Gotta eat

Has hunger as a game mechanic ever been well implemented? Hunger has only ever been an inconvenience in any game I've played that I can think of.

I enjoyed the survival mode in the first dead rising. You had to eat or drink but it did not really seem like a chore at a mall I guess.

I usually don't like the constraint but I'm okay with Subnautica's survival mode

I don't think hunger was done badly in MGS3. It wasn't an inconvenience as much as it is in other games, since all it did was make any action you do drain stamina drain faster than if you didn't eat. If you wanna stay at the top of your game, you gotta eat.

In CoC Revamp if you even count that as a game, adding hunger forces you to eat and every single food changes your body in some way, so it's kinda interesting.

No, because it's scaled down to requiring to eat every 5 minutes.

Monster Hunter handles it in a way I think is good, but it wouldn't translate so well to other genres. Before a hunt, you can eat a full meal, and depending on what you eat you'll get some minor special effects and up to a 50% boost to your base health and max stamina. Your stamina bar effectively doubles as a hunger meter - stamina restores over time regardless, but as the hunt goes on, the maximum size of the bar will slowly depletes in chunks. You need to eat in order to expand the bar again, but the food you eat during a hunt won't give any extra bonuses like the large meal you eat beforehand. Cold areas will cause you to get hungry faster, and you can get skills that increase or decrease the rate as well. Or completely ignore the mechanic using a drink that gives you infinite stamina temporarily.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and MGS3 handled hanger pretty good.

Wew lad. There was lots of effects. It made your aim shaky, it made your stomach growl so enemies would hear you, and sometimes it would make you stop and bend over and clutch your stomach too. It wasn't inconvenient though, especially since food was fucking everywhere. If you went hungry in that game you fucked up bad.

When you say it's only ever been an inconvenience, I hear "this mechanic isn't challenging enough". Apparently other anons hear something different, because all the examples so far have been for lighter, easier to deal with hunger systems.

(checked)
Trips of truth.

in Elona it goes from being an inconvenience early on to being so useful that you forcibly make yourself puke to eat more food whenever you get the chance.

Enjoy your anorexia, where you throw up everything and food abuses your stats instead of training them.

I'd rather wait till my pets are hungry so we can share the gains. My attributes seem to develop faster than my skills anyway, so I don't see any point in grinding them specifically like that.

Or you knew that the spider camo was overpowered as fuck when used right

Fucking hunger ruined whatever remaining stuff I liked in Minecraft.

Of course you'll never see a hunger mechanic implemented well if you only play shitty games. Download some Angband.

Fucking hunger was the best thing Minecraft ever added. No more worrying about scratch damage from falling 3 blocks, no more instant heal

Cubivore

Hunger is the ultimate no fun allowed mechanic. Anyone who thinks it should be implemented ever can suck a dick.

Ehrgeiz's adventure mode has a hunger meter, and all the food is in one of five different categories, which affects your stats. Eat too much of one type of food, and your stats will start to skew, increasing some but reducing others in exchange.

But yeah, nah; any "realism" change is just an excuse to make a game harder or more cumbersome. Best you can do is accept the difficulty hike in stride.

"Making the game harder" is a good thing 99% of the time.

When it comes to hunger, the purpose should be to force the player outside of their comfort zone in order to supply themselves. Most hunger systems don't do a good enough job of this on account of being too damn easy and showering you with food pretty much every step of the game.

I don't mind hunger, I do think repair systems are annoying though.

t. incompetent casual

I guess I should elaborate more. "forcing the player outside of their comfort zone" makes the players take risks, which functions as a setup for potentially fun situations. Otherwise the player is likely to take the most dull, monotonous path to guaranteed success every single time. A well implemented hunger system can really make the difficulty of the game shine through.

Or at least it would, if ever there were a well implemented hunger system. Pathological fear of making games even the slightest bit difficult prevents this from happening in anything but the most obscure titles.

Well that went well.

t. newfag

My problem is how it decays so fast you have to dedicate a few in-game days to stock on food if you want to continue making a shelter.

Doesn't take long at all.

Yeah so basically that single update gave survival mode a few in-game days worth of content where before it had none at all. It's not nearly enough, the whole "build yourself up to survive" ends far too soon in the game, but it's better than nothing.

The real plus though was just balancing health and healing. Prior to the update food was an instant heal, which was OP as shit and made combat a joke. Meanwhile trying to build anything or walk anywhere resulted in 1/2-1 heart damage all the fucking time and you had to decide whether to waste resources healing or just live with it. Now it's not a waste.

The Zwei games actually feature an experience system based on what you eat. If you save food, you can later change it for food that grants you even more experience, resulting in the player trying to level up as less as possible.

Also Zwei II will be released soon for Steam and GOG.

In vanilla Stalker you quite literally never need to worry about food beyond just making sure you have some with you. There's no scarcity or difficulty related to it, on the contrary you will want to make sure you don't carry too much and take up that carry weight.
With mods like Call of Misery food is more of an issue and for quite long into the game. Clean food is rare and expensive, whereas unclean food like (cooked) mutant meat gives you radiation. You need to either be able to withstand the damage to your health or use radiation removal items like alcohol, clean water or cigarettes.