[Poll] Player Hunger: Survival Fun or Invasive Drudgery

If we are being realistic I can go all day without eating, I'll be hungry but I'll suffer no ill effects. After a full day I'll be weaker, especially if I've been very active. I can still have bursts of strength/speed but my ability to sustain those will be greatly diminished. Full starvation leading to being limited on movement takes a very long time. You simply need more breaks. Death can take a month or more.

Water is a bit different, ill effects that are very noticeable also usually take over a day to achieve. but once they start, it doesn't get better till you get some water in you. disorientation, inability to think properly... all sorts of bad things happen.. death takes awhile.. 3-7 days depending on activity level and conditions. (possibly 2 days, but takes extreme conditions, such as running in a desert with no shade)

But as long as you have water, you don't need much food. So if they put in any ill effects, they should be very far spread out, several days without food, a day without liquids(although water and things with high water content should be the only liquids that count).

I think most of you have suggested way too short of a period to go without eating. On a daily basis I go 18 hours without eating, and then have 2 meals within 6 hours of each other. I suffer no ill effects. I eat at 12pm and 6pm each day. I don't do breakfast, I don't eat snacks. Some days I only eat 1 meal a day if my 12pm meal is large enough. 1 meal every 24 hours should be sufficient, less than that doesn't decrease strength/dexterity, but does reduce focus, as you can still perform feats of strength, but not as many as quickly. I'll note that of those 18 hours I'm sleeping for 8... and if you want to start talking about issues with deprivation, try some sleep deprivation sometime and see how that works on your reaction speed.

When I'm out hunting and hiking I generally have a snack before I leave camp(before dawn), then a snack again once I get where I'm going, usually a couple of hours later. and That is with a lot of hiking, 8 miles over very rough country not on paths. And by snack I mean a package of 4 crackers+peanut butter and a bottle of water. Then I'll have a full meal when I get back.

Overall, id prefer a reward based system. Like vjek said, no ill-effects without it, bonuses with it.

 

My thoughts on Hunger: Stamina feeder!

Running needs to be dynamic, we should have Lazy walking, Brisk walking, Jogging, Running, and Sprinting. Each faster mode should take more stamina. Jumping should take stamina. Swimming should take stamina.

These things all deplete your stamina bar, so what fills your stamina you ask? why, eating food of course! (and rest)

So basically, the penalty for not eating should be not being able to jump, swim, or jog/run. Eating while moving will restore less stamina than eating while standing still. Eating while sitting down will restore a bonus percentage of stamina. Taking a nap after filling your belly will top off your stamina bar. Sleep should be an optional way to log off your character. If you log off without sleeping, you will not gain stamina while offline.

If you go too many in-game hours with your stamina at zero, you will briefly collapse from exhaustion, and then start moving very slowly. If you don't find some rest, or eat, you will die.. but there will be ample warning. (lack of any stamina leading to initial collapse being the first hint). The bottom 10% of your stamina bar should always be replenishable by either sleep or eating, so if you can't find food, you can take a nap, and gain enough stamina to hopefully get to somewhere where there is food..

Finaly, NPCs and Players should be able to recognize when someone is nearly exhausted/very hungry. Caring individuals (players&NPCs) may offer food to these people. Hopefully soon NPCs will be taking naps and eating regularly too..

 

That's another way to do it.. what about crafting and fighting affecting your stamina too?

And what do you think about that coupled with hunger capping your stamina over time? So hunger would put a max cap on stamina, but food would not only remove that, but restore your stamina points at the same time, removing effects from activity.

You don't necessarily want to get rid of the purpose of rest (even if its idling) though.

 

I went pro-specific. Hunger mechanics always concern me. In some cases, they come to be an annoying hindrance to playing a game, never mind enjoying a game. In other cases, they add to the immersion, and so, enhance the game experience.

My preferred hunger system amounts to:

- After some initial timer runs out, hunger sets in.
- After a period of time in a "hungry state", the debuffs set in.
- The debuffs start slowly, but the longer you are hungry, the faster the debuffs drop your stats.
- The debuffs never drop your stats lower than (50?)%.

Those are the basic points.

 

That jives with what I'm saying.

Percentages of any buffs and debuffs and timers to be debated.

 

I'm pro hungry and anti buff food

I'm not a fan of food suddenly being able to give you +70 agility for a limited time ...

I generally agree with redfish and straynger

 

What Margard said there - I don't want most food to act like potions. I would prefer hunger as a bulwark against negatives, rather than mundane food giving buffs.

I'm not opposed to the inclusion of magical recipes in the cooking skill tree, magical ingredients or special regional/cultural preparations that offer a stronger benefit. I just want them to be truly special and not a replacement for other magic, or a player-coddling buff system that leads to stat inflation across the range of PVE targets and a constant, unsustainable escalation of the DPS game. It is also important to make each skill tree unique to avoid a homogenization of viable strategy. IE: "Who needs a cleric? I got bread!"

I voted very pro. I hope to see encumbrance - this is something I have come to expect from a Lord British game. We don't have to have people starving to death (although it would certainly present an additional ethical dilemma), but hunger and thirst should not be cosmetic annoyances.

Agreeing with Astrobia, I would suggest allowing players to assign (perhaps on the paper doll) containers for auto-eating and auto-drinking. This is an organizational issue and would ease the annoyance of gameplay. You don't make archers root through their bags for each individual arrow, after all. Hence the term "a quiver of baguettes"

Quality of food could affect the length of time you stay full and refreshed. Realistic hunger, thirst, and endurance can make small bonuses seem very magical. Think of lembas in Lord of the Rings - it stayed fresh, kept you awake and alert, made you feel full and content and maybe even a little happy. It didn't make you stronger or faster or give you more magical power, but it was incredibly valuable. The separation of hunger/thirst/endurance from strength, dex, combat stats and magic stats (in general of course, I'm not saying they can't be interrelated) enhances this value. All the healing potions in the world won't quench your thirst in the desert.

One idea I had for including some additional buffs in food was long-term consumption of a particular diet. So, you eat nothing but blue-snouted frog meat and after a period of a few days you gain some bonus that continues as long as you keep eating that food. So, how much can you eat before you are full?

Hunger/thirst progression after logging off? Seems a bit much to me. We generally assume the character is sleeping during this time. It would make sense for a character who continues to heal during this time to enter the game with a modicum of hunger and thirst. For longer periods of inactivity, maybe we can just assume they took a moongate back to earth or something. I mean, taxes are enough upkeep.

On the clock: It makes sense to have hunger based around a six-eight hour cycle, thirst might be a bit more frequent. This could vary slightly based on a character's constitution or other stats. I would like to see eating/drinking obviate hunger/thirst for a period. I mean, hunger shouldn't be scheduled independently of a character's actions. Also, it would be interesting to see hot environments increase the frequency of thirst.

There are a lot of good observations and ideas in this thread - I'm glad for seeing the response to this topic full of honest opinions and critical thinking.

 

I would find auto-eating more annoying. You dump everything into a black box, don't choose what you want to eat at each meal, or when you want to eat, and have to wait until you run out of food to know that you're out of food. A counter like in previous Ultimas wouldn't make sense, if different foods have different mass and nutritional value.

I think a better solution if people want something more automated would be to have some camping process where you automatically sit down and eat, like in earlier Ultimas where you would H-ole up and camp. And then do something similar for eating at taverns. And then even if they included that, I don't think they should take out bag eating.

 

I played a mud where if you didn't eat something your recovery rate was greatly diminished. so hp/movment points took a long time to go up, and I think you couldn't memorize/pray (spell circles like D&D) if you were hungry. significant enough of a disadvantage that everyone tried hard to keep food on them at all times. Luckily food was also easy to obtain, especially from clerics who could create food with a spell. Or from merchants, or as loot.

also this applied to drink/thirst, and you started with a waterskin + food, waterskins could be filled from wells or fountains all over the game.

In really challenging areas people could find or quest for items that were always full of water/food. or spawned food/water. It also gave you a message,

You are hungry.
You are thirsty.

The main thing is you could still play just fine while hungry/thirsty, but killing things took longer because of much longer breaks needed to recover. And no worry about death once you ran out of food... Death was bad enough, losing exp/levels and needing to recover your corpse, and if you were high enough level, getting a resurrection to restore some of your exp.

 

I like the idea of eating something giving you a pro, such as mana or health VERY slightly accelerated in the increase rate. I'd rather not have hunger strike me down and kill me, however. I thought food was a bit too useless in UO, but a bit too important in U5. Perhaps somewhere in the middle.

 

I'd also prefer it but I just don't see enough demand for it for this to be a requirement. I think players today would be more accepting of it if there was a strong basis on story otherwise the reward just isn't there for most folks. And how well they integrate it into crafting and whatnot.

They're actually pretty good and will tell you when you're slightly hungry, hungry, starving, or starting to affect your skills with increasing levels of debuffs. Same for thirst...as well as sleep requirement mods, cold weather mods, etc.

 

no eating - more of a chance to fizzle a spell/mis swing your sword
well fed - attack as normal depending on your skill level.

 

Assuming we has a health (that depends on our stats, maybe health = strength * 10 or so)

could have so various foods gave a temporary health bonus i.e normal health is 100 you eat a .... and for now has 120 , basically 20 extra health that you lose first during the battle.

could have 4 kinds of food

• aaaa that gave +X*strength as bonus
• bbb that gave +X*dexterity as bonus
• ccc that gave +X*intelligence as bonus
• and ddd that gave a flat +X bonus

 

It would be of course more realistic if the char has to eat and drink.

And for the first few weeks it surly would be intresting to deal with that problem.
But i fear after a while it would be only annoying.

Im not sure the Devs can solve this...

 

I wouldn't be opposed to requiring players to only eat once for every 24-48 hours of play-time, and only inducing small debuffs for not doing so. Even a small debuff that only requires a player to eat very rarely would be enough to make cooking worthwhile.

 

I think, granting that they design a good system, players won't find it any more annoying than, say, gathering reagents for spells. I've played a lot of RPGs with hunger or something like hunger in them, and some of these make it a stronger element of the game, some of them make it a smaller element. But in most of them, its just something you get used to and learn to take for granted.

The few exceptions are where the developers mess up and don't do a good job of implementing it (Ultima VII).

But at any rate, I've also found it adds a lot to the game in ways more than it possibly takes away.

 

I like your proposed system, I didn't want to quote it all (it was really long), I agree with alot of what you are saying.

 

in the old Ultimas you would die of hunger. It was a very real possibility, before Ultima V came along and you could just go eat in Castle Britannia over and over again..

Let's not go back to that... it's just not fun

 

I voted no hunger, BUT:

If we're going to have a cooking skill (and agriculture), then the fruits of those labors should be valuable and people should have to eat. On the other hand, anyone should be able to cook without putting points into a cooking skill.

In LotRO, cooking produces food that increases your regen rate, boosts stats, and other nifty things. Everyone wants food. You don't have to eat food, but it really makes a difference in combat. Scholars are the alchemists of LotRO, and really only get 2 potions - morale and power restoratives. UO alchemists got all of it - cure, heal, str, dex, int, invis, explosions, etc.

Anything you have to have to be successful (or for convenience) in the game, people will dump points into it, and everyone will do it. Magery in UO, anyone? Most people had it just for the Recall spell, if nothing else. Then we got runebooks, and it wasn't such a big deal any more.

If you must eat, and must have skill points in cooking to make food, everyone will have cooking points and everyone will be a cook. People will just budget some points for it. Then there's no point in being a cook. If there's something that everyone needs, it should be an innate skill available to all for NO skill points.

Riding takes far more "skill" than cooking (in my opinion), but I'm not aware of any games that have riding lessons or riding skill points. It's taken for granted that everyone can hop on a horse and ride it.

I don't like being required to eat in a game, or use a bathroom, do dishes or laundry, or feed my pets. I think that game is called The Sims.

If you're set on having a cooking skill, though, rather than it being an innate ability that anyone can do, it needs to have value to more than just role players having virtual breakfast, without conflicting or competing with what alchemists can do as far as regenerative or stat boosting potions.

 

Very good point.

However, I believe there is an implicit understanding in most games that the character you are playing has had some "worldly" experience prior to you taking control of them.

So, the character knows how to cook basically (aka: Understands that putting a pot of water over a fire will cause the water to boil).

If the character has been raised in a rural environment, then basic horse riding may have been learned as well during their earlier years.

Even at the lowest entry levels : "Skill" in most role-playing games tends to be construed as being "Better than the uneducated person".

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I agree: To cook "very well" and to ride "very well" though are both skills one would need to work at.

And I would suspect there will be a couple of entry level recipes for untrained cooks, something they can use to gain experience for the first level.

(My wife would definitely agree on the riding "very well" portion. I'm constantly telling her how the horse seems to do most of the work, and the rider is simply along for the ride. She gives me the "evil eye" every time. )