Extra Punctuation: Why Regenerating Health Sucks

[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?

 

[Dectilon]

'Walk it off'-healing actually sounds pretty interesting. Maybe make it so you absorb energy from your close environment so that you can't spin in a circle. It'd change how fights go since you'd have to keep moving to heal, but that also makes it easier for enemies to find you.

 

[kebab4you]

Only problem I have with generating health is that 9/10 time it´s use it refuse to tell me how much I got left! How am I suppose to know how much % health I have left by just looking at something like this;

Spoiler: Kinda big image

 

[darthotaku]

I think Yahtzee forgot "no regenerating health"
just get a decent sized health bar for the entire level and have it replenish when you're in the next level, until then your screwed. If I remember correctly that's what they did with the origional Goldeneye and I felt it was a good system

 

[Popido]

I prefer nothing. Just make it fit.

 

[Mistermixmaster]

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'm genuinely distressed that Yahtzee has thought of my 'luck' system to replace health. For years I thought I was terribly clever to be the only person to have come up with it. Damn you, you behatted semi-Antipodean.

This "Luck" system is nothing new. Brothers in Arms: Hells Highway uses it. It does give the Red Screen effect (not bloodspatter or so though, it's just red to show the threat you're in), but you can turn it off (and it's forced off on Realistic). Basicly, the more dark the red screen goes, the more likely it is that you're going to get hit by that one bullet with your name on it.

"Evidence": Check this video at 2:30-2:45 and 4:05-4:15
<youtube=tgOQ6uF47Mk>

It certainly is a nice system instead of the regenerating bullet-sponge health system.

 

[Mooshman]

I believe one of the best additions to gaming as a whole was regenerating health.

It allowed game designers to carefully craft epic battles as they knew how much life the player had when they faced each encounter, one of the reasons that the first Halo game revolutionised the First Person Shooter genre.

That said, in it's current form many people miss the old days of grabbing health packs, a "luck meter" in my opinion is exactly the same as a health meter, it's just like Duke Nukem Forever's "Ego meter" replacing the original health bar. In the end it's the same thing, just a re-branding.

One of the best ways of implementing regenerating health was Ninja Gaiden 2. They knew that their game was hard and so they could make much more challenging fights in the game, your health regenerated to a point after each major fight depending on your performance. To get back to full health you'd have to use consumable items to top it up.

Why not have something like that in an FPS? it stops the player from hiding behind walls to get their health back and they'd be forced to run around the battle field looking for a medipack or medic. It would mean that they'd have to fight their way out of each confrontation effectively so they could continue to the next area.

Personally I think that would be a much more effective solution.

 

[Citrus]

I think the best health bar I've seen was from Condemned 2. It regenerated, but it was divided into segments and you could only regenerate health within the segment you were on. If you wanted to restore lost segments of the health bar, then you had to use a med kit.

It made it so that if you just barely made it out of a fight alive, you'd still have a fighting chance against the next enemy you encounter, but you'd still be punished for taking so much damage, and you'd still have to scout around for med kits and manage your health.

 

[Quiet Stranger]

I could have told you the regenerating health was overrated and overused a LONG time ago, I miss Health packs and body armor

 

[noogai18]

I always thought that the original Ghost Recon games were great about health. Your characters couldn't take more than a couple of bullets to the torso, and if you got shot in an extremity it'd affect you besides a health hit. Shot in the leg, you move more slowly. Shot in the arm, your aim is thrown off.

 

[footdog]

it isn't good tension when you're at the tail end of Half-Life 1 and you only have 1 FUCKING HEALTH and you fall just little bit and you lose that 1 FUCKING HEALTH. Did that the first time, I hate the last little bit of HL1.

you know there are little pools of sparkly water everywhere that heal you forever without running out all through the end of half life, right? because i can imagine how that would have really sucked if those didn't exist, or, you know, you didn't know they were there.

 

[The Random One]

Extra Credits did a good defence of regenerating health lately. Their point was that it allows you to string together the gameplay more effectively. That is, the devs always know how much health you'll have when you're in the fray (all of it) so every encounter has the desired impact. Is that a bad thing? Insofar as you're comparing it to the 'games allow you to create your own stories' philosophy, yes, it's bad, but I think the problem isn't so much that everyone is doing it but rather than everyone is doing it and forgetting you need to cramp up the difficulty.

Personally, I think Alan Wake did it well. Oh god, regenerating health in a horror game? Really? But since you don't have any green herbs to concern yourself with, when your health is dropping you're toast. Either win the fight already or get the fuck out. Or die, that's an outcome.

It's true though that it's a sign of larger laziness on devs, but it's not to be entirely dismissed.

 

[thereverend7]

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.

You mean like Brothers in Arms:HH ?

Yeah I stand corrected by 2 people. I never played the BiA games so I wasn't aware of that. Was it done well?

 

[KlokwerkSolja]

Yaht, regenerating health means either the player can stand about bored or move on very carefully. Its designed to keep the action fluid and put the choice into the hands of the player as 'player choice' is key to making the game fun, you idiot.

You keep commenting on design principles you don't actually understand. These things exist for a purpose, not just cus some 'idiot' professional AAA developer whose job it is to intrinsically understand games had a brain fart.

I like your reviews, but I?m gaining the opinion that for all your acerbic and admittedly hilarious commentary, you don?t understand the systemic design behind the products you review.