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I voted "no" because I can remember how annoying this was in Ultima IV. Besides, it's one step from requiring you to go to the toilet, sleep, bathe... Frankly, these are really just unnecessary levels of detail, even for an RPG.

There's a fine line between immersive and irritating.

 

I voted no, because I remember Net Hack.

 

Another No vote here. If I wanted to worry about telling characters to eat, drink etc. I would play the Sims.

If they did implement it so that you had to just be carrying food/drink and the characters would eat automatically this would just make it so that you ended up having the hassle of shopping for food and worrying about the space/weight in your inventory as you hauled around vast quantities of it. Been there, done that, it was not fun.

 

Having carped at Ultima IV, one redeeming aspect pf the need to feed in Ultima VII was that you could kill animals for food. Granted, the implementation was somewhat comical at times (deer produced 5 legs of venison, you could use the Pickpocket spell to suck the meat out of animals without apparently harming them in any way, and chickens seemed to be made of beef, that sort of thing), but when Iolo started piping up with "I'm starving!" you could open up a can of whoop-ass on the nearest deer, and hey presto! Food for 5! And, this being an Ultima, you could also bake bread. Which was entertaining for, ooh, almost half a second, when you realised that you could use buckets of blood in the dough rather than water.

But other than that, it was just a pain in the arse, really.

 

LOL Magpie. You'd have to make it entertaining, like having to visit dodgy food bars, and possibly getting sick if you were so stingy you went to the cheap food outlet.

 

I voted that it depended on the implementation.
But I probably lean more to a no unless it can be done without being irritating.

In Betrayal at Krondor the characters automatically ate once a day. Just had to find them food. That wasn't hard in BaK. Also, IIRC when they were traveling between scenes they didn't eat no matter how long it took.

I do see it as more of a fun thing rather than something that should be a necessity. I'm with Harbourboy. Make it entertaining. Sometimes maybe causing trouble. I like it in BG I & II when my adventurers have had a hard battle and we get to an Inn with good accomodations. They get the best and once in a while I think 'too bad they can't have a decent meal'.

If I were to put required eating in a game I would do the following-I think.

1) Make it automatic.
2) A shared inventory so that the player wouldn't have to worry about who had how much.
3) Make sure there was enough food to be bought or found so that no one starved to death.

 

It worked in the good old Diablo-clone "Dark Stone". Adds a little to the mood, that's all. But it worked.