[QUOTE=RikohZX;50826788]Problem is that visual meters are an easy way out and often come with the fact that they're meant to be a primary focus for the player, thus why they're often so short and constantly needing to be refilled. Without actual gauges and meters verifying your character's needs and conditions, you need visual and audio cues. This is all theoretical on my part; a stomach grumbling could, for example, be an early warning sign of hunger, followed in due time by less stamina and decreasing capability. Sleepiness is your character perhaps yawning, or their vision sort of having a little slack or blurriness to indicate that their head isn't all there. Thirst is probably the trickiest to figure, I can't actually think of a good idea for it. But this sort of stuff takes effort and careful balancing, something a lot of survival game devs just don't feel like doing.
But then I was never much of a fan of the genre. Things like character's physical and mental needs should be supplementary to the experience in a beneficial way for gameplay, as Jim says in the video; I don't really go for games that are pretty much all about the survival and maintaining your various needs ontop of your health too.[/QUOTE]
I used a mod for skyrim once that did that and it was annoying. Hearing my character's stomach grumbling in the middle of conversations or other shit was frustrating. Same if you were let's playing the game and were trying to talk only to be interrupted by your character loudly coughing or whatever. It was less immersive to me than meters funnily enough, because rather than me being connected to my character, it made me instead feel like my character was telling me it's hungry. Unless it were to actually give the physical me a sensation of hunger it wouldn't work in my opinion.
Personally, I have no problem with meters. Having actual information is just plain helpful. Does it necessarily make sense? No, but it's an acceptable break from reality. FPS games have used health meters/numerical information for decades and it makes just as little sense, yet we all complain when we have abstract shit like jelly vision and the screen going grey to inform us.
I really don't get this sentiment. People can tell when they are hungry/thirsty/tired/sick/hot/cold/hurt. You don't SEE it as a bar or percent. You FEEL it. The "meter" (for a lack of better word) is in a form of how intense the feeling of hungry/thirsty/tired/sick/hot/cold/hurt you are.
This feelings have to be presented to the player in either video or audio form. All you're doing with getting rid of visual cues and replacing them with sound cues is replacing one unrealistic "meter" with another unrealistic one.
In my opinion that's even more unrealistic and immersion breaking.
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