What have gamers got against regenerating health?

[applesandoranges]

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[kickyourass]

I don't dislike it simply on principle, there are certainly places were it works (Like Lost Planet), but alot of the time it makes things too easy. Some of my favorite games are once where you could potentially find yourself in just the situation you described, because it basically forces you to be careful.
If you can just charge into battle take 9 shots to the chest at a time and completely fine as long as you took a 5 second break before bullet #10 hit you, it's nowhere near as challenging and thus nowhere near as satisfying to complete.

 

[Darkmantle]

I think it works rather well in halo and cod. I just wish more developers were willing to use different mechanics in their fps games as opposed to just copying what's popular!

It's not regenerating healthy fault it's an overused mechanic!

fun fact everyone likes to forget, first halo did not have regenerating health and had health pick ups

 

[Guffe]

I don't care if it's regen or medpacs in a game.
The asnwers you're gonna get here are:
1. It's not realistic
2. It's too easy to just go somewere and wait for it to regen

 

[BehattedWanderer]

Depends on how it's used. Often, it's used terribly, as a quick development idea that the devs can know, at any time, how much health you have, and can therefore fill the small corridor they're designing with as many schmucks as possible. Then, when you round the bend, they can do it again, because they know you can just hide and suck your thumb until you're all better.

Health recovery stations/medkits offer something different--namely, that they can space out the challenge, and you now have a limited set of supplies to use to work through to the next set of bandages. Ironically, using them gave games a greater atmosphere, for taking on an entire horde with limited resources became more hectic, more terrifying, and more exciting as you managed to limp to safety. The adrenaline rush of a persistent near-death primes your "fight" response, and you are actively struggling to stay alive. With the ability to heal at will by squatting down and wetting your pants, you worry less about it, and in doing so become less involved in the immediacy of the situation. What was "I need to react fast to stay alive!" has become "oh, guess I better just take my time and learn where the enemies pop out from."

 

[Drizzitdude]

Re: Borderlands, that game did something else right with health regeneration - it tied it to mechanics other than hiding. Special mention goes to Mordecai, who heals by throwing a flaming bird in people's faces.

good times. Gooooood times.

 

[Electrogecko]

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)

As it happens, that very comment was what prompted me to begin this thread - congratz!

As it happens, I agree with Anthraxus on this one. Without health regen, every single fight is a real danger to both your short term and long term success, and strategy usually depends on planning for the future.

Regen: Whenever you're not in combat, you're running at full speed toward your next destination. Approaching a lone enemy? Don't even stop moving. Shot you a couple times? big whoop, keep running.

No Regen: Whenever you're not in combat, you're peering around corners looking for threats, always on your toes. Single guy shot you a couple of times before you killed him? "Fuck! That asshole! I can't believe I'm so stupid! Why didn't I see him?! How could I be so careless?!"

Ultimately, it's a preference, and there's room for both systems depending on the type of game you're going for, but I feel that not having regen provides the type of tension that a game about gunfights probably should.

It's a spectrum, and I'd say that non-regen is on the side of survival horror and regen is on the side of action.

 

[Callate]

I don't mind the mechanic itself, so much as the kind of gameplay design it enables and promotes. I can make a game where the player has a certain amount of ability to judge the risks he/she wants to take, the pace at which he/she wants to address the challenges, the resources he/she wants to expend getting from point A to point B... or I can have the player spend the majority of their time in combat waiting behind a wall, either to heal, or for the stupid bad guys to stick their head out so they can be shot off.

If I'm trying to squeeze out 'x' number of hours of gameplay with limited art assets and time to design levels, or if I don't want to spend a whole lot of time jiggling the difficulty, which prospect am I more likely to embrace?

Admittedly, "cower behind cover" gunfights are somewhat more realistic from what I understand of real-world gunfights, but this may be one case where verisimilitude should take a back seat.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Health regen is a crutch were bad level design and smaller level layouts creates a situation where you get less content thats more shallow.

Halo 1 is still the better game, hell DOOM has better level layouts than most modern FPSs ><.

Also cover systems fail, let me have better control over the bullet sponginess of a game, I'd rather dodge and snipe and die in 2-3 hits if the targets die in 2-3 hits, pouring a buket of hot lead into something is quite annoying.........

 

[Elamdri]

I don't mind the mechanic itself, so much as the kind of gameplay design it enables and promotes. I can make a game where the player has a certain amount of ability to judge the risks he/she wants to take, the pace at which he/she wants to address the challenges, the resources he/she wants to expend getting from point A to point B... or I can have the player spend the majority of their time in combat waiting behind a wall, either to heal, or for the stupid bad guys to stick their head out so they can be shot off.

If I'm trying to squeeze out 'x' number of hours of gameplay with a limited art assets and time to design levels, which prospect am I more likely to embrace?

Admittedly, "cower behind cover" gunfights are somewhat more realistic from what I understand of real-world gunfights, but this may be one case where verisimilitude should take a back seat.

Actually, regenerating health also plays into encounter design. Without regenerating health, a developer has no clue how much health a player is going to have going into any given encounter but the first for each level.

With regenerating health, a developer knows that all players will go into every encounter with full health, thus removing a variable, and therefore making it easier to tune each encounter's difficulty.

 

[loa]

It makes you hide behind cover all the time and that's boring?
Maybe people don't like to bleed from the eye, something that goes hand in hand with recovering health.
Also regenerating health that would make a regenerator from re4 proud kind of takes any illusion of lasting implication out of taking a hit.

Needless to say THIS ISN'T HOW HUMANS WORK. If the guy I control is supposed to be yer standard marine and there's no explanation for his alien-like matabolism, that's kind of an immersion breaker right there.

If there's medkits you can at least pretend that he uses them to fix up his wounds and bruises which makes more "sense" in real-world logic than sucking your thumb behind cover for 5 seconds and then suddenly being healed by the power of grayskull without doing anything for it.

 

[Seanfall]

It's overused, it removes the sense of tension. It has no place in RPG type games but people keep trying to shoe horn it in there. I'm just kinda sick of seeing it really.

 

[Electrogecko]

I don't mind the mechanic itself, so much as the kind of gameplay design it enables and promotes. I can make a game where the player has a certain amount of ability to judge the risks he/she wants to take, the pace at which he/she wants to address the challenges, the resources he/she wants to expend getting from point A to point B... or I can have the player spend the majority of their time in combat waiting behind a wall, either to heal, or for the stupid bad guys to stick their head out so they can be shot off.

If I'm trying to squeeze out 'x' number of hours of gameplay with a limited art assets and time to design levels, which prospect am I more likely to embrace?

Admittedly, "cower behind cover" gunfights are somewhat more realistic from what I understand of real-world gunfights, but this may be one case where verisimilitude should take a back seat.

Actually, regenerating health also plays into encounter design. Without regenerating health, a developer has no clue how much health a player is going to have going into any given encounter but the first for each level.

With regenerating health, a developer knows that all players will go into every encounter with full health, thus removing a variable, and therefore making it easier to tune each encounter's difficulty.

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."

 

[tzimize]

I personally prefer my health to recover rather than scramble about looking for med-packs. Plus, with non-health regen there's always the Halo nightmare scenario of being stuck at a checkpoint, hordes of nasties bearing down on you, no health packs in sight... and 1% health remaining.
Regen health avoids all of that unpleasantness.

Some time ago I played a shooter called Singularity. And it all came back to me. Regenerating health is an abomination. There is no logical reason health should regenerate (other than shields, or that the protagonist is a freaking x-man) and it destroys the immersion. Good immersion will lead to a better gaming experience. Which is what everyone wants I'd think.

 

[Electrogecko]

I don't mind the mechanic itself, so much as the kind of gameplay design it enables and promotes. I can make a game where the player has a certain amount of ability to judge the risks he/she wants to take, the pace at which he/she wants to address the challenges, the resources he/she wants to expend getting from point A to point B... or I can have the player spend the majority of their time in combat waiting behind a wall, either to heal, or for the stupid bad guys to stick their head out so they can be shot off.

If I'm trying to squeeze out 'x' number of hours of gameplay with limited art assets and time to design levels, or if I don't want to spend a whole lot of time jiggling the difficulty, which prospect am I more likely to embrace?

Admittedly, "cower behind cover" gunfights are somewhat more realistic from what I understand of real-world gunfights, but this may be one case where verisimilitude should take a back seat.

I fail to see how non-regenerating health would make me cower behind cover less. I would think quite the opposite.

The health regen system isn't the determining factor in how much time you spend behind cover. It might be one of them, but it's not hard to run through levels of Halo on an easy difficulty without ever using cover.

 

[Phisi]

I don't have much problem with it. We are not playing milsims here so I don't think realism matters that much. The criticism I see here is mostly to do with it's realism or it is lazy. Regenerating health as a mechanic affects the way the game is played. If I like how the game is played then i play it. It is essential in a game like CoD as it puts you and your enemy on equal footing when you enter a fight. without it the game would be very different and most likely broken as after one fire fight you do not have the health to survive another. In games like Payday: The Heist which uses a compound system (recharging shield and non-regenerating health) it works as each game you play you plan. The shield means you can shoot without suffering consequences however if you screw up and end up in a shit position then you do suffer for it and you have to play carefully until or chance putting down a doctors bag to get you back on track. People need to think of the mechanics of it and how it plays in relation to the game. Think of Killing Floor for example. You don't have regenerating health but everyone has an unlimited supply of Medical syringes and sometimes a squad medic to heal you for you. How do these mechanics affect the gameplay?

 

[scar_47]

It tends to work far too quickly, I'm fine with it if implamented well unfortunately most of the time its not since most games take after COD where your good after 5 seconds of no damage. That works fine in a game thats all action but really kills most any other since you can essentially cheat your way through, Skyrim and Deus Ex HR did it well where health doesn't regenerate fast enough to be useful in combat but saves you from having to constantly heal after small skirmishes or getting stuck due to a lack of healing items.

 

[Dryk]

In most games I prefer edge forward thinking "Oh god, I'm going to die" for a few minutes than spending ten seconds thinking "Crap crap crap I need a wall" while running away as fast as possible.

Also the bloody screen with veins really annoys me in Mass Effect 2... it's third-person guys...

In general? It just feels a bit lazy. Regenerating health can be a useful addition to some games (I actually can't imagine Call of Duty or Battlefield being designed without them)

It happened in Call of Duty 1, which I played for the first time just a few months ago. They managed to design it fine... then again they were using mostly semi-automatic or bolt-action weapons.

I also love Halo: Reach's or Mass Effect 3's, shields for the first couple BS rounds and then actual health. Half Life can suck it because shields are just another health bar in that game.

Don't the Half-Life shields only take a certain percentage of the damage depending on what you're being shot with? It may just be another health bar but at least it's an interesting one ^_^