Shpongled said:
Personally i thought Halo 1 had it down, don't know why they changed it for the rest.
Bunch of health blocks, which can only be replenished with health packs, and a shield which regens after a moment or two out of combat. Meant you still had to be careful how you played because at 1 health block left you had no leeway once the shield had gone and die as soon as the shield dropped. But you still had some room to manouevre as long you were careful.
This avoided the annoying forced constant reloading of games with no shield, where on higher difficulties you have no health for a while due to lack of health packs, and die all the time to unavoidable shit because your character is bowled over by the force of a violent sneeze. Higher difficulties were so much more fun in Halo than other FPS, where it basically became a process of dying enough times to learn where all the enemies are. Pure static health without regen may be harder, but it can make for some damn tedious gameplay. Throwing a shield on top gives the advantages of both forms of health. and the removes the disadvantages of both.
Honestly i can't fathom why they removed the health aspect from Halo.
Gotta agree with this, Halo CE almost perfectly balanced the two concepts.
Now, personally, I don't mind regenerating health as much as other people seem to. I didn't grow up with Classic FPS's like DOOM or Quake or others, so its not ingrained through nostalgia in my head that "Regenerating health = Shit game". To me, if the game is designed well around whatever health system you have in place, its gonna be fine.
The way I see it (Keeping in mind I'm obviously not a Dev, so its speculation on my part), in games where you have a limited amount of health that does not regen, level designers probably need to balance what kind of enemies you face in what areas vs the amount of health just lying around. Enough to keep the game feeling challenging, without feeling like it just straight up gimps you if you made a mistake and took a few bullets to the face 30 minutes back.
In games WITH regenerating health, it seems like you have a bit more leeway in terms of design, but to keep the challenge up, they need to throw smarter and tougher enemies into the mix to keep players on their toes, and not just lying down eating gravel until they regen their health. Enemies that keep you moving and try to flush you out of cover. This is what the later Halo titles get right, and what I feel Mass Effect 2 & 3 do great with as well. (Though, ME 3 has a pseudo-healthpack system with Medigel) and what something like Call of Duty gets wrong. (No, I'm not saying that CoD is/is not a good game, not gonna open that particular can of worms today lol) In the later Halo titles and ME 2 & 3, enemies are pretty smart, and on harder difficulties, enemies dont just get more bulletspongey, but get even smarter. Games that don't use the regenerating health system well will throw slogs of easy enemies that do nothing but shoot at straight angles toward you with the occasional grenade, or one huge hulking bulletsponge.