Drop the numbers from the UI?

[Ruruwawa]

Quite a few of the suggestions I've seen from players can be paraphrased as "the game doesn't match real life experience closely enough."  One variant is personal preference, say a specific brand of rifle.  IMO we can leave that kind of personalization for mods in the future.  Another variant is missing survival techniques.  I think Hinterland may add some of these over time, starting with the ability to drag a carcass that's coming in the next update.

A really common complaint, especially from new players, can be summed up is "defies common sense."  It usually comes down to stuff like kcal/kg, how many liters of water I need to drink, how much this weighs, etc.  Numbers.  I'm not surprised people feel this way and I'm certainly not criticizing.  It's common sense to rely on real life numbers when the TLD feels so real and in-game guidance is so scant.  But when those real life numbers don't yield the expected results in the game it creates a sort of cognitive uncanny valley, harming immersion.

Personally I feel the best thing for TLD is to simply take the numbers away.  Especially weight, calories, temperature, wind speed - things you'd need an instrument to know.  It's survival -- let me judge the size and condition of things by eye-balling them.  Keep the consequences of being cold or hungry or overweight, but communicate those factors in a non-numeric way.  

I know it's a big change for those of us who have played the game a lot, but I think we can make the adjustment.  And it's a great change for new players -- more intuitive with fewer "wth I just ate 3kg of venison!" reality-defying disconnects.