Extra Punctuation: Why Regenerating Health Sucks

[Wondermint13]

Hard to dissagree with any one who can write that much! But his best point is that regenrating health does turn a game into nothing more than a sequence of the same events..
Atleast if you play through a game without generating health more than once you have a better chance of experiencing it in a whole different way, It can turn a simple stage of point and shoot into something of a fight to survive.
And a True gamer would appreciate that more than playing the same thing over and over in the same way, the only difference being more bullets will hit you and you'll spend more time ducking behing stuff. Thats not what I would call a different setting atal.

Ta Yahtzee

 

[Kyn8]

'Health' and arguably ammo levels / weapon availability are pretty much the only measures used to give players feedback about condition of characters.
Pen & paper games have most often taken a chance on what few variations there have been (to the best of my knowledge) but they seem to always end up either being unwieldy to implement & maintain from a game developers side of the fence or players have found it a challenge to understand the gravity of the more complex information that they need to make important decisions on either for the way it's conveyed or that the conditions can suddenly overpower an otherwise balanced encounter.

It can't be all that hard to come up with reasonable resources to manage, the other half of the answer though is to make encounters about more than applying your weapon to everything in sight.

 

[domicius]

Slow news week I suppose.

Nothing wrong with regenerating health. It cut out the old "reload to try and survive fight with full health" BS we had to go through with shooters-of-yore.

Does low health add more tension? Maybe. Depends. Perhaps.

Does regenerating health let you keep playing? Definitely.

 

[Darkwolf22]

That luck thing is a good idea. Im actually surprised Yahtzee left out the Healing system in Far Cry 2. that was an interesting way to go about healing yourself, dig the bullet out, inject some morphine into your arm and run away. Of course it still requires to hide behind cover and stand still, but at least your actually preforming some sort of action.

And while not realistic in the slightest, its at least more believable that your characters a drug addict, rather then wolverine with a gun.

 

[Skratt]

Health by station is probably the best implementation I've seen, with maybe a few random health packs to be found - either off of enemies or in supply closets. It didn't seem bad to me in ME or ME2 when my health regenerated, future magix and all, but one of the many problems that led me to quit Gears before I even reached the half-way mark, was the fat space marine regenerating health.

 

[tweedpol]

This has probably been said, but, in many many games WITH health bars (eg. Half life 2), I end up constantly quickloading every time I lose more than about 20 health, which is a bit like having regenerating health but more boring and cheat-y.

See, this right here is the point where it's gotten ridiculous. I don't consider myself hardcore by any means, but I think if you can't force yourself to continue in a game, any game, when you've only lost 20 health out of 100 (good God, that's less than two health packs ? and those things ain't scarce!), you really need to man the fuck up. Seriously, people like you are the reason developers are scared to make games where hiding in the corner sucking your thumb doesn't make everything all better.

Aw, thanks dude, mature way of expressing your opinion! You just don't see it often enough on a forum. There are several reasons why I reload, unrelated to a failure to 'man the fuck up', maybe I thought I could handle that encounter faster, more cool-ly, without losing so many of those asinine allies, and these things usually correlate with losing less health. All of these except the last one would also apply to a regen system. I'm aware that I'm doing this to myself with my own perfectionism, and I don't remember complaining to any developers that it was ruining my game experience, but it is one more thing which triggers the dreaded quickload reflex. And, being okay with losing more than a bit of health in an encounter seems inevitably to lead to bits where you have only say 20 left, and end up doing the quickload spamming anyway. If you reply to this, try to refrain from ad hominem attacks on my manliness (hey, try giving it up for Lent or something!)

 

[iamthe1]

I really don't see what the problem is: I've played enough FPSs with my ass glued to a wall, bullets flying everywhere, shit exploding, etc., and all I can think is:

"Please don't let another bullet hit me! PLEASE! I'm so close to recovering health! If the Gods will let me live another half-second, I'd let a donkey ra--GODDAMNIT! WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU COME FROM, YOU ASSHOLE?!"

So I fail to see how regeneration must detract from congruence of gameplay or from his precious "eh-mur-shun." As he said, it's not about realism, it's about how well it's integrated into the game, and many games that I've played do this quite well. In fact, health packs can be positively detrimental to many combat-heavy games. The game that got me into next-gen FPS was Vegas 2. If I had had to look for health packs in that game, it would have been intolerable. As it was, it was fucking AWESOME!!!

I think that developers need to decide what works for the game they're making. And granted, most of them DON'T. That's the real issue. "Oh fuck! This crap game that sold well did it! We have to do it!" That brings everything down.

But Yahtzee knows that already.

 

[Tuqui]

I must say at first I was "what you talking about Yahtzee?" as I finished reading i understood what you meant, and was pretty similar to what I though already, also I think one could make a great game just taking little ideas of each of your EP and ZP.

 

[Mr. Socky]

Or you could go the Brothers in Arms route and if a player hits a checkpoint with no health/ammo left and they die a few times, they get the option to restart at the checkpoint with full health and ammo. Since, you know, even though war isn't fair, a game should be. And thats the actual message when Brothers in Arms gives you the option. In Road to Hill 30 at least.

There are far too many posts to see if somebody else has mentioned this yet, but speaking of Brother's in Arms, Hell's Highway uses the exact system that Yahtzee describes. You don't have regenerating health, the screen just turns red to indicate that it's extremely likely that you'll get hit. I certainly hope that somebody mentioned this, given that there are 7 pages worth of comments.

 

[Asparagus Brown]

Though I don't think it's appropriate to all games, I think regenerating health is a good system. Games that rely on you having low health, horror games, for example, lose a sense of thrill if it's so easy to regain health. Other games like shooters benefit from it greatly, I think. It allows the developers to balance the each encounter by knowing exactly how much health you're going to have previous to reaching it. It, coupled with a good auto-save, also encourage gamers to try new approaches to a situation, since, if it doesn't work, there's no real loss (this is the issue people opposed to the system think is the problem), and they won't be punished for one rash or experimental strategy.

While games shouldn't always be about challenge, the ones that are should be fair in their challenge. The regenerating health allows developers to create a fair challenge and gradual increase in difficulty by knowing what health you will be on at the beginning of any given section. This, of course, would be the same as having the health regenerate only after an encounter or, even throwing health packs around at the end. But if the player's going to be collecting them after every fight, anyway, it may as well happen automatically.

 

[TheAngryMonkey]

I am not a big fan of heath regeneration either, you can just throw you ass into the wind get as much damage down range as possible then dive back into cover.

I also find a lot of games now really obscure your vision when you get hit, I understand the idea behind it but you only take a couple hits and you cant see. Trying to find the guy that killing you, becomes impossible.

I miss the heath bar.

Nothing was sweeter then beating a boss with one notch of heath.

 

[carpathic]

Gotta disagree with you on this one Yahtzee. I remember playing bushido blade where you were legitmately hurt in battles and it was the LEAST FUN GAME EVER.

I mean, when we talk about adding realism to a game, perhaps we could move out the part where your average "hero" kills more people than Gilles de Rais?

If you're gonna do some killin' you gotta have a lot of health.

 

[ZaxqZombie]

play flashpoint dragon rising or just get FP: red river when it comes out if you want a health system that affects your movement and ability to fight depending on where you're hurt

 

[Grickit]

Regenerating health has made multiplayer so much slower because after each skirmish you sit behind cover and wipe the strawberry jello off your face.

I miss the days when you were down in the red on your health gauge (remember those?) and had to fight the way back to your command post through the squad of clones trying to capture it so that you could maybe heal a few seconds from the medical droid before they respawned.

Things were so much faster and games encouraged epic ballsyness versus pansying around after every engagement. We had jetpacks and dodge-rolls! We literally pitched C4 at each other we were so manly. Cover? Chest-high walls? What name so?

Don't get me wrong. I don't mind a slow, tactical advancement across a three mile long map from Bad Company 2 now and again. I just wish that Battlefield and Call of Duty hadn't choked out the entire rest of the shooter industry.

In other news totally not related to the second and third paragraphs: Where is Battlefront 3?

 

[Barry93]

I've always thought the best health system was in Resistance: Fall of Man (not to be confused with that abomination call Resistance 2), where you had 4 health bars next to each other. If you took damage, you would lose health in the first bar. Should the first bar empty out completely, health would start being deducted from the second. If the first bar did not completely empty, it would regenerate after not the player didn't take damage for a few seconds, but if it did, health would not regenerate in that bar, and could only be restored by finding health on the ground, which was few and far between.

Because Hale was infected with the Chimearon virus, this system actually made a lot of sense. Before he was infected, health did not regenerate at all. Of course, Resistance 2 came out with the standard "go suck your thumb in a corner while your health is restored to 100%" system; at least it atill used a health bar.

 

[Mortuorum]

I actually don't mind regenerating health in most games. I don't remember ever looking back at a game and saying, "man, that was a great game, but I really wish I'd spent more time on health management."

A also take a certain amount of umbrage with Yahtzee's argument that regenerating health provides a disincentive to exploration. If the only rewards a developer can provide for exploration are health packs and ammo, then they're a pretty lousy developer and the game is probably deficient in other ways as well.

 

[teknoarcanist]

I know it was just the result of a poorly designed realtime menu system, but I think the first Kingdom Hearts game kind of stumbled onto brilliance with its health system. Healing restores HP, but costs MP. You gain MP by attack -- which means you're probably going to take some damage. And the actual act of healing is this difficult little button maneuver you're struggling to perform at high speed (shifting through a mini-menu with the right analog stick) while sprinting away from the boss. It made for a very good tug-of-war between attack and defense, and I don't think I've seen anything that was quite as deep and elegant since.

 

[bushwhacker2k]

The luck system sounds kind of interesting actually, in a way it's similar to Sonic in that you collect large amounts of luck(rings) and if you would be hit and killed, you'd instead lose luck(rings), I suppose holes are very unlucky things then, as the amount of luck(rings) would be irrelevant.

I think a semi-realistic system based mostly on stealth in which you would die from one or two gunshots but you have a cloning device nearby would be cool

 

[Haro]

I have played with three health systems that I think work pretty well:

1. Halo 1 and Halo: Reach. This was mentioned before, but I think its good to have partial regeneration, but also health packs. In Reach especially, I liked how your health could essentially be rounded up to the nearest quarter or so, and you had shields, so that you would definitely feel the effects of consecutive combat, but it wouldn't leave you with those annoying scenarios of being stuck in a fight with 1 health and no way to get it back.

2. Resident Evil 4. I loved the herbs and health sprays. In fact, I loved everything about RE4, but the health combined with the inventory system really was great. You could compensate for a lack of skill by having an abundance of health items, but supplies were ultimately limited, and so was your capacity to carry. You would also have to make decisions between ammo, guns, and health. I won't mention Resident evil 5, because that game took the inventory system I loved and murdered it...

3. World of Warcraft/TF2. You have a health bar that, in WoW at least, is capable of recharging itself, but very, very slowly. The process can be sped up through items, like food or bandages, as well as potions or healing spells in combat. Team Fortress 2 actually is somewhat similar to this, in that medics can heal you, you can pick up health packs, or, in some cases, use class specific weapons or items to regain health, but at a cost.

I will say that I appreciated recharging health when it first started out, just because games always used health packs before then and it got a bit old. Now, however, we once again see the industry largely showing no creative spark and just using the most common techniques.

Recharging health can be good, but you need to be creative with and critical of it, rather than just making the same old system that has been used in nearly every fps since 2004.

 

[beema]

I'm inclined to agree with this opinion. Even when it comes to online multiplayer. I think I enjoy CS:S hitpoint system a lot more than COD's regenerating health. I mean there were those moments when you were down to one hitpoint, last man on the team and manage to defuse a bomb or something. Very exhilarating and rewarding. You don't get that with regenerating health. Or if you wing someone, you can hunt them down and finish them off and have the advantage, which means your initial winging wasn't a complete waste. In COD if you don't finish someone off within a second or two of winging them, it's as if you never even hit them because they next time you meet they will have full health, which feels very cheap.