Extra Punctuation: Why Regenerating Health Sucks

[WanderingFool]

I found from watching several playthroughs of Dues Ex, that I prefer their use of health. You can find FA kits, you can replenish at medical robots, and you can even get a augment that regens your health by consuming Bio-electrical energy. This probably wouldn't work in COD, of course, but still a decent system.

 

[omicron1]

I agree that regenerating health alone is a pretty poor game mechanic; I don't think, however, that it is without its uses in a discerning design. For instance, I'm working with a triple-mode system in my own pet RPG/action-adventure project:
1. Regenerating health in order to allow you to fight each enemy on essentially even ground - this is, je pense, an important function to have, as it can keep you from getting truly stuck in a long string of fights.
2. Wounds system (think Dragon Age: Origins) to give some consequence to poor blocking/dodging/fighting skill. Wounds should matter, but not leave you completely ineffective.
3. Energy/food system to give you a resource to manage. Fighting, running, and doing things take energy; energy recharges slowly but drains your "stomach," which you must keep full by eating. If you're starving, you can't fight.

 

[PopcornAvenger]

I liked Bioshock, where not only did you use health kits and stations to heal yourself, the enemy did, too. Well, at least the health stations. Until I sabotaged them. muhahaha!

I like the old school health bar & kits. Why fix something that's not broken? Dead Space does it pretty craftily, as it's a health monitor system resembling your spine, I rather liked that - it didn't detract from the game's immersion, but fit into it.

Don't like the regenerating health systems, I agree, they are less fun.

 

[Xanadu84]

Regenerating health does make a lot more sense in puzzly games like Portal and Mirror's Edge.

Entitled to your opinion sure, but frankly, Yahtzee is just plain wrong here.

What an odd thing to say.

If you disagree with someone, you can just say it without this weird "I give you permission to have this opinion" thing that people seem to like doing.

It's not that odd. There's often times hate over opinions, and what people personally like. Someone tells someone that they are dumb for liking something, for example. That is wrong. Yahtzee likes a certain type of game: Games with hit point systems instead of regeneration. If that's your thing, more power to you. I will not criticize an individuals taste. However, Yahtzees tastes say absolutely nothing about the validity of regenerating health as a whole.

I for example don't like peanut butter. I can say that I don't like peanut butter. But the fact that I don't like peanut butter means absolutely nothing to anyone else. If there was poop in a jar of peanut butter, I could say that, "This peanut butter is bad because it has poop in it". And I would have an excellent point about the peanut butters quality. If I just said that peanut butter is bad, im not adding anything to any meaningful discussion. In this article, Yahtzee isn't pointing to poop in the peanut butter, he is saying that peanut butter is gross.

 

[RUINER ACTUAL]

The luck system would be great in a shooter. You're running from cover to cover while under fire, and the more you get shot at, the more likely you are to get killed.

 

[Michizane]

the thing with those ideas is, all of them can work, including the regenerating health bar system.
Like so many things it all just depends on implementation, and there are a lot of ways to screw them all up.

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

I actually prefer regenerating health. I feel like a health bar takes me out of the experience, while regenerating health keeps the game flowing and moving forward. Nothing is less fun than getting blown away over and over just because you made a mistake 2 rooms back and there's no health kits nearby.

 

[JMeganSnow]

I'm not terribly fond of the instant-regen-at-end-of-combat in the Dragon Age series, personally. There's absolutely no incentive to try and push your party to the limit so that you're not taking massive damage during the fights, because you only have to make it to the end of THIS fight and everything's fine.

Contrast this with other games where you have to use potions or rest (although the resting mechanic has been mangled in some games to basically be a post-combat reset button, so it's little different from instant-fix) in order to restore lost health/mana/whatever. Taking a lot of damage in THIS fight can mean you'll be ill-equipped to handle THAT fight later on. So it's a lot more fun to look for strategies where you don't get hurt.

And the thing is--games that push you into "I must prevent myself from getting hurt" have a gameplay mechanic that actually increases immersion to a certain degree. Because all that damage you've been taking MEANS something. Some of the pain of combat gets communicated. It's not all completely detached.

 

[VichusSmith]

When I think about the games I played before regenerating health having health packs strewn all over a battlefield, I'm glad that we have this type of health recovery now. It's not realistic, but eventually we'll get there.

I think ideally you would either make a game where your character is armored up, the luck system that Yahtzee suggested, or a mix of recovery items, some health regeneration, and some sort of minigame where you or a medic character patches you up.

 

[Sampler]

Been playing Fable III recently and feel the same - what was the problem with Fable II's food/potions? It even added a layer, food makes you fat (or thin in celeries case) but is cheaper and more common then potions.

Also the loss of the health bar has quite peeved me off.

 

[TriggerHappyAngel]

Personally I've always thought, in a realistic game, health should be replaced by a "luck" system. When the game calculates that a bullet is about to hit you, it corrects the trajectory so it doesn't, and you lose a bit of your luck bar. Then when it runs out you finally get hit by a single bullet and go down crying like a big fat girl.

Spoiler: My Answer

Take my money and create that shit :O

 

[Thaluikhain]

Regenerating health by running around was (sorta) done in Giants: Citizens Kabuto, where Delphi recovers by immersing herself in deep water...and normally has to run round to avoid being shot, or swim way out. She can't use weapons or anything while in the water as well, it's one or the other.

It was actually pretty annoying, really, IMHO.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

because in a truly realistic game you wouldn't be able to continue after getting shot once, and any game that doesn't let you make any mistakes isn't going to be much fun for anyone except insane obsessive no-hit-runners.

Like Trilby: The Art of Theft? Or Super Meatboy? or...quite a few "Life" based games.

Hidden and Dangerous and most of your vaunted "Stealth" games rely on you having to run like hell from a single dangerous encounter.

 

[jman11288]

Yahtzee,

I can definately agree that regenerating health is overused, but I can see why so many developers use it. It's a cheap, easy way to keep the game moving at a good pace. Today's gamers are fickle, impatient people who don't want to spend even 30 seconds diverting from the path foreward to hunt for a health pack. And when they press on without the benefit of a full health bar they get gunned down over and over again leading to frustration and quitting the game. It's lazy, but unfortunately it pleases the low standards of Call of Duty players.

That said, I think you're absolutely right about tying to find new ways to restore a player's health. However, I believe a combination of systems would work as well. I know everyone likes to pick on Halo (for some reason), but I think Bungie had the most effective health system with the first game and thankfully brought it back with Reach. You have your shield, which will always regenerate as long as you're careful, and you're actual health that will immediately give away to one or two shots. You could say that is like any other shooter, but the difference is that you still need to hunt down health packs for maximum survivability. You still get that feeling of triumph after you visciously beat four brutes to death with an empty energy sword handle while your shield is broken, but never really feel like you HAVE to search for health packs in order to continue. It's still a good idea, but not required.

 

[Flauros]

Believe it or not, i had a similar idea to yahtzee's about that "luck" system. you could have a character who is considered "very lucky" and as he's getting shot at, the bullets whiz by or he happens to dodge them. once your luck bar runs out though, its close to curtains for you. you would have a very limited health bar and once the bullets started hitting you, it would be realistic and you would die in one or two shots.

I thought he automatically dodges or absorbs a punch by leaning into it, but hell get tired of doing that eventually.....

 

[Triforceformer]

I'll be honest and say that which system is better depends entirely on the individual game. Half-Life 2, a game with health packs/stations, works because of the way the game is paced and how the atmosphere is set. Gordon Freeman mending his fractured bones by standing on them would just feel off. In Duke Nukem Forever, health regen would work because it helps the player feel as powerful as Duke is; able to take bullets like they're candy...or some other metaphor. It also helps that the health bar is named an "EGO" bar. Duke Nukem's huge-ass EGO can deflect bullets and lasers, and absorb pipe-bomb explosions. That alone justifies the regenerating health. For me at least.

But it's not like DNF just gave up its exploration factor by going with EGO. Searching around for interactive novelties, executing "bleeding out" enemies, etc, inflates the overall EGO. So rather than searching for health packs to mend your wounds, you find say for example, a "Balls of Steel" pinball machine. If you get the high score, your overall EGO becomes larger so that you'll have a better chance at surviving future encounters. Yes it's still regenerating health, but it's regenerating health that accounts for the lack of depth that would come from just having the system and nothing else.

Not that this won't stop Yahtzee from giving an almost inevitably negative review of DNF. Yes he's giving it a blank slate, but DNF is daring to not adhere religiously to the way FPSes used to be. That, combined with (possible) DN3D-based rose-tinted glasses, might paint death for the game in his review. It won't matter how good the overall product is, or how old-school the game is designed. He'll decry it almost solely for regenerating health and other modern mechanics, people will forget about his "Praise by exception" policy, and the sheepier of his fans will blindly avoid the game like the plague.

I'm not saying that "All classic" FPSes are bad, but that my philosophy is that the extremes should not be the standard. Whenever people talk about FPSes, they either say "All modern mechanics" or "All old-school mechanics", with no possibility of any kind of middle-ground. DNF is finding a nice balance between old-school action a modern-day action from what can be seen. For me, it'll most likely make the game even better. But for someone like Yahtzee, who seems to prefer "All old-school and nothing else", will probably hate it.

So I guess what this whole wall boils down to is this: It's not the mechanics, it's how they are used and what the game is like. Regenerating health would have been terrible in Half-Life, but health packs in Bulletstorm would have killed the gameplay pacing.

 

[Falseprophet]

I'm not terribly fond of the instant-regen-at-end-of-combat in the Dragon Age series, personally. There's absolutely no incentive to try and push your party to the limit so that you're not taking massive damage during the fights, because you only have to make it to the end of THIS fight and everything's fine.

Contrast this with other games where you have to use potions or rest (although the resting mechanic has been mangled in some games to basically be a post-combat reset button, so it's little different from instant-fix) in order to restore lost health/mana/whatever. Taking a lot of damage in THIS fight can mean you'll be ill-equipped to handle THAT fight later on. So it's a lot more fun to look for strategies where you don't get hurt.

And the thing is--games that push you into "I must prevent myself from getting hurt" have a gameplay mechanic that actually increases immersion to a certain degree. Because all that damage you've been taking MEANS something. Some of the pain of combat gets communicated. It's not all completely detached.

On the contrary, I like that system. It's best of both worlds. It means each individual fight can be tailored as a challenging tactical encounter, instead of having most fights be throwaway random encounters with disposable mooks. And I still needed to stock a big chunk of my inventory with healing potions with this system; imagine I needed five times as many plus a bunch of Phoenix Down-equivalents. It was a refreshing change from almost every other RPG I've played.

And there have been plenty of times in tougher fights where I was down to one party member, who couldn't spam healing because the potion or spell was on cooldown, and basically had to kite (or engage, if a melee character was the sole survivor) the remaining enemies with hit & run attacks, hoping to drop them before they got in the killing blow. I was on the edge-of-my seat for those.

 

[pigmy wurm]

I also have issues with the health regen system in most games. I liked the first halo a lot where you had a small regenerating buffer but you could still get stuck in a situation where you have a tinny sliver of health and a thin layer of shields protecting you from a bunch of elites. I really wish more people used it, reach sort of pretends too, but I can never be certain when your health will magically regenerate and when it will stay badly damaged.

One thing I could see working well is a much slower and more dynamic regeneration system. Give a player a meter that heals a tick of health every time it is filled up. Standing around causes it to fill slowly, moving causes it to fill a bit faster, shooting at people increases it even faster, and killing someone gives you a bigger boost. You could even have a healing item that, instead of just giving you health, it supercharges your regeneration meter for a short period of time.

 

[FogHornG36]

Ouch! i got shot, can we have a time out guys from this fire fight so i can go look for health box, Its also to help teach people if they end up getting shot, then that is not were you want to be, and you need to stand somewhere else, or pay better attention without slowing the game down too much or making you leave your npcs all by themselves.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I agree. I don't play shooters often, but where's the challenge if all I have to do when I'm low on health is go back to a room I've already cleared and suck my thumb for a few minutes?