What have gamers got against regenerating health?

[Sexy Devil]

So does anyone else see the irony in a forum that often complains about modern cover mechanics, complaining that health regeneration isn't realistic?

I really don't care what health mechanic is used as long as it doesn't detract from the overall experience. Regenerating health works really well in games like COD and InFamous, but other experiences require different mechanics.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

It takes away any sense of urgency and tension for me. It can also undermine whatever challenge there should have been in some levels of a game. There's literally nothing stopping you (in Halo 2) from running from the beginning of New Mombasa onto The Bridge level early on in the game. Finally regenerating health + cover based shooting = boring to me.

 

[Aphantas]

I see fully regenerating health as bad because it tends to segment the experience of a game. That is each battle is independent of all others, making a skirmish just a sequence of fights with little to connect them together as a whole game-play wise.
I have no issues with partial or slow regen because it averts impossible fights, while still allowing a player to feel the consequences of good or bad gameplay.
All in all I think that most people hate regenerating health because it's been overused recently by lazy designers.

its seems to be this idea that cover-based action games require regenerating health as an incentive to find cover. I find this ridiculous. Finding cover would be just as important (or even more so) for a game where health is limited since your aim is to reduce health losses to a minimum.

Checkpoints every 10 seconds
Regenerating Health
Auto Aiming

As much as i love halo, these things pain me.

Oh and games that you have to unlock the "harder" settings.. that FUCKS me right off.

I hate auto-aim as well. I always find that it makes me over shoot my mark.
I don't mind unlocking harder mode only if the harder mode is more then just enemies have more health and attack.

 

[Kahunaburger]

I believe they dont like it because ITS EVIL!!!!!

There's little to no intensity to it, you just duck behind cover or whatever thing the game has you doing for a bit and then bam, it's all fine again. No intensity, no consequences.

The intensity comes because they can give you much harder encounters. Without it they either give you weaker enemies or simply less of them. It means they always know you will have 100% health when you go around that corner so they can throw twenty enemies at you instead of two guys who dont know which way to hold the gun.

Although, if a player can just grind away at those 20 enemies with minimal risk, is the game challenging or just tedious?

 

[Aphantas]

I believe they dont like it because ITS EVIL!!!!!

There's little to no intensity to it, you just duck behind cover or whatever thing the game has you doing for a bit and then bam, it's all fine again. No intensity, no consequences.

The intensity comes because they can give you much harder encounters. Without it they either give you weaker enemies or simply less of them. It means they always know you will have 100% health when you go around that corner so they can throw twenty enemies at you instead of two guys who dont know which way to hold the gun.

5 guys in a game with limited health can be just as difficult as fight with 20 with regenerating health. Difficulty will be dependent on the health system as well. Hell, even 1 guy still needs to be treated seriously with limited health systems. Dark Souls is testament that, Attrition will get you in the end.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

How the hell did you guys happen upon a "because health packs are more realistic" approach? There are genuine design reasons why healthpacks are better, the way it makes first-person shooters more intense and exciting than what often devolves into waiting behind walls sucking your thumb while limbs sprout back.

But realistic? You guys hear yourselves when you talk, right. Read yourself when you type. ...you know. You're actually processing the ideas you posit, right? Regenerating health is more realistic than healthkits. In a retarded sort of roundabout way, but yeah, waiting for inertia to go away and pain to subside is a whole lot more realistic than losing five gallons of blood and somehow restoring it with a MacGuffin.

Neither are exactly genuinely realistic, but to argue one is more real than the other? As if that's a positive in and of itself? Don't make me laugh, Escapist forum community.

 

[nickyv917]

I like the combination of non-regen health and regen shields, like halo reach and borderlands. Thats the way I like regenerating.

Yeah, I'd say that's the best compromise. Or having a certain threshold, like your health only auto-regenerates up to 20%.

I think they did that in Mercenaries. I like that system the best. It keeps the tension at a good level, without turning you into confetti. Because, it's somewhat realistic, because of adrenaline and whatnot.

 

[hyplion]

first of all it makes games too easy, with med packs you have to consider your resources before engaging the enemy, and do it without losing too mucch health. Nowaday you just run out, shoot a bit, run back, go cry in a corner for a moment, and repeat. Boring and repetitive.

The most fail use of this was in duke nukem forever, where you had to take cover to regenerate your ego.... i thought dukes ego would rise while killing stuff.....

And what you call unpleasantness, i call fun, i simply loved all the times in half life i was at 6 hp, 2 shotgun rounds left a full pistol clip and one grenade, it forces you to think and play smart, and it brings an extra dimension to tension in the game, it gets more tense as your resources (HP, ammo) drop, and you feel so relieved once you hit that weapon cashe.

 

[zehydra]

The best system is no health regeneration at all in multiplayer. Like no regen health and no health packs.

 

[The Heik]

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.

Methinks that you're taking my words a bit too literally. I know for a fact that balancing a game is a challenging thing to do (heck, me and a bunch of friends just finished making a game, and the battle dynamic was a big job for our design and level teams). I merely meant that it was straightforward. It's easy to understand what you need to do and how you need to do it; it does however take a lot of time and effort to do it right. And that's a thing many developers don't do.

Buts I mentioned before, I'm not talking about how a company can screw it up. That's been done to death. All I'm talking about is that you can change the dynamic of a fight to ensure that health regen doesn't become a crutch for the player. If I had to mention all the various details on how to specifically do that, then this post would be 20 pages long, and I don't want to write that much out.

 

[8a88leph1sh]

you want realism? if you get shot you have to be medevaced to a hospital a hundred miles away and are out of commission for weeks if not months. Does COD: Hospital Warfare sound like fun?

PS Instantly healing yourself with a box with a little red x on it makes zero sense in reality as well. It's a game, if it was real it wouldn't be fun.

 

[Bostur]

Regenerating health can be done well, but mostly isn't. If the AI is good enough it can be used as some kind of suppression effect. As the player is pinned behind cover, the enemies can flank and attempt to deliver a killing blow. It can result in a frantic feeling of an epic firefight, where the player may need to retreat or reposition behind cover.

When done poorly it just adds to a feeling of railroading where the player is shoved forward towards the next setpiece.

Health pack systems can be bad too, it's not exactly thrilling to search completed parts of a level for a health pack. But if the pacing is good, both systems can work well. It's not that one system is superiour to the other, it's how the mechanics are used in the context of that particular game. Sometimes popular mechanics are simply copy/pasted without the developers questioning the mechanics or giving much thought to how they want to use them.

 

[PurePareidolia]

I've only really thought regenerating health would be appropriate in a few games that didn't have it. Serious Sam 3 was the one that stood out because it sold itself as being old school, then filled the early levels with hitscan enemies, and a helicopter you couldn't kill until you got the rocket launcher, and were forced to run away from losing health all the time. So you were going to lose health, and if you got lost in it's copy/pasted environments or took a wrong turn (which could easily happen) you needed to go hunting for health instead of trying to get to the rocket launcher. Regenerating health would have made what essentially became a run-and-take-cover section a lot more bearable.

The issue is when designers use it as a crutch to not build in a difficulty curve.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Although, if a player can just grind away at those 20 enemies with minimal risk, is the game challenging or just tedious?

Is there actually a minimal risk? Take CoD for example, if you die in two-three hits can you really call it minimal risk? No you cant because there is risk.

I'm not sure that you can consider the danger faced on any CoD difficulty to be actual risk. If you die in that game, it's generally not because an enemy flanked you or anything like that - it's because you stuck your head up for too long. If you take the recommended "hide like a scared child" breaks, there is little danger of losing anything but 10 minutes of your life.

I could actually say the same thing about games without regenerating health. They are not challenging but instead just tedious. Take Dark Souls for example, its not hard its just tedious. Hell I would wager any of the last few CoD games on veteran are actually much harder.

Why do you see Dark Souls as tedious instead of hard?

 

[Weaver]

I'd like it as a FEAR style. You pick up health kits (well, they were injecty things) and then you can use them when you want. To be fair, I think even Wolfenstein had health packs you could carry around.

This way health is an actual resource to be conserved, but you don't find yourself stuck with 5hp before a boss.