Will food and hunting be useful in The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim

[Visitator]

If you've played Minecraft, as basic as that game is, one thing that's really good about it is how health regeneration is handled. There are no health potions. If you're low on health, you need to actually kill some pigs for meat, go fishing, gather mushrooms or bake cakes. That's something that made that world feel "real", that you actually had to use nature to survive. It was also something that was missing from Oblivion. You just had too many light-weight extremely powerful potions lying around that doing something interesting like hunting deer would serve no practical purpose.

[Wyvern]

Food regenerates health now, too. The purpose of the vegetation is to combine them into alchemy. If you don't want to use the alchemy skill and use raw material, then that's up to you. If you have been paying attention, you would see that food now offers health restoration. And cooked/prepared food is better than "raw" food. It reminds me of food in Fallout series lately. And I bought food in Oblivion all the time for alchemy. I didn't RP at all.

[ApplePowerPC]

I know food regen health, but really. Cooked salmon gives 10 healths, out of what, 1000 health? It still seems pretty pointless to actually cook salmon. That seems like an error in game design, especially since they went through all that trouble to make amazing 3d models for all that stuff. My fighter will eat meat and my mage will drink potions. I guess it will depend on what perks you choose at the end of the day.

[Gunaar]

I m quite certain the health Todd had was purely for the demo. Don't you think that number is a little weird? Food is weightless IIRC. And I'm not sure if we've seen what kind of health can be restored with a "typical" restore health potion yet. Food is going to be a good alternative for people that don't want to be alchemists; food will probably be more common than potions and will be cheaper. I at a standstill don't get what you're worried about.

[MacIntel]

I hope cooking is more useful because I want to play a Ranger/Hunter character that lives out in the wilderness and hunts his own food to survive. I also hope that they make sleeping a little harder to do out in the field or make it replenish less health so that cooking and potions are needed more often. A hardcore mode would make this part of the game a lot better for me. If you can hunt for the meat, and cook it, then i really hope you can hunt for the pelt and craft it too!

[Common]

I am going by how it worked in Oblivion. I'm wondering why you would go to the trouble to make salmon cookable if there's no actual point in doing so. Unless food scales or only increases a % of your health, food will either be extremely overpowered at the low levels or completely useless after your health is too high. I just think the dynamic of the game would be better if food was your main source or an equal source of health, since hunting would actually be a profitable enterprise. When you kill a deer and find a slab of deer meat it should be a more rewarding experience than "oh, this might get me 2 silver from a vendor."

[desilva]

10% of your health for chomping on a piece of food is hardly useless. Useless in the middle of combat lately, but I don't plan on sitting down for a three course meal across from a bloodthirsty Draugr. Use food outside of combat if you don't cast magic, so as not to waste potions. I hope food and hunting will be meaningful to the game, not just some simple small activity you can do. It would be great if there was a hunter's guild in Skyrim.

[RyanInt]

They don’t seem useless I agree with this dude. 10 Health if you have 100 seems a sweet deal especially when you can probably but 5 Salmon for less than 1 potion, the potion might heal a lot more, but the Salmon is cheaper/easier to get. SO it does work out in the end. Armored skill, Todd did say you can upgrade stuff so, but this time we won't have to worry about getting +5 RADs when consuming cooked meat or eating anything for that matter.