Well, you're right about the hunger bar not moving if you stand still, but there is still urgency. It seems a little silly to tell people that, in a game about tactile personal exploration of areas (Finding levers, pushing buttons, picking up items individually, etc), you should tell people to stand still until they've figured out a puzzle. A lot of puzzles do require walking around a bit. With the Tetris puzzle, it's not unreasonable for someone to think that there might be underwater hidden switches to press, or to not know that the map needs to be rotated, resulting in food usage. Unlike the "floor of light" room (I think that's the name?) where you can just look at the in-game map and work out mentally how to properly path across it. That said, even if your characters are "starving", it has no effect on the here and now. It stunts your regeneration mainly. If you starve because you're piecing together a puzzle, then get jumped by mummies, you're in no danger provided you weren't low on health to begin with. So if you need extra long to solve a puzzle, and also run around a lot, you can just not feed your characters until you've solved the puzzle or have given up.Dr.Disaster wrote:You identified the key point of the disagreement: he see's a hunger urgency that is - to be frank - selfmade. Player actions like walking, fighting/spellcasting and thus auto-regenerating health/energy and even resting cause hunger in LoG2 while standing still and doing nothing does not. This is very easy to verify: start a new game and have the party sit in the cage. Now leave for bathroom/kitchen/shopping/whatever and return after some time has passed. You'll find the party still sitting there awaiting your commands without a change on their food bar.Rithrin wrote:I want food to stay. I like how it feels, generally, in Grimrock. Azel doesn't. It's a differing of opinions. Nowhere did he say that he had a problem with finding or gathering food, but his detractors have been repeating this constantly, as if it is the driving force behind his posts. He just doesn't get a good feeling from the combination of puzzle solving and hunger urgency. If you're going crap all over someone, at least represent their opinions correctly. Otherwise, you just look silly sitting around with manure-covered straw men.
Now if players finds a puzzle but miss or don't unterstand it's hints they can always try to brute force them. Azel's statements regarding the Archives and Tetris puzzles reflect that this seems to be his default route. Due to this he moves his party a lot but accomplishes little beside generating hunger. This might cause him frustration but it's after all selfmade.
This is why I think the food system does not detract from puzzle solving (You can starve forever while puzzling, and it doesn't hurt you). The hunger "urgency" I refer to is created by the need to ration food and forecast how much you will need/can carry vs how long you'll be down inside a dungeon. In essence, I don't think the hunger system interacts much, at all, with the Puzzle Game aspect of Grimrock, but only the Dungeon Crawler aspect.
@ you mentioning a flame war