Not trying to bash the game just asking the question. Could cooking have been done better in this game?

Here is my thought on it:

I like that they added this to the game, I did not like food items being alchemal ingredients (like they did in Oblivion), but I think it could have been done better, and here is why. All the recipies do is increase stamina or health, by a minimal amount (I think the best recepie is 15 points). So at lower levels this is good I guess, but with the abundance of health potions that can be found in the game (or bought), after a certain point, the idea of carrying around a 100 venison steaks for a dungeon crawl seems riduculous (not to mention the idea of downing 10 of them during combat when 4 health potions (or less) would do the job. So here is my idea for a solution, I think it would be better if say after not eating for 24 hours, your max health would drop by 1/3, and for each additonal 24 hours another 1/3 drop until you eat something (effectively you could starve your character to death). Now here is where cooking could come in, if your charecter is "hungry" he could just eat an apple or a carrot and resolve the problem, but if he ate a prepared meal (i.e. one of the recipies) it would add a positive effect, such as a 5% bonus to 0ne-handed for the next 8 hours. Each recpie could have its own advantage and more comlicated recipes could provide similar advantages only better (example: eating a venison steak increases one-handed damage by 5%, but venison stew increases damage by 10%). I think this would be better from at least a role-playing perspective, becuase as it stands right now you could theoretically go through the whole game and never eat a meal. Which leads me to another role-playing point in the game that could use improvement, sleeping.

I like that they made the change from Oblivion, where you don't have to sleep to gain a level, as you can now use the level up strategically, but it opens up another point. You can now go through the whole game and never sleep, unless you are looking to get the rested/ well rested bonus. So again, I think this can be fixed in a similar fashion, say if your character has been awake for 20 hours, their stamina would drop by 1/3. Then for every additional 10 hours they go without sleeping another 1/3 drop. If their stamina gets to 0 then make it so they can only move as if they were over-incumbered. Now to help with those long hauls (Solitude to Riften for example) make it so that the player can carry a bed roll in the inventory, then you can stop an camp anywhere along the way. Just drop the bed roll then you can use it and carry on in the morning (maybe though you don't get the rested bonus for camping).

So these are my ideas, do you think they are better than the current system or do you like the way it currently runs?

hardcoe mode = Food is useful. Make it happen Bethesda!

Where are the baking recipes...the oven...with sweet roll theft being such a current crime wave...why can't we make sweet rolls??
Seriously, think food values should at least increase with practice.

Agree with hardcoe mode (able to check off/on dehydration, hunger, sleep requirements, etc.) to make food more useful. It is more there for immersion I suppose and for poor warriors who can't afford potions and can't make them

Cooking is absolutely useless to anyone who doesn't use it just for RP purposes.

It's a wasted mechanic that, without hardcoe mode (and even with it), could have gone to something else.

It is useless outside of roleplaying.

I am a roleplayer.

One thing I don't understand...

Arrows are weightless... but food and ingredients are not...

It's a good idea but it wasn't implemented in a way that makes it useful. I tried it out, saw what it did, then ignored it. I don't play on hardcoe so there is no reason to bother with it at all. But the way I look at it is they put stuff like that in so that people who choose to role play to that degree can utilize it and make their world feel more real. That's one thing I love about how Bethesda makes their games. They give us so many options. Most people probably won't touch it but for some it is a very important feature. It's good to have options. But I do wish it was more useful like adding extra stat boosts over a long time for complicated recipes or something of that nature. It would also be nice if it could be advanced with use or that there were rare recipes to be found that could do something special for your character.

There is some commands and by speculating maybe hard core mode was in the game but got scrapped at some point.

I think New Vegas' hardcoe mode must not have been too overwhelmingly popular, Bethesda was pressed for time, and decided to leave it out (or they didn't want to blatantly copy one of Obsidian's innovations.) I wouldn't complain too much about wasted development time - the exact same system used for recipes is used for smithing, so all it probably took was an afternoon or two of throwing together recipes. As a hardcoe mode modder, I think the game is perfectly set up for needs mods, the foods and the recipe system are in the game and all that remains is to code up a penalty/reward system (or, if you're like me, a painstaking simulation of human physiology.)

That is kind of difficult to swallow.

I have right now around eight hundred arrows, and I can run like the wind with no problem but if I carry fifty mudcrab chitins and about three hundred blue mountain flowers and I cannot walk.

How is ok to carry an obscene amount of arrows? It is strange indeed.

Not true! Venison and Beef Stews, along with Vegetable Soup, were invaluable for those who used shields and power attacks.

I was very disappointed in the cooking system, i was hoping for more. But I would still like it if i could atleast see myself eating somethign when i was at an Inn for something. I mean since it serves no purpose outside of rping, and i know there are animations for it, i see NPCs eating and drinking all the time. It would be cool if my character did those also.

I thought it was fine but very useless. If there was a point to making food then Id cook, i just sell everything.

Although I'm glad that the feature is in, rather than out, it still could have been planned and implemented much better. Even if they didn't use it for a "hardcoe" mode setting (in which I'm glad they didn't), they could have used food to provide X bonus for Y minutes instead. Example:

Beef Stew: 20pts bonus to Heath for 8 hours

Apple Cabbage Stew: 20pts bonus to Magicka for 8 hours

... or something along those lines.

This would have made much more sense (not to mention be more practical) than what it serves in it's current form. Incidentally, this is another feature which I hope to change when the CK is released.

I wish food offered more Healing-over-time and Fortify Stamina effects.

I suspect it was rushed to meet release date. I bet there's a mod that bumps up the benefits of cooked food already. If not, it will probably be made once the CK is out.

I'm sure it was just added for RP reasons so ....no. It's not even important enough to be considered a fail wtf...

I don't suppose there'd be a hardcoe mode dlc down the road that actually makes cooking something useful.

I have never even tried to cook anything. I don't even take food items from dungeons any more since they are nothing more than worthless added weight. If eating was necessary I would say that it was a good thing to have, but since there are hundreds of cure potions to be found just laying around, and you can stop time to drink all of them at once, eating to regain health and stamina is a waste of time.

food should just have better buffs instead of restore 15 health make it resore 15 health and increase max health by 15 for 1 hour.

Not everything in the game world has to have great benefits. Its food for crying out loud....it shouldnt even be healing wounds in the first place let alone making you harder to kill for simply eating a venison chop. I personally love that theres a cooking feature in the game, even if it was there only for 'show', but at least theres some benefit to it.

This quote says it all.

Why have cooking if you're not going to have a good use for the food? Sure, it gives you like 5 pts of health, but are you really going to eat 10 rabbit haunches to gain 50 health in the heat of battle? Give us some realism aspects to the game...eat, drink, and sleep to stay at full stats.

I agree, its a nice addition to make dishes, but the implemenations in making the food and the praticality of concerning yourself could have been done much much better. Rp value shouldnt strictly be the only value ;p

It either needs to provide bonuses that are substantial enough to warrant the time spent, or there needs to be drawbacks for not eating/sleeping. I prefer bonuses.

Vegetable Soup! But yeah, not much depth to the system. Better than I expected though.