As I understand it, being hot or cold mostly depends on the ambient temperature and whether or not you are wearing too much or not enough clothing to compensate. This makes cold weather a simple annoyance at having to put on another layer of clothes to make it have no effect. I think instead having warmer clothes on should just increase the amount of time it takes to become cold/freezing etc and a heat source such as a fire would be needed to actually get warm again. This would make more sense and would help to make winter something you need to prepare for rather than ignoring it almost completely.
Y’know, we have this thing called body heat. It’s one of those important little details game designers like to include for verisimilitude.
Temperature and how it interacts with the wold around the player (and the player themselves) is definitely something that could use some looking into. Luckily we’ve got a fair number of people already on the job, so hopefully this shouldn’t take too much longer to become more realistic.
The average human body has a temperature near 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. During strenuous activity, this rapidly increases, with a healthy temperature being near around 105 degrees (there about, its been a bit since AP bio). Due to the structure of the human circulatory and the composition of the human body, energy must be used to both increase AND decrease temperature. In the case of decreasing temperature, the majority of heat released either escapes from a network of blood vessels on the top of the head and through contact with any external surfaces (generally reserved for the feet except in cases of sleep or rest).
If we are going full realism mode here, your body doesn’t actually give a rats ass if your arms are cold as long as your core body temperature is maintained. It would be uncomfortable and lethargic, but frostbite is unlikely in all but extreme circumstances (don’t pour water on yourself in a blizzard). Also, head covering would have a direct “health” warming effect for the entire body (doesn’t make it more pleasurable) while not wearing shoes would be a rather large penalty.
Also, the last bio class I took was AP bio and that was 2 years ago. So, yeah, if we are going realistic here, you’e going to want additional research.