What have gamers got against regenerating health?

[gyrobot_v1legacy]

Arena Shooters always had a semi-regen Health feeling, with Unreal, the +5 health kits is pretty much your regenerating health. you have to keep moving around while avoid being shot since finding cover so to speak will have you kill. Plus if you successfully murder someone, you can get enough adrenaline to rewarded with faster regen.

A good shooter will keep you on the constant move, reward health by pushing the enemy aggressively instead of hiding. So advancing and dodging gunfire will give you some health back, killing several enemies boosts your health.

 

[lapan]

It often forces the shooter into cover based shooting whihc most of the time comes with bland level designs and makes enemy attacks obvious by placing the cover exactly where a enemy wave will spawn. Medipack gameplay on the other hand unusally comes with wide levels and secret rooms.

It also lowers difficulty and makes the thread of death not scary anymore.

 

[lacktheknack]

It works in games like Mirror's Edge, where a bullet to the leg would wreck the point of the game, and since the game is designed to have encounters disconnected from each other.

In a strategic shooter, you're supposed to die when you screw up, not be mildly inconvenienced by crouching for several seconds. Thus, alternate health raisers are required (or none at all). I liked Second Sight's way of doing it, with telepathic healing.

 

[fragmeistar]

In certain games it does work though. Take Battlefield 3 for instance. Sure there's regenerating health, but without a medic (effectively throwing you those prized medkits) your health regenerates at such a slow rate that camping and waiting for your health to return to 100% will have an amazingly detrimental effect to your team's performance.
Of course this has no bearing on single-player, where I suppose the idea is to make sure that a bad player won't be too heavily punished for sucking.
However, if you complain about it, use the hardest difficulty! Here's a good example, R6Vegas2. If you don't use cover well, you will have a hard time surviving, and health regeneration can only help SO much.

Basically, regenerating health in multiplayer could be done much better, but in single-player your choice of difficulty makes up how well it really works. Even in Call of Duty, if you choose the Veteran equivalent it's not THAT effective - though running away can help.

Tbh, I think that BF3 and Farcry 2 style works. Regen isn't a bad idea, but making it quick and easy to regen health makes it bad.

 

[loc978]

I say attrition is a good thing in shooters. It's immersive, gives you a reason to avoid getting hurt. But, more often than not, I don't like frag-fests. I'm a strategist. In single-player games I like to have limited resources that I have to manage. Automatically regenerating health gives you an unlimited resource. In multiplayer... I actually prefer gameplay to be broken up into rounds, with each player having only one life per round and absolutely no option for healing.
But that's just one guy's preference.

 

[WolfThomas]

I think the best form of health management is a combination like in Farcry 2 and Condemned 2. The latter in particular, you have three big blocks of health and damages chips away at the first block, it will regenerate if resting but if it drops to the next block it won't regen. Painkillers or health packs are scattered to regenerate them. If you die and have to reload a checkpoint it refills you're health to full, so that you're not caught in the 01 heath problem.

This way it encourages you to be cautious in your damage but not have to worry too much about getting every last health pack.

 

[Shadowkire]

In addition to what everyone else said, I would like to add that it is annoying when you have regenerating health and when you are "low on health" the screen gets covered in blood.

When you are being flanked and need to take out 1 enemy so the cover you are on will protect you from the rest having your screen get bloody/blurry/shadowy/tunnel vision is incredibly annoying.

It also effects how enemy AI works in games because the enemy is designed to give you a challenge. In regen health games the enemy needs to be able to put a lot of bullets into you on a moments notice, leading to absurd situations in games like COD where you can barely see a tiny dark splotch on your screen when it starts emptying a SMG into you(or the enemy is shooting you through the bushes with x-ray vision).

 

[Smooth Operator]

Regen health avoids all of that unpleasantness.

Yes it does and that is why it's bullshit, if the challenge is removed then so is the reward.

 

[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.

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.

 

[teebeeohh]

it also makes for lazy level design, because all the fights within a level are unconnected, you go into an arena, kill everything in sight and move on to the next. placing small enemies or ambushes makes no sense (unless the ambush insta-kills you) because you just shrug off the damage so every encounter has to be designed with enough enemies to kill you.

i do like a system where health regenerates to a threshold or you have shields or something because this stops you from running to a bossfight with 1hp

 

[ablac]

Regenerating health means you dont get stuck in a scenario where you dont have enough health to progress and are faced with the choice of restarting the entire bloody level/going backa checkpoint which is simply infuriating or combing the entire level for health packs which may or may not be there. Neither are desriable no matter how good or bad you are. The first is simply annoying because the game can get you stuck in a situation with no real solution and the second one does not add tention as some claim but simply breaks the flow. It essentially yells 'stop everything because now you need to spend a bloody age looking for something which may or may not exist'. I can understand it in an RPG where planning and thinking the whole situation through is part of the game but for an FPS it usually isnt. In most FPSs you are confronted with things you cannot easily plan for and must rely on your own skill and ability to solve these problems in a short space of time. If the game isnt designed for it then it wont work. In todays market where levels tend to last a very long time and cant be completed in a few minutes, with experience, regen health makes more sense. The player is highly vulnerable, more so than in games without regen health and their success relies upon how they can deal with situations quickly. If you think its too easy then jam it up to a higher difficulty and do a perfect run without dying. Simply put people who think regen health means sitting behind cover all day takinga shot now and then are misinformed and havent played what they criticise. Games which make you use cover also have means of removing oyu from it specifically because the designers are not thick enough to make a game which can be won by sitting behind cover all day. That loses the game for you, you need aggression in these games overwise you get surrounded and overwhelmed and your cover is made useless because the game is designed to flush you out and kick your ass if you do that. Gamers arent agaist it. People who follow the views of people who's job it is to say outlandish things are against it because they have no opinion of their own. Chest high walls, hiding behind cover all day etc. That was all said orignally by people like Yahtzee. People regurgitate these views out so they can sound original and clever because they dont actually play the games and thus are free to criticise them any way they like, and these people love to criticise. I am not for one over the other but neither are inherently bad and its stupid to say one is. The challeneg doesnt have to come from stock piling health packs but from other things. Oh and to those who complain about immersion breaking outside of hyper realistic games. Get over it. In either mechanic your bloke just took a bullet yet is functioning perfectly fine. Hell in most games you can survive a shot to the face at full health. stop making this a reason because your immersion should not come from realism. If you were immersed because of realism then you have a very poor understanding of basically every aspect of reality.

 

[The White Hunter]

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.

Not to mention grenades that did the same thing. (Those were way OP'd by the way)

Especially when you didn't know they leeched health from your friends =D
Then found out they did and responded witha resounding "yaaay" and carrying on anyway.

 

[Sectan]

I like hybrid health regeneration(100 health total with 1 health ever few seconds type of thing). Doesn't make you an unstoppable killing machine, but it doesn't leave you in a deathtrap situation.

 

[MammothBlade]

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.

 

[Kahunaburger]

OT: I'm perfectly fine with regenerating health. Speaking as a future member of the industry, it make designing the challenges of the game far more easier to balance. It's infuriating for the players to continuously lose to couple of grunts because their health is at one percent, when at a full health it's not even a challenge. That breaks the flow, and that's a very bad thing for a game to have.

I think it would be more accurate to say that it makes balance matter less. If a player can slowly grind through a firefight by popping a squat every few seconds, it matters much less if the firefight is imbalanced, because a sufficiently motivated player can always make it through.

But that's the mark of a bad design, so the balance wouldn't matter anyways.

Health-camping can easily be dealt with a little bit of forethought. One way is for the AI's behaviour change depending on the player's actions. If the player starts camping about, the AI throws some grenades at them or flanks their position, forcing them to actually fight rather than just pop-and-drop. Another good way to deal with it is to simply make a good mix of enemies. It's easy to camp on your regen if all your enemies are snipers who don't move, but if a couple of melee dudes and and some faster flanking units are added in, you suddenly have to prioritize who to destroy in order to ensure you don't get killed. Bam, the fight is suddenly strategic, all without needing to handicap the player in any arbitrary fashion.

The problem with this mindset is that in game design you don't have "bam, strategic" or "bam, balanced." Creating a strategic/balanced game is a complicated task, and we know this because most games aren't strategic or balanced.

Look at Halo 2 - it doesn't just solve the regenerating health problem by throwing in melee units, grenade-throwers, and flankers, it solves it by giving some enemies regenerating overshields, making them smart enough to use them, setting fights in big, open levels, making enemies smart enough to navigate these levels and on higher difficulties use them strategically, creating flying enemies that flank from above, and so on. The AI in particular is the product of careful work - I've played many games that try for similar levels of firefight depth, but fail because the AI isn't smart enough to flank without getting shot.

 

[Arina Love]

i don't have anything against it. I actually like it. You don't have to search for stupid med packs and spoil shooting fun. Shooters have evolved, i guess some player still clinging to old ideas.

 

[RJ 17]

You complain about realism and yet a tiny metal case with a plus on it is going to fix all your bullet wounds? And that is more realistic than regen health?

Had you read 4 posts below the one you quoted you'd see I have already addressed that such a statement.

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...?

It's not perfect, but having to pick up a 1st Aid Kit is still more realistic/makes more sense than thinking of gum drops and puppy-dog tails to heal yourself.

Well the whole point of regenerating health is that Developers can design each encounter under the assumption that the player is going to have maximum health. It greatly simplifies encounter design because of it.

Likewise, players get the benefit of knowing exactly how much health they will have going into each encounter, which helps them prepare for whatever strategy they are going to utilize.

The problem with most shooters is that they don't force the player to move enough. Most the comments are about people bitching and moaning about how all they have to do is hide behind some cover. Well that wouldn't be so easy if developers made the enemies utilize strategies like cover busting enemies, grenades, artillery, ect.

Which is why I believe that Mass Effect 3's combot was a very nice middle-ground between regenerating and health-pack life recovery systems. For starters, the enemies are smart and like to pull off flanking manuevers. They're also rather grenade-happy, forcing you to move around. I also liked how they handled the health with "You can regenerate lost health, but only that of the health-bar you're currently on.

The problem is there's no sense of danger when you know you can just wolverine yourself back to full health in most modern FPS's. Each encounter doesn't make a level more difficult, it's essentially you just moving from one fire fight to the next with no consequences from the previous fight.