What have gamers got against regenerating health?

[Nieroshai]

Maybe it fits in with arcady shooters like COD and the like, but it absolutely has NO PLACE in any type of semi realistic tactical type shooters for obvious reasons.

As i was discussing with someone in the GR thread, having it in a game like R6 Vegas was a complete joke and UBI should be ashamed of themselves. (for more reasons than just that, might I add)

To be fair, med kits aren't remotely realistic either. Stomping on a white box with a red stripe doesn't usually patch wounds. Downing potions--sorry, inventory medkits--is also implausible. For the sake of discussion alone, though, what's the most realistic shooter you've ever played? And what health system did it have?

The most realistic shooter I ever played is Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis and Arma 2. They didn't have regenerating health OR medkits.

"There is no health indicator at all, to determine the extent of your injuries you simply check your body for wounds. Any wound to a vital area has a good chance of killing you outright, and wounds to the limbs affect your movement and accuracy. If the player character is shot severely in the legs, he'll even have difficulties standing up and will be effectively crippled, unable to walk and forced to grovel all the way. Though there aren't any health packs as such, you can get the wound treated by a medic if you can find one. If the last medic in the platoon just bought it and a tank ran over the field hospital tent, however, tough luck!"

And yes, they are video games ppl.

Awesome, I should try them. The ultimate consensus, then, is that all health regen is silly? I can drink to that if you will.

 

[Nieroshai]

It has been mentioned plenty times already in this thread, but it's because it reduces any tactics, skill or challenge to "Duck for a few seconds when there's blood on your eyes."

The nicest way I've seen it implemented was in "The Getaway". What happens is that if you get below a certain amount of helth, you can regenerate a little. Maybe 20% ish of your total health. This meant you'd never have so little health that it would be near impossibly hard to get to the next healthpack, but running around haphazardly soaking up damage still had consequences. The regen also was near impossible to do in combat, had to go lean up against a wall for a few seconds and there was only a limited amount of it you could do through a mission.

I like this. I think such a system should also be paired not with insta-heals but HOT ("heal over time" to use an MMO term) healing items that work faster when still. I liked Metal Gear Solid 3's mechanic where you couldn't heal to full health unless you tended your wounds first, and had to have the right items to do it. No splint? That broken leg's gonna be a problem. Of course, magic MREs still left it unbalanced, but they were a little more rare than in other installments, making you hunt animals for your health.

 

[Rai^3]

A game shouldn't apologize for trying to present a challenge. 'Nuff said.

 

[Ashadowpie]

it makes the game a challenge. personally i hate challenges and regenerating health And an overstock of health kits is always a plus for me. a game isnt fun if i die alot. Okami has to be the most perfect example of a game for me, i litterally died on purpose just to see what the game over looked like and that was after i beat the game 100%

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Maybe it fits in with arcady shooters like COD and the like, but it absolutely has NO PLACE in any type of semi realistic tactical type shooters for obvious reasons.

Actually, it does. Realism means if you get shot in the body armor your character would have trouble breathing, deep bruising and probable broken bones. It means a single fragment from a grenade can kill you. It means you spend the entire god damn game shooting at targets you can't see.

Realism has a place in simulation. In anything but simulation, adherence is arbitrary and takes a back seat mechanical concerns. Just consider the occasional attempt at simulation in with respect to infantry combat. A handful of games across a decade who's combined sales across all platforms are less than that made by a Call of Duty in a month. Sure, there are people who want that. Hell, I even liked Operation Flashpoint and Arma. But those two games have something in common: tedium.

Realism makes the battlefield a dangerous place where a slight mistake is rewarded with getting to do it again. Sometimes that works. Most of the time, something more arbitrary is what you want.

The question that one should ask about regenerating health is not one of realism. It is a question of design intent.

If you consider the three basic damage models present in video games, regenerating, non-regenerating but recoverable with items, and absolutely non-recoverable, you can see that each encourages a different style of play.

Regenerating health ensures a player arrives at a gunfight with a known amount of health. This essentially allows a developer to make an encounter more challenging since they can better understand what a player is reasonably capable of surviving. This mode thus encourages action and set piece gun battles.

Non regenerating but recoverable health makes health an expendable resource. It means that because of a poor showing at an engagement previous, an encounter might be all but impossible. It generally offers players the choice to expend their most plentiful resource (powerful weapons or HP). It also encourages exploration for additional health and can introduce tension by itself.

Absolutely non-regenerating health offers no resource to manage, just an ever present fail state. It encourages slow pacing and extended planning sessions. To a lesser extent, it could encourage exploration if the game is designed such that there are multiple routes around an obstacle.

Rainbow six has notable used two of these models. The earliest games had absolute non-regeneration. This was suitable simply because the player had access to near perfect information about a mission before the set foot inside the play area. In fact, most of the game was spent in the planning phase as the execution phase could take as little as a minute to complete. Later games did not present the player with perfect information and still had a non-regenerating health. This lead to a game where most of your time was spent slowly slicing the pie around corners and memorizing enemy locations. These middle games demonstrated a fundamental truth: non-regerating health is the enemy of high action.

The most recent games also opted for imperfect information (and outright cheating) but resulted in a game that is at least more reasonably paced. There are still significant design problems of course, from plausibility (Across Vegas 1 and 2 I shot a reinforced battalion of infantry. That's a mite big for a terrorist operation), to simply being confused about what kind of game it wants to be (cover based or tactical - if tactical a cleared room ought to stay cleared and not magically pop enemies into view).

The standard model, non-regenerating but renewable, still has plenty of purpose. Just not in shooters. Old design favored building of monster filled mazes and tedious jumping puzzles. Most of the time in an FPS were spent doing things that had nothing to do with shooting. Since exploration was critical to progress at a most basic level, having health as a pick up made perfect sense. To this day, survival horror can make great use of this mechanic as it offers a way to build tension just by making it take a little longer to find that next med kit. But the Modern FPS shooter simply remains focused on the shooting phase. Even in the games that attempted to focus on realism above other concerns you spent most of the time shooting. Delta Force would sent you to fight entire companies of troops. Ghost Recon would pit four guys against a hundred. Operation Flashpoint had you at every major battle at the most crucial and heavy fighting of an entire war. Their damage model simply runs counter to everything else about their design.

I personally don't have a problem with the mechanic when it is used correctly much the same as I often welcome non-regnerating health in games where that mechanic makes sense. Dead Space already encouraged exploration and wanted to be scary. Making health a pick up was a perfect choice.

 

[Comic Sans]

My problem isn't that it makes games easier. I actually see it as the opposite. It lowers the damage you can take and railroads you into specific playstyles. In a health based game, you can be as safe or risky as you want. Having it be a finite resource encourages action, since you are rewarded both for progressing quickly in order to minimize being whittled down if you do desire, and for being methodical and moving slowly and tactically. As long as you could limp to the next pickup, or had enough medkits in your inventory, you could succeed. With cover based shooting, they compensate for health being a infinite resource by making you only able to take a few hits, and this really irks me after a while. It's not fun to spend most of a fight in cover because stepping out for two seconds will get me killed. It discourages any form of aggression beyond poking out and shooting, and it's incredibly tedious. It also means that no matter how bad you are doing, you can win a war of attrition with the enemy. Kill one, almost die, heal. Kill one, almost die, heal. There is no end difference between someone who went through skillfully without taking a hit, and someone who almost died 12 times. It turns the fights into unrelated skirmishes and removes any need for developers to have bigger, less linear levels since all resources are handed to you. Some games have handled it well. As has been said before, Far Cry 2 and Mass Effect 3 both have regenerating health, but allowed you to take some fire, and made the fights count with segmented health. Halo did a great job of it. You were allowed to have some damn FUN with the game. And regenerating health is often no fun. The compromises that come with it make for samey, sterile encounters that often make many games today feel tedious.

That was longer than I meant it to be, but that's my opinion.

 

[samaugsch]

No point saving it for later, as it takes up one of your two gun slots.

Yes, but you only need one weapon anyway, the assault rifle, keep the RPG just in case a helicopter or tank shows up.

No point in having anything other than the assault rifle anyway, so the "you need to think about what weapons to use" excuse doesn't actually work.

See, this is another problem with CoD-style gaming. Assault rifles, assault rifles, assault rifles. Can people use nothing else? If it were up to me to make a fps game, assault rifles would be gone. Or have drawbacks enough that people don't use them all the time.

Assault rifles are probably the most balanced weapons out there, in terms of accuracy, rate of fire, and firepower. If you're one of those players who's better at one combat style than others (such as ambushing), use a shotgun. If you're a good sharpshooter, use a sniper rifle. The reason assault rifles are so popular is because they have a little of pretty much everything.

 

[Electrogecko]

Well, certain games don't have automatically regenerating health, but ensure that the player has full health at certain locations. So, in these games, your "encounters" could simply be defined as the area between two health stations, (by which I mean a point at which you're ensured to have full health, not necessarily a thing that requires player involvement) which not only allows devs to estimate/know how much health you have, but gives them much more control over the range of size and difficulty of these encounters.

This is because, while having regenerating health may take out the variable of health at a given time, it adds another variable; one that's much more important to determining difficulty. I call it...."health." Also known as total health, HP, allowable damage, vitality, or life.

Meanwhile, in a game with regenerating health, the player is constantly trying to break a large group of enemies up into individual encounters, and break individual encounters up into semi-encounters, and so on ad infinitum.

So no, I disagree. I don't think it plays into encounter design; it completely degrades it. Your definition of an encounter is completely arbitrary...if we were to go by it, every time you popped your head out of cover for an instant would be an "encounter."

Not really. Look at it this way. Shooting games, by far, are linear levels broken up by various firefights along the path. Now, as much as you might say that it's completely arbitrary, most games do not involve one long session of running and gunning. Instead, you walk forward, a group of mobs spawn, you kill them, you walk forward, another group spawns, and you kill them, then you walk forward, and more spawn, and you kill them as well.

Take Mass Effect 2. At any given point in Mass Effect 2, you are going to be fighting some finite number of enemies. Usually this involves entering a room and fighting enemies until they stop coming in. You then move to the next encounter, which is usually triggered by entering the next area or by activating some sort of plot point.

I mean, that's how shooter encounter design works. And my point is that the benefit of regenerating health is that as a developer, you know exactly how much health a character is going to have when they spawn the next fight.

Sure, yea, a system of regenerating health lets devs know how much health you have at the begining of an "encounter," but my problem is it also lets them know how much health you have for 90% of the game. If you get full health every time you hide for a few moments, then your definition of an "encounter" breaks down. In the eyes of the gameplay, there's no difference between the start of one of your "encounters" and being in the middle one......full health is full health.

There is nothing that a regenerative system can do that a dev controlled system can't. I'm not talking about needing to run around to find health packs here.....I'm not necessarily a fan of that. I'm proposing that devs should take a more active role in determining how much health the player has, and if you're concerned about encounter design and difficulty, you should agree.

You want to ensure that the player has full health at the beginning of each group of enemies? Fine. Easily done with the system I'm proposing. The problem that I have with regenerating health is you don't just have full health in the beginning, you have full health at dozens of points throughout the fight, and each time you get full health, it is, for all intents and purposes, an all new "encounter." Regenerating health is a ticket to absorbing bullets without consequence. When I'm being shot in ME2, I don't give a shit until my shield is almost gone.

 

[LeQuack_Is_Back]

I don't hate regenerating health, I just like the "regenerating shields, fixed health" system more. Like in Payday: When you had full health, you could afford to keep pushing the line once your shield went down, but getting health back wasn't easy, so you saved it for special occasions, like sprinting to the exit at the end of a heist.

It also just feels like your character's tougher in general with 2 health bars.

 

[Ferrious]

This has probably been said already, but if you want intensity / realism (within certain boundaries) the heath system from Dark Corners of the Earth is the daddy. Opps, you got hit once in the leg? Now you're bleeding to death, can barely walk and can't see through the pain. Man, how I loved it (let's have the sanity system too while we're at it!).

That said, I much MUCH prefer regenerating health where it makes sense. The point of energy shields in Halo is exactly this:

Regenerating health is a ticket to absorbing bullets without consequence

This is the whole point of their use. If a modern soldier gets tagged while running for cover, he's most likely out. A SPARTAN's shield can deflect that hit. You can pop up, line up a shot and fire with limited suppression-immunity. Given that most every bullet fired is for suppression, you can see why such a theoretical technology would be a military advantage.

So in those games I love regenerating health. Be it via nanobots, energy shields, space magic, whatever. It allows for better set-piece battles and I really enjoy the panic-stricken battles of trying to clear enough room for that wonderful "beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep..... ooooooooOOOOOOO" noise of shield regeneration.

In games with low-tech, or a pretence at realism beyond man-made-of-cars-attacks-space-Nazis, then I'd rather not have it. What I would like, is Max Payne's "auto-tuning" health pack system in more games. Makes you scrounge, but tries to ease up on you if you're working yourself into a bad place.

 

[Ramare]

I don't really have anything against either mechanic (regenerating health or static health & medkits).
However, I like hybrids better.
Games like the original Halo, and Far Cry 2.
Elaborating:
In the original Halo, you have Shields and Health (much like in Mass Effect). They have to get through your Shields, which recharge over time when not taking damage, to be able to damage your Health; but when/if they do damage your Health, you have to seek medical treatment.
Of course, this hybrid only works in futuristic games with shielding.

In Far Cry 2, you had portions of your total health, and if you took damage, but not enough to drain an entire portion, that portion would recover; however, empty portions would not. You had to heal those with magical syrettes full of healing and morphine. Or bottled water you find laying around. Or, if you have used at least one syrette, small med boxes that give you a smaller amount of syrettes (compared to the filling station), but are more common, and also heal you to full health upon collection.
Of course, this hybrid wouldn't work for every type of game.

Another hybrid I've liked was the type in Bethesda games (albeit sometimes input by mods).
In those games, you can sit back and wait a long while (usually between a few real-time minutes to around 20 seconds, depending on the game, your character's specific healing factor, and how much health you have) for your health to recover, or you can use potions, or you can consume healing food (which you could consider as simply fueling your inner healing factor), or you can use spells, or you can go to a church and have all of your wounds healed (literally) magically.
Or some combination thereof. Use a single small healing potion, use up what little magicka you have left on healing spells, and then simply recover the rest of your health.
Of course, this "hybrid" wouldn't work outside of the type of game it (seemingly?) came out of.

 

[Squidbulb]

The realism argument is kind of silly. Are you saying that gunshot wounds that heal in a few seconds are any less realistic than healing a bullet to the face with a few bandages?
Like Ramare said, it's good to have a mix. Just Cause 2 was a good example. You do heal a bit so you're not stuck on low health for ages, but you need to find a med pack to fully heal.

 

[Jawn Ahuehuehue]

health pax r 4 conter streik kidies LOL

 

[Spy_Guy]

In multiplayer shooters like say, BC2. The idea of getting into a slightly extended gunfight with someone, where you can get them with several bullets and they can hide long enough to recover to full without a medic, and then kill you, is dumb. It also defeats the purpose of having a medic around.

I actually liked the system in BC2. The health regen was so slow that it was barely noticeable, with bullets hurting you enough that it wouldn't be a sound tactic to go wait.

If you got into such a gunfight, then I'd argue that both of you would be out of bullets before one of you could regenerate back from "near dead" to "healthy enough to make a difference".
So, no, Medics were not obsolete at all.

Let's talk Modern Warfare for a series with "hide until full health, then come back", and even then the point is moot; after all... if he's been disentangled from you long enough to get full health, then logic dictates you should have full health as well.
If you're not due to his teammates, then the fact that you died can hardly be pinned on the health regen system.

Not to mention that it's not tricky to shoot a fleeing enemy in the back, especially when they're at low health and the weapons are as lethal as they are. Now excuse me while I run around this here corner for a nice Sandvich.

While we are on this topic, I also hate not having a life bar. I like to know exactly what my health is at, not some vague idea based on how hard it is for me to see through my screen.
Of course, I am probably not the best one to talk for people who claim to like "realistic" shooters(An idea I find absolutely absurd). Especially since my favorite FPS is Doom.

I think that stems from the fact that "life" is unquantifiable, and I actually find the "jam" effect people like to take the piss out of rather immersive.
Instead of needing to look at a bar to quantify my health and run a quick calculation in my head on my current supply and what to do, I can simply look at how horrid the screen is, and quantify that intuitively, rather than mathematically.
Sounds like I'm making it out to be advanced calculus or something, but it really does make a difference to me.

 

[dessertmonkeyjk]

I tend to prefer the cel based regeneration system in ME3 and Transforms: War for Cybertron. It's essecially just regenerates a cel that isn't entirely depleted and must be fully restored eventually if you want full health by other means. This is also fairly similar to how some fighter games have health regeneration with a half of the health you just lost can be regenerated if you don't get hit again instead of the whole bar.

You basically need to worry more about not getting hit or risk being more vunerable for as long as you don't gain any health powerup. Maybe an adrenaline feature where you gain all your health temperarly and if you're already full gain an extra 25%.

 

[Lugbzurg]

You know, I've gotten to thinking that there may be one particular place that works well for regenerating health: multiplayer.

Think about this. You have a couple people shooting at each other, pulling down each other's health until one of them is killed. However, the survivor still ends up being very low on health. Anyone (particularity with a more decent level of health) could just walk right up to the guy, kill him in one shot and score a kill point, despite the fact that someone else went to the trouble of bringing the one guy's health down in the first place.

With regenerating health, this problem wouldn't be affecting the game like this. The thing is that it works good in multiplayer, to keep it fair. In a single player game, it would just be horrible.

 

[Elamdri]

you know exactly how much health a character is going to have when they spawn the next fight.

Which can be fixed by putting health kits before each battle, or just letting the player use stealth to avoid battles altogether.

health kits don't let you know how much health a player has going into a fight unless you put enough health kits before a fight to heal to full, in which case, why bother with them at all?

Some games don't allow stealth.

 

[dementis]

it detracts from the realism when your character can just say "Hold up guys, let me duck down here and magically get rid of these bullet holes scatter across my chest........alright, I'm good, let's fight!"

Surely no less realistic than being able to repair ten bullets to the brain and a rocket up the ass with a band-aid and aspirin...?

Some games have an explanation for the medkits working, in Halo the medkits contain bio-foam, it slows bleeding, dulls pain and releases endorphins to stave off shock so all they really do is trick your body into thinking your fine and dandy.