What have gamers got against regenerating health?

[WanderingFool]

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 the system like in Far Cry 2 worked pretty well.

The thing I see about reg...

It disrupts game flow, mostly. And it also makes them too easy, or possibly too hard. Instead of needing to avoid taking damage by dodging bullets, all you need to do is crouch behind a wall. On the flipside (the other part I don't like) sometimes it makes your character have so few hitpoints. In Marathon, for instance, your character could take some punishment, not a huge amount but a reasonable amount. You stayed alive by dodging bullets, and sometimes you had to choose which hits you might have needed to take. It added a bit of really quick-thinking strategy. Whereas with modern shooters, all you really need to do is hide behind a chest-high until you regenerate, which kind of disrupts game flow. And if you can't make it to a chest-high wall in time, you only have like 2 or 3 hits before you die, and in most cases things are going too fast to dodge.

Well, I guess with 5 pages already, somebody was going to bring that up.

From my expereince, when there is regen health, while you can take a shot or two and duck for regen, you can take only a few shots before you die overall.

 

[Unsilenced]

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.

^
Pretty much that.

Regenerating health is just basically an exaggeration of natural human recovery, while health kits are an exaggeration of the capabilities of aspirin and band-aids. Neither is omg teh supur realz, and to be honest a game would suck if it really were.

"You've taken a .22 to the leg and severed your femoral artery. Thank you for playing. The game disk will now self destruct because you are dead."


Also, regenerating health isn't always easier. It just allows for different tactics that, like I've been saying all along, fit with some games and not with others.

Think about this scenario. In F.E.A.R, one of my most common tactics was to save up health kits (I almost always had 10 stashed away) and wait until massive boss fights. Then I spammed the healthkit hotkey while tanking. In a game with regenerating health, I would have to find cover if I took a missile to the face. In F.E.A.R I just kept pressing the use health kit and laughing at the very idea that mere missiles could kill me. The cost of this, of course, was that I would have none later, so it was a tactical choice, but it still allowed me to have a valuable tool in a time of need.

 

[Kahunaburger]

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.

I think that's fair. I've played at least one shooter (Halo 2) that was balanced, challenging, and featured health regen, and I don't doubt that it's a possible thing to do. Glad to hear that you put a lot of thought into balance and challenge in your games!

 

[Irridium]

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.

Wait, but Halo had the regenerating shield. And in Halo 2 and 3, it was basically a regenerating health bar since it's all you had.

 

[CountryMike]

Medpack lying around were good in old shooters like Doom. Because those games had a huge exploration element in them. The levels were maze-like and you had to find al kinds of stuff. It has no place in contemporary shooters. It's just annoying.

 

[Aeon_COR]

I loved the health system of Resistance: fall of man
your health would regenerate but only up to the next quarter mark, if you wanted to go from 10% to 50% you needed a medkit

 

[chinangel]

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 kind of have to disagree with that. If you stay in one spot to long you will get grenade spammed and I remember enemies actually flanking you in several levels in Black Ops. Its been to long for the other ones so I cant remember if they did that in them.

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?

Because its not actually hard. Every boss fight comes down to finding out what its weakness is and repeating the same task over and over again. There is really no true difficulty to the game. Regular enemies generally come down to dodge, dodge, attack, repeat. I am not saying its a bad game just that its not hard.

I'm going to respectively disagree. The game has legitimate difficulty, the enemies like any enemies in a game, have set attacks they do. But you're not given any special ability ot get past them. the game is challenging because it expects the gamers to be up to the task.

IE: Try getting past Unrelenting Discharge, the most nightmarishly difficult of hte bosses.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Regen health avoids all of that unpleasantness.

Yes. And it eliminates a lot of depth in design space too.
They are two different mechanics; one isn't "better" than the other; they just need appropriate application.

But developers go by popularity metrics, and the most popular shooters have regenerating health, meaning they will add it even if it isn't especially useful or needed for their particular game.

And over time, that has translated into people falsely believing that one mechanic is better than the other for ALL scenarios.

 

[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 kind of have to disagree with that. If you stay in one spot to long you will get grenade spammed and I remember enemies actually flanking you in several levels in Black Ops. Its been to long for the other ones so I cant remember if they did that in them.

Hmm... this might vary between CoD games, then. At least in MW2 and MW3, I don't remember enemies being smart enough to flank. Sometimes they'd try (usually in a scripted event) but would leave themselves wide open in the process. I remember BFBC2 being the same way, but it was a little better because the enemies could eventually destroy cover.

 

[Paladin2905]

I think people forget that regenerating health wasn't originally a gameplay mechanic, it was a programming fudge to eliminate the long loading time that consoles developed when they moved away from cartridge based media. That being said, it is now a standard because it helps the flow of games along (while still solving the original problem).

Personally, I've never been a big fan of regenerating health unless it is used as a minor point. The perfect example of this in my mind was the original Max Payne- your health bar did not regenerate unless you were down to its last pixel; and then only up to 10% or so. This never left you screwed with no recourse, and kept the drama of being close to dying and having to think a bit more.

Balance people, striking a compromise makes for the best here.

 

[Aerosteam]

It's a lazy health system.

That is all.

Just so I avoid a low-content post, here is a picture of a cloud:

Spoiler

God doesn't seem to like me.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so meh.

But Shadow of the colossus had a Regen health system. would you say that game would have been improved with healthpacks?

I've never played Shadow of the Colossus, so I wasn't thinking of that game when replying to this thread.

There are more ways, to have a health system other than it regenerating over time and healthpacks.

I really don't know what the lore/universe of that game is, but I know healthpacks wouldn't belong.

Maybe potions? Maybe praying at a shrine? Maybe each hit to a colossus' weak point will give you a portion of your health back?

All I'm saying is that there are more inventive and interesting ways of healing yourself other than waiting/avoiding getting hit any more.

 

[Lt._nefarious]

I don't dislike it per-say but I do think it should be optional and the player should choose between it and med kits...

 

[Kungfu_Teddybear]

Hiding behind a wall to regenerate your limbs breaks the flow. Far Cry 2 is a perfect example of how health bars in games should be handled.

 

[Naeras]

I'm not against regenerating health in itself. It's a great way to ensure that you don't ever enter a hard confrontation with close to zero health, which means you might have to reload an old save and play through the level again to make sure your health is higher at that confrontation. The problem is when it's handled completely wrong(i.e. most games), because it tends to make the game ridiculously easy when you can regenerate any damage you if you just hide behind a box for five seconds. It also removes most of the incentive you have to explore levels for secrets, because more armor, ammo and health can be acquired that way. There are also games that realize that this actually makes the game easy and tries to balance it by making confrontations confusing and frustrating, forcing you to hide in a box while your immortal squadmates kill everything for you(hello MW2), which is even worse.

However, the "you won't ever have zero health at the start of a confrontation"-part of regenerating health is a good thing. You just need to make sure you can't fully regenerate health by hiding behind a wall. Space Marine and Deus Ex: Human Revolution are examples of games doing it right: SM only regenerated your shields passively and required strategic use of execution kills or fury mode to regenerate damage done to the health bar. DE:HR had a max health of 200, but only regenerated health back to 100 without consumables, and it regenerated very slowly so that it couldn't be abused as easily.

 

[Netrigan]

There would be no worry about those annoying headcrabs hiding in the air ducks, who cares if they nick you a bit when standing still a few seconds mends it all up?

It just occurred to me that you're right. Regenerating health has gotten rid of all those nuisance critters that plagued video games for years. No more going into tunnels and having to shotgun rats... although Battlefield 3 did turn a rat battle into a QTE.

I knew there was something about regenerating health I liked

On a more serious note, regenerating health should always be thought of as an option when developing a video game and not a requirement. It works well in some games, not at all in others.