days underfed you should also suffer penalties to these attributes. But couldn't you simply cast create food and bypass the penalty? Not if you need to maintain the positive level for a period of time to build your health back up after it has dipped. However, there is another concern raised there…

This system complements the economy, however magic bypasses that and effectively neutralises the cooking skills usefulness, but that doesn't have to be the case. Assume magically created food and water function the same way as healing magic, returning you to a neutral state.

This works both ways. If you consume food or water created by magic you effective drop out of your current nutritional state and get reset to neutral whether your were in the positive or negative.
This should also lock you out of gaining the positive benefits of the system for certain period, say a real life day (or 24 in game days) before you can start building up nutrition again.

Enchanted waterskins that hold more water for less weight are an option to take the edge off the burden of carting around water. This isn’t the same as magically summoning water so as long as you manually have to fill it with non magical water and there is wear and tear on the container. This would be a good way to help bring thirst more in line with hunger. I’d also automate drinking water so if there is water in the skin the character idly swigs from time to time.

You can expand on drinking by including juices, wines etc. that in addition to hydration, provide minor boosts to the 3 elements of hunger. You could perhaps fill a waterskin with soup so that even the automated thirst mechanic could benefit from the cooking skill.

The effects of alcohol would also have to be determined… Realistically there are almost no benefits to drinking it. It makes people feel warmer but really lowers their core temperature (killing them quicker) so weather endurance is out. It makes you looser but lowers reaction time so cooldowns effects are out. It does effectively dull pain, so it could reduce the duration of certain debilitating status effects inflicted by enemies.

I’d avoid influencing carry weight with anything other than core stats. No matter how it happens becoming overloaded without picking anything up because your effective carry weight dropped is nothing but annoying.

Ramifications and Balancing:

Is death worth including? This system should be unintrusive enough that it shouldn’t matter either way. In addition to discouraging AFK activities, including it does encourage the hunter gather lifestyle and facilitate ranger style roleplay.

That said if you are just going to get resurrected after you die, even if a corpse run is required, death by hunger is no real obstacle, just a minor hassle. Really minor, I mean... Just go somewhere safe to die and get resurrected no longer starving.

Taking that into account it would be worth making the penalty for poor health to gradually continue to lower the HP, SP and MP attributes up to an extreme value, say 90% (again exact value up to devs). In a game with resurrection, this is even better motivation then death itself. It also works for thirst for slowing XP gain and ability cool downs.

We would still want healing spells and resurrections to reset it, say to around 50%. Have any healthy meals they get down to quickly do the same before resuming regular growth and decay, just to keep it manageable. Magically summoned food/water would reset it to neutral at the cost of starting the opt-out countdown, which ideally would be around as long as it would take to get to neutral health with proper feeding.

With such a huge drop for such a small benefit the trick is in balancing the scaling. Each of the four clocks (Calories/Energy, Nutrition, Flavour Satisfaction, Thirst) would need to be independent. Rather then a simple 0-100 scale something a bit more complex would be required. A scale of -100 to 150 for each clock (the actual size of the number is irrelevant and for the purpose of the example).

Say -100 is starving, 100 is full, 150 is overfed. The rate at which it drops should be faster at either end. At 150 it drops quickly, at 100 at a moderate rate, at 50 it drops slowly. It continues to drops slowly until -50 at which point it speeds back up to a moderate rate until it reaches -100. Set the amount of time it takes to go from 150 to -100 to be about 3 in game days for nutrition and about half that for energy and flavour. This is the state of your belly.

However your belly is just half the clock, the short term status of your hunger. The numbers in the short term clock are just used to determine how your long term nutritional status changes over time. This long term status is what matters and determines your attribute adjustments. The long term status bar could be a number from -10000 to 10000 (hypothetical numbers). Periodically the game would check your current short-term status and add it to your long-term score.

Long-term hunger status should still decay on its own. For this example say it decays at rate equal to 50 per short term addition/subtraction. Eating enough to have the short-term score at 50 means you would break even. The fastest you could raise it is 100 per check (hard since the short-term status drops fastest at that peak) but it could potential drop at 150 per check.

This helps emulate real nutrition to an extent. When you starve yourself it takes 2-3 times as long to get to the good nutritional state where you stated from. A good target would be for it to take 60 in-game days of being well-fed to reach the peak of good health and casual feeding to maintain it after that. Failing to eat should drop it at a rate that reduces it to the minimum over the course of 30 in game days (at least 2 real days of heavy play).

Other ways to make hunger fun:

In designing the core system the most important thing is to make sure it’s practical and not burdensome and annoying. Once those check boxes are ticked you need to start looking at how to give the system flourishes to make it fun and engaging. The cooking system and its link to the economy is part of that, as is the forestry skill tree allowing hunting and living off the land.

But what about fun within the hunger system itself? The first easy place to include some flourish is in the system's feedback to the player. In Ultima 7 feedback from your character and party members is one of their most memorable features, with then demanding your stuff their face and belching loudly when they do or screaming “MORE!” which is entertaining.

It cuts both ways though because the frequency of the nagging for food also made it annoying and players might not like the putting of words in their characters mouth. Tummy grumbles, moans and idle animations would be less invasive. Other flourishes from the previous games were things like vomiting or trippy screen effects when eating toxic food items. (+1 vote for Ultima 8 mushroom effects)

Up to now we’ve only gone over long term hunger effects. What about short term discomfort and satisfaction? I pointed out earlier that in the early stages of hunger it sharpens your senses to help you hunt, but it is distracting for other pursuits. Perhaps a small temporary buff to combat abilities but reduced crafting skills (excluding cooking) and the inverse for a satisfying meal (feeling bloated but relaxed and able to tinker) would keep things interesting.

Options to pick your character's favourite foods and least liked foods would give more characterisation and depth to things. This could alter how your character reacts to eating these preferences and may have a small impact on their effectiveness. Tastes and characters change so giving characters the option to change a taste once a month would be necessary flexibility.

What about things like cravings? Not had protein in a while? Low on carbohydrates? Is your character craving brain food? If including favoured foods those would need to be considered. Regardless rare randomised cravings that provide a small positive buff for a while when being fulfilled will motivate players to seek out more exciting foods than their staple.

A fun fact about real life hunger people who have a gastric sleeve get 2/3rds of their stomach cut out including the part responsible for hunger. When they forget to eat their stomach doesn’t remind them. However they can still feel hunger from time to time, but it’s not triggered by lack of food… It’s triggered by seeing food.

Ever walked by a restaurant and seen a person eating a delicious looking well-prepared dish and wanted what that person is having? Being surrounded by food encourages you to eat (heck reading this post is probably making you hungry). This would be a fun mechanic especially for cooking merchants. Decorate your vendor's stand with your most aesthetically pleasing dishes to draw in customers who can’t resist the temptation.

The trick is giving characters opportunities to bolster themselves or manage their buffs rather then aiming to penalise them. Make cooking and eating more interesting without making it purely decorative or just another form of alchemy for making magic potions of a different shape.

There's also the possibility of certain foods and drinks influencing a sleep and fatigue mechanic (Coffee An Zu anyone?) but sleep is a lot more difficult to implement in an online game without a transition to a dream world space. Using sleep as an entry point to text adventures in dream space would be cheap to implement: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...entures-cant-get-ye-flask-make-ye-flask.7332/
Otherwise sleep is another can of worms that probably needs its own thread.

Feedback so far:

One interesting question is what would happen when your character is logged off? Presumably nothing... Or they sleep... I guess it would depend on how the logout/in system works. If you reappear exactly where you logged off I'd say you character was in suspended animation (sanctuary spell?). If when you log in you arrive on the overworld map or the entrance to the area you were in last or your house, them maybe you could assume your character was going about their business in their downtime and restore them to a satiated state.

Tibs pointed out the usefulness of hunger in simulating realistic siege scenario tactics. When two massive guilds are besieging each other castle rather then a direct fight allow the attacked to instead camp the instance, cutting off supply lines (No one can enter the instance to bring the castle defenders food without first fighting their way past the besieging army). So eventually the castle holders will be forced to exit their walls and fight their way out to get supplies. It is in interesting idea... Mixed feeling about the idea of guilds having week long engagements over a control node but it would certainly be an interesting option to have available. Though any kind of create food spell or opt out nullifies the idea... Though Is suppose they'd run out of regs eventually...

Another possibly related function to aid with that is food spoilage. Fresh food is more nutritious and it loses value over time, which would help encourage players to buy from cooks regularly rather then stockpile 1000 fish cakes. Probably another controversial point though so I'd to see more brainstorming on this idea... My input is it would allow for more interesting recipes to be included like smoked/slated/dried variants of meat, sugary meals also tend to last a lot longer but are lacking in nutritional benefit beyond easy calories.

Something Seon said gave me another idea for making the system more tolerable. A food bag your character automatically eats food from when hungry in the order the food is placed in the bag. Effectively letting you queue different the recipes of food you want to eat, giving you the option of choice and micromanagement of your cumulative food effects without the tedium of watching the clock for your next snack window.
This should also apply to hirelings you've place food in the pack off, assuming they need to eat.

Mystic pointed it would be cool for characters that habitually overeat to become fat and those underfed to become skinny. I could not agree more but know this would have to be a long term goal for later episodes given how much extra work non linear scaling is, as Darkstarr has pointed out previously.

Thanks to the Dev+ group and chat regulars for the feedback so far. Lets keep the ball the rolling.

Seeking further feedback:

This isn’t an ironclad proposal so much as some general brainstorming ideas for the devs to take into consideration and play around with. I encourage them to take the ideas they like above and those posted blow. I will try to compile proposals from this thread here at the end of this post from time to time.

The devs want to hear what we think. They ARE doing a cooking system. Are we going to have hunger to complement that? Can it be done in a fun and unintrusive way? What would you like to see from a hunger system and what must they absolutely avoid? Do you have systems of your own to propose? Vote above and post below to give them a piece of your mind (preferably a constructive piece).

 

I voted "meh."

1) I would prefer to see 3 "xp bars" : Crafting/RP, PvE/quest. PvP/conquest. I've very happy to see things like eating diverse foods at the right time (i.e. when hungry), sleeping at the right time, etc. move the crafting/RP bar. So it's a bonus for people who care about those things and not relevant for those that don't. Or maybe they care just a little and this is a good thing to do.

2) If there is a skill cap and there's gear to win / consume to win in the game (all of which I absolutely despise) then cooking should be balanced in a reasonable way with other crafting professions. It would be silly if everyone else got some great stats and you got pie. Obviously, the much better answer is to do none of this and to let everyone cook with only time and effort as the trade off.

 

my silly foggy head placed the mark in the wrong button and did not realize til it was already registered. I would have voted in this way:

1. Pro Specific: I want hunger only if it follows a realistic clock (no overnight starving).

I would have voted in this manner simply because it sucks going to bed and waking up dead ... If you are gone over night or for a couple days, and are very very hungry the longer you are away.. this would make sense..

I do STRONGLY believe there should be hard core mode.. i am one that likes to play "Hardcore".. give me disease to cure, give me hunger to satiate.. give me children to give to lord british to kill errr.. sorry got carried away.. but you get the point

 

I'm for hunger having some kind of in-game consequence... otherwise food becomes meaningless - we need to make sure the 'cooks of New Brittania' are rewarded!

Something like in Ultima 7. where you will get subtle clues when you're feeling hungry... then come the consequences if you keep ignoring it.

 

Hunger would have to be based on 'in game time', so you don't starve while you're logged off!

 

Yeah nothing else can affect you while you are logged off, why would hunger?

 

Shameless plug time! Ok maybe not so shameless since it's someone else's thread.

Stats & hunger, sleep, weather

Brought to you by redfish. I'm pretty sure it was in the linked thread.. we had a pretty good discussion regarding hunger (and obviously other things).

 

Well then i would alter my vote all the more. I am thinking it could affect you off line. Consider this - Your character is still "in the world" even if you the player is not... a disease hits.. you could come back sick.... your away way way to long.. you could be very very very hungry... i mean granted maybe it doesn't kill you .. that woudl be to harsh.. but i can not recall what game it was i played.. it made it feel all that much more real.. even while the player was offline.. the character is still there therefore the effects still hit the character... ~shrugs~ as i said.. i'm for HARD CORE

 

Well then here's a thought for you. Your character is still in the world.. would they not see to their own needs in your absence? You the player log out for a few weeks.. they're not just going to stand their like statues waiting for you to come back. They're going to go about their business like anyone else.

 

Perhaps, and i really really wish i could remember what game it was.. Goddess.. okay anway.. There was a game that did this. And when you returned you were not dead but you needed to work back up to be back on par or better then you were and time to work up to being where you could have been had you eatten all that time you were away.

My point was, i would vote for what i had said "if" that was the case.. if it is only on an "in game time online" .. then pfft.. i say it should be constant.. with no limitations

Very Pro: I want hunger to be in the game in some form no matter what.

 

I've always felt that hunger should be in the game - after all, what's the point of having food in the game if you don't actually need it in order to survive? The tough part is designing a practical system that balances realism and game play. I think you should have one meal per day (game time) in order to avoid negative consequences, i.e., you might start having trouble carrying a lot of loot or your combat effectiveness is reduced. Such effects should be gradual at first (accompanied by obvious visual cues), but increase in severity the longer the character goes without nourishment (i.e., after a week or so in game time with nothing but water, for example, you would still be alive, but probably bedridden). Your condition would remain stable during the period you are logged off (i.e., you won't get any worse - the "clock" actually stops when you're off during real world stuff).

 

Pro Specific: I want hunger but have an alternative suggestion for how to do it (post in comments).

Hunger is a necessary mechanic if in PvP events an army would march and lay siege to a settlement.

1. The siege has no meaning unless the defenders need food and water.
2. The besieging aggressor must have a supply line to cut.

Therefore if there is going to be PvP there should be a hunger mechanic.

In PvE there should be a reason to frequent the tavern. There should be a reason to make camp, providing opportunity to interact. It makes 'host' and 'guest' meaningful. It provides reason for hermits to come to town and be social (ran out of salt).

There are plenty of reasons to have hunger mechanics and providing for that need should be a significant concern for inhabitants. Sharing food promotes cooperative play. Outlaws need to have some social dependency. Shunning should provide impact, and be a real threat for the violent.

 

question related to mine tho i have changed my tune, still my brain questions, therefore my fingers type.

Q: does game clock really stop when you log out? ~grins like a chesire cat~ this is the misconception so many make that is not accurate what so ever.. consider.... That house next to you, was not there yesterday, you logged out, it is there today. Game clock did not stop, your avatar was merely "asleep" while you were logged out and the world kept going

Just... saying

 

Cooking does need some kind of purpose, and satiation is much more fitting than healing. I'd love to see a hunger system in game, though I'd want something conservative, that requires very little food to survive.

Hunger would enrich the tavern scene too. I'm surprised we haven't seen the Bear Tavern folks or FireLotus endorse this idea yet.

 

I voted very pro. It would make the cooking craft every bit as important as making weapons, armor and clothes. It would also draw people into social areas like taverns.

I agree with DarkStarr. Hunger and needing to eat was the biggest improvement that Fallout New Vegas had to the Fallout series. It worked and made the game more intense. I think it would work for SotA too.

 

This, completely this. Not punitive but hunger should be in the game to give all the cooking recipes/crafters a reason for existing.

 

Oh, and a shout out to the OP for bringing this topic back up. I think it would add a lot to this game!

 

I agree with some of the above posts. Hunger wouldn't necessarily need to lead to death..but maybe a progressive penalty. Something that would compel you to want to eat.

 

What I would prefer:

No eating = baseline/normal.
Eating = bonus.

 

Not enough of a driver to keep cooks in business, imo.