How would food work in a game like fallout, when you needed to get somewhere that was a 2-3 weeks hike? Yeah, you would have to stop twice on the way and it would be just plain annoying. BaK's food thingy was nothing but annoying. You had a limited supply and it wasn't about pawning loot, but inventory space.
Well, Fallout wouldn't fare well, not so much on the food count, but with water. That little Vault 13 flask isn't going to get you very far across the parched wasteland. But it doesn't necessarily demand realism, nor direct management. It's not like you had to manually update the little "n days left!!" post-it. Food and water supplies can be decremented automatically during travel, and outdoorsman could possibly be tied into the finding of adequate nutriment along the way.
But, I don't think it would really be appropriate to Fallout. The world is so immense and sparsely populated that it would be pretty unreasonable to demand the player consume food and water, since they tend to spend a lot of time more than a week or two's travel away from a
known supply of food and water. I think it's an itch better left unscratched with Fallout's current incarnation.
Thinking beyond that, and into the theoretical though, there's some interesting aspects to the idea of drinking and eating irradiated food and water.
In Betrayal at Krondor, your annoyance could quite rightly be termed "depth" by another player. All those rations getting in the way of your loot? Then you have a serious choice to make. Annoyance at that is like a kid throwing a hissy fit because their parents couldn't afford the gift they asked Santa to get them. You're not getting what you want, so you're pissed.
But what's wrong with a game saying "Tough luck, inventory management is an issue you have to deal with!" If nothing else, it's a good life lesson for the kiddies.
People complained about Fallout's time limit, finding Caius Cosades and a whole host of things that I see as legitimate portions of the challenge the game provides. Sometimes I think that a great deal of gamers don't actually want a challenge, they just want to get from start to fininsh with all haste, so they can complain about how short the game was.
I rather have no food in a game than that kind of food thing. Sure different consequences and health status are nice but it all comes down to being annoying.
As I say above, it troubles me that "annoying" aspects such as food management are deemed such because players are unwilling to face any kind of real consequence. It's the same line of thinking that leads to the Elder Scrolls' "jack of all trades, master of all guilds, no limit to what I can do, because I am the fucking uebermensch!" shit.
I think a few of us are on different pages here. To me "Production Values" is more an encompassment of a theoretical end result than a measure of production quality. Saying "I want every character to have full VO" is a high production value, regardless of how shitty it might turn out to be. Saying "I want a 30 second cutscene as the player enters each town" is likewise a high production value, even if the quality is shite. "I want each map to be individually rendered as a huge fucking bitmap" etc.
And that's exactly what Baldur's Gate had. About 5 CDs worth of high production values. Aspirations to include massive amounts of superfluous content. And in the opinion of the minority we represent here, it was generally of bad quality, and the game would've been better off without it.
But there are folks out there that are more concerned with the fact that all dialogue is voiced, than whether or not any of those voices are competently acted. Just like there are people that are more interested in how pretty something looks than what substance it has. Or the fact that a game has recognised Hollywood B-Actors, rather than the actual end result of their VO sessions.
