The Health Bar is more realistic than Regenerating.

[gabe12301]

Halo has an excuse.(Spartans are wearing armor with regenerating force fields.) COD and most shooters used it because it worked so well but forgot to add an excuse for it.Now everyone uses it because most gamers stopped complaining about realism a long time ago.

 

[Carlston]

Well of course just "walking over" a medkit and getting to full health isn't to realistic either.

But the health bar does limit the game since a few bad shots and you die game over. Sometimes a little regeneration keeps the game play flowing.

 

[Yellowbeard]

I like health bars. It's having hundreds of conspicuous first-aid kits scattered all over the place that kills the immersion for me. Case in point: in Half-Life 2: Ep. 2 when you're ambushed at

Spoiler

the White Forest Inn

, the Combine clearly spent time and care preparing the roadblock, but didn't bother to empty the adjoining building of two-dozen first-aid kits, batteries and ammo.

Being able to carry first-aid kits with you a la Deus Ex, System Shock or Bioshock is a better solution, at least for suspension of disbelief.

 

[annoyinglizardvoice]

Call of Cthuhlu: Dark Corner of the Earth is the closest I've seen to a "realistic" damage system on a FPS.

Personally I prefer a health-bar/life-guage to regeneration

 

[Merkavar]

i think out of all the systems i have used i think i prefer the health bar with either segmented regen or only a % regen. so say you have 100 health and get 50 damage your health will only regen to 60 cause thats the top of that segment. or your health will only regen to 70 cause thats 20% you can regen.

That way you have the best of both worlds. you cant hide behind cover and get back to full health but you also dont have to worry about small amounts of damage cause your health will regen a little

if i remember correctly kind of like the Prototype health bar

 

[imperialreign]

Regeneration is regarding as a more enjoyable experience however.

No!
It rewards the wrong tactics. Taking as little damage as possible and doing as much damage as possible should be rewarded.
Quickly regenerating health just makes extreme camping and suicidal rushing possible. (remember those idiots who rush at you with the knife in the MW2 series?)

"You've just taken 20 bullets to the face at point blank range and are almost dead? Don't worry! U've stabbed the guy who did it and your face will magically regenerate in 5seconds."

Agreed. The only real highlight, IMHO, to the regerative method (in combination with a HUD overlay) is the questionable level of health . . . that is, not knowing how close to 100% you are.

Personally, I love STALKER's method . . . regeneration is not really present at the outset of the game. If you have horrible bleeding, you can die - even if you have a medkit or two (they don't heal 100% of bleeding without the use of bandages). Your health will slowly regenerate by itself, as long as you're not bleeding, but it an take a shtoopidly excessive amount of time (from about 1/4 health would take 15+ minutes to recover from). There are healing "aids" available in the form of artifacts, but to use them, you must give up using other artifacts which might have properties better suited to your gameplay or situation - you're left making a trade-off for their regenerative properties.

Of most regenerative systems, I liked Metro's the best - in heavy fights, you don't regenerate fast enough to survive . . . you must use medkits.

 

[Bre2nan]

The most realistic health system I ever encountered was that in the old Tom Clancy games, Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon. Back when you had mission planning and when one shot could end your life.

You take a hit to center mass from an assault rifle, even if you're wearing body armor, and you'll be having a bad day, if not dead or severely wounded. You take a hit to a limb, you're probably combat ineffective unless it was just a graze wound. Don't even ask about head shots. The difficulty factor was a *****, of course, but the very first FPS I ever played was Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear. Ah, the memories. Shame they let the good games die.

Nowadays I'm so used to the trends that I'll defer to regenerating health for its sheer simplicity of execution. Though the regeneration system in MGS3 was actually pretty good, if a little exaggerated like any game.

Even the new Rainbow Sixes have a pretty good health system. It's regenerating health again, but you can still plonk over dead from a stray shotgun blast 50 yards away. When they introduced upgradeable armor in Vegas 2, you didn't fare much better. That stray shotgun blast might just critically wound you then.

Still, the system in the old games was much more realistic, and caused you to really take care and plan out each attack. It makes things much more strategic than your standard shooter fare.

 

[Baneat]

Arguable, it'd be absurd for a health bar game to allow you to only take like 1-2 bullets before death. In a regen system that's definitely possible to place in the game.

E.g. CS:S (realistic), I put 6(6!) rounds of a USP into an enemy, and they did not die.
CoD(Unrealistic), No gun in the game (none) takes more than 5 bullets to kill. ever.

 

[maddawg IAJI]

Health Bars in my opinion are a tad more realistic. To an extent however, placing some bandages over a broken leg is no better then ducking behind a bush to heal from a shotgun shell to the arm. Eating a pizza is no better then ducking behind a couch after being hit in the neck with a sniper.

Health Systems entirely work only when a reason is given for the ability to regenerate health, but since that's not entirely profitable, realistic health is thrown out the window. In short: It doesn't matter which one is more realistic as they both don't make a hell of a lot of sense.

 

[VanillaBean]

Definitly agree with you here, games that go for the relistic feel should not have regenerating health bars. Unless your wolverine your battle wounds are not going to regenerate quickly in the REAL world.

 

[Seanchaidh]

Who would play a game involving lots of combat with firearms where the penalty for getting hit is having to call an ambulance in order to escape and, erm, stop playing? (Or just die, of course.)

Whether it's respawning, regenerating, or magical Jesus medkits, you're not getting realism in any very fun shooter. Realism is completely broken just by the ability to save a game. Doing it over? Yeah, so I just died... coming back to try again. Uh-huh.

 

[Treblaine]

Neither are very realistic. Realistic would be pretty much one hit one kill. Or rather, one hit, one kill, blackout form pain or near incapacitacion followed by bleeding to death.

Actually in real life shootings people typically can survive multiple gunshot wounds, and more than that, stay conscious and mobile throughout.

Take for example the 1986 Miami FBI Shootout, the two suspects took 6 and 12 shots respectively before they went down including one taking a full shotgun blast and still trying to escape. They weren't killed till shot in the cranium when trapped in a car. This is a fairly accurate recreation of the events:


There was no drugs nor alcohol in their system, nor any history of steroid use, no body armour the only thing they had going for them was completing basic army training. That and having a better weapon (assault rifle vs revolvers) they were almost able to shoot their way out of an ambush by a 4x larger force of veteran Federal Agents.

As a radiologist who has to know about pathology and has dealt with patients in hugely varying states of health I know people can suffer HORRIBLE injuries and still walk in. Bullets do a lot of damage but we've had little old ladies WALK IN on a broken femur, probably because they thought that their injury was just the "normal pains of age".

Pain - even from serious injuries - is not an absolute quality, it IS subjective, and it's not going to be "Game over" till your brain/Spinal-cord is destroyed, or your body is completely starved of oxygen from your lungs/vascular-system destroyed. Damaged ain't enough, someone who is very physically fit can still shoot with a collapsed lung and major blood loss.

 

[SilkySkyKitten]

Both Regenerating and Health-Bar based health systems have their advantages and flaws. I personally prefer a mix of the two (like many on here), although one of my personal favorite examples of this doesn't come from something like Halo or Far Cry 2. Rather, it comes from Perfect Dark Zero.
To explain, PDZ had a system where you had an overall health bar that would deplete at a rather fast rate if you were under fire, and would regenerate if you stayed in cover for a period of time. However, unlike most regenerating health systems, the health bar would only regenerate up to a point as opposed to most games that have your health fully regenerate. You really had to be careful and use a proper strategy in your encounters with enemies, as while you would regenerate if you went into cover you'd still have less health than you started with.

Spoiler: Perhaps this little text-based diagram would better explain it...

-You start out with a full health bar:
[XXXXXXXXXX]

-You get shot quite a bit, so your health decreases:
[XXX_______]

-You stay behind cover for a bit, and your health regenerates, but only up to a certain point depending on how much damage you took:
[XXXXXXXX__]

And so on and so forth...

 

[Trolldor]

No, it doesn't. You just add bits of cover between the player and the enemy. That's the balance.
Wolverine mechanics aren't necessarily bad, but they're more a single-player mechanic.

Health bars work wonders in multi-player, particulartly when you have dedicated healers like medics in Killing Floor, or limited healing items like in Left4Dead 2.

 

[Hyper-space]

So called "realistic" games have done away with the health bar in favor of the get shot, regenerate form of gameplay.

To call this realistic is moronic. I'm not saying that the mechanics of a health bar are any better, but the concept is much closer to realism.

For example, a Health bar can represent how much a soldier knows they've been hit. Looking at it from an in-universe example, the soldier knows they've been hit, and should move with more caution until they can find a way to patch themselves up.

With the regeneration, it doesn't matter how badly you're hit, all you need to do is duck into cover until you grow your limbs back. You don't need to know how bad it was, you don't need to think over how to change your survival strategy, you just get back up and do it again until they die.

The health pack pickup method of healing is about as close an approximation of real world first aid this side of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. It forces you to take time out of combat to find a way to heal yourself, just like medical aid in the real world.

The health bar is much closer to a real world method of combat in games than regenerating will ever be, while still being a true game mechanic.

EDIT
I leave for a few hours and the thread gets away from me. Allow me to clarify my stance above. I am not trying to imply that either system is inherently better than the other. A lot of my favorite games use the regeneration system.

What I am commenting on is the ridiculous notion that game developers have towards realism. Many games that tout realism as a selling point are misleading their buyers. (Looking at you COD and Medal of Honor)

If a gamer wants realism, they should play Arma 2 or Stalker. Then they can bleed out to their hearts content.

This rant just came off as an annoyance I have with the big time game developers. Sorry if my main message was a bit jumbled.

I think regenerative health was handled pretty well in hardcore mode in BLOPS. You only regen from minor stuff like falling down a not-so-high-that-you-break-your-legs height.

 

[Falseprophet]

I like to think of regenerating health not as "Your character magically gets better after getting shot", but as a measurement of how close your character is to being killed. Brothers in Arms did this, by having a character caught in the open never actually get shot till he "ran out of health". Every other hit was just a representation of the enemies drawing a bead on you. I like to think other games with regenerating health are the same way.

Like Mirror's Edge, for example. Faith is able to run, jump, climb, and fight just fine after being shot because she isn't getting hit. She's just being shot at, and the health representation is how close she is to being hit, or at least hurt. Same with Call of Duty. The health could represent the same, or your body armor deflecting shots.

This was the justification for hit points, the granddaddy of all "health bar" systems, back in the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Of course, D&D, just like everyone else, seems to have forgotten that.

Maybe the compromise solution is to relabel the "health" bar as "stamina" or "endurance", and have it slowly regenerate over time, but it can also be refilled instantly through some kind of health-pack equivalent. Max Payne's painkillers were a good version that fit the character and story, for example.

I just don't see any of the alternatives as any less flow-breaking. Health packs require backtracking or hoarding, but regenerating health requires me to hunker down for half the battle until the red stuff falls off my face (admittedly, in squad-based games I might still be able to direct my squad while my PC regens). The only reason I'd duck under cover in MW2 was because dying and respawning took slightly longer and was much more flow-breaking.

 

[Fidelias]

Neither system is more realistic than the other. A health bar is actually a bit less realistic, since you know how many rounds you can take until you die. And then when you get a health pack, you just magically heal instantly.

With regenerating health, at least, you don't have to retry levels a million times because you took too much damage at the last checkpoint and you're about to go up against the boss monster.

 

[Geo Da Sponge]

I don't really have a preference for either system, but I really dislike those people who think regenerating health=invulnerability, and then go on to complain how you can tank any game with regenerating health. It makes me wonder whether they've ever actually played a game with regenerating health on a difficulty higher than easy.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

I've got to say I'm a health bar guy. Regeneration simply removes that added layer of challenge... You know, living until the next health kit? Using strategy?

Feh.