What is the appeal of healthbar-em-up shooters?

[Luminous_Umbra]

I disagree immensely, for several reasons.

1. If being dropped in one hit is true for you and enemies, it becomes a contest of who sees who first most of the time. and if it's true of only enemies, then it's a snooze fest unless you're fighting such a huge glut of enemies that killing them in one shot doesn't matter as much.

2. It reduces variance in weapons. Splash damage amount doesn't matter if any hit kills instantly, poison-like status ailments (and others) are pointless, and so on.

3. Continuing from the previous point, it makes weapons duller in general. Whereas a game might have slower, but more powerful weapons and faster, but weaker weapons, those go away when everything kills in one hit. Then it's just a question of what's faster, has bigger shots, etc. There's far less opportunity for differing weapons and the thought of what weapon would be best.

4. As others have said, bosses. Because if you want a challenging boss that gets downed in one hit, your options are limited and frequently irritating. (Like a boss that's very hard to hit)

5. As others have said, it removes quite a bit of strategy.

The overall point is that while there are plenty of games where bullet sponge enemies are done poorly, the opposite done right is basically non-existent, because of how much is lost from doing so.

 

[happyninja42]

What if you're 1not a 17 year old twitch response gamer but still finds bullet sponges to be boring?

Then play the plethora of shooter games where you can die in one hit. There's certainly no lack of them out there.

sorry but I just don't get why bullet sponges automatically make things more tactical/strategic.

Because you can't rely on simply having a higher response time to win.

For me at least , most of the times I play a game with bullet sponges enemies I try to use some sort of cover/plan of attack but it all becomes moot because all the enemies just end up rushing me with their Spongy HP bars and one hit weapons.

....If they are killing you with one hit, then how is that a "bullet spongy" game? That sounds exactly like the other type of game you feel is better. One hit, one kill. That's not slogging it out, tossing bullets at each other over a long period of time.

I also don't get why having enemies with less health automatically make the game a 'twitchy shooter'. Just because the enemies die quickly doesn't mean you won't.

....yes, that's exactly what I said. I can die as quickly as they do, but if I'm simply not as fast as the other players, and simply don't have the hand eye coordination they have, or even as stable of an internet connection as them, I don't have time to do anything else but die. When I'm dead before I can even register that someone was attacking me, there is no strategy for that, and it's frankly, not fun for a lot of gamers, myself included. Some people like it, and that's fine, go play the other shooter games that function this way, there are tons of them. But let those of us who actually like to have more to the game mechanics other than "who got their shot off first", have a shooter game we can play and enjoy. And again, I've seen footage of this game played by people too, and they died pretty fucking quick. So I think the "bullet spongy" example, implies like, minutes worth of firing and you just eat the bullets. I saw nothing to that effect, where the shots were actually hitting the person. They dropped fast. It wasn't 1 shot, but it sure wasn't dozens of clips worth of survivability, unless they were, you know, using cover, flanking, getting out of the line of fire long enough to heal, using their abilities like the shield to eat damage. The people who decided to do what the OP said, and just "stand there and takes rounds to the face" died really damn quick. So yeah, I still don't see what the issue is.

 

[Souplex]

Plus having reasonable amounts of health makes melee a viable option, and melee is always more fun.

Then why make a shooter in the first place? Just make a melee game with limited shooting.

I don't like it either. Upgrades and inventories are overrated. I like picking up weapons in the heat of combat and then dropping them when I'm done with them. I don't want to be a walking arsenal in all of my games, nor do I want to look at menus for half the game. I think games are loosing something now that everyone wants to make pseudo-RPGs. Weapons are just tools. Instead of having this false sense of progression, I want more interesting combat scenarios and level design.

Because the option to shoot, punch, or some combination thereof is always preferential.
I wasn't referring to shooter/RPGs, I was referring to full-clip shooters as a whole, such as the works of Bungie.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

Because there's just some primal satisfaction in seeing the task you're set out to do (in this case killing enemies) be achieved quicker via finding new gear and being more effective against enemies.

I haven't played any other "health bar" shooters aside from Bordelands, but to simplify it to this extent kind of misses the point. Having the capacity to take some damage can change the dynamic of a shooter to something totally different from, say, COD. In BL2, for example, weaker enemies will often rush you into melee, weak ranged units will shoot from cover and throw grenades, and bigger baddies can stand there and be a major threat. It forces the player to not rely on cover and always be on the move, forcing quick tactical decisions. Since the player can take a fair bit of damage compared to most shooters, movement becomes more viable as a strategy. Then there's the element of some enemies having shields while others have armor, some are weaker to fire, some have visible weak spots and so on.

You know what isn't satisfying? Drawing a bead, firing off a burst and watching an enemy lose 2.5% of his health bar.

It also tends to drag down a game mechanically as well. In a game where combatants can die in 4-8 shots positioning and cover and the element of surprise actually matter. In a game where it takes 40 odd shots, not so much. One person opens fire, the other returns fire and then they stand there drilling away into each other's health bars until the one with the bigger numbers wins.

These things don't really apply to Borderlands. Most enemies will die from 10 shots or so, and only the biggest bosses will lose that little health from bursts of fire. The bosses are meant to be big climactic moments, so if they dropped from firing a single clip into them the spectacle wouldn't really be that spectacular, would it? Also like I said, enemies in Borderlands are varied enough to keep the player moving and the player isn't a bullet sponge. Standing still will get you killed in seconds in Borderlands.

I am with this guy.

Dying exceptionally fast is what made me hate CoD and similar games in the first place.
I'm just going to run over here an-*SNIPED*
Maybe I'll just-*shot by someone camping in cover somewhere*
I-*CAMPER*
Oh! Wait! I have someone in my si-*SNIPED AGAIN*
Finally, I have someone in my sights, Gonna shoot him and-*I miss somehow and I get 360 noscoped on the spot*
FINE! I'm going to camp here and get the first person to pass by! *Gets maybe one kill, and then when they respawn I get grenaded since they predict I'm still there, or they manage to knife me before I can shoot them.*

Compare that to Halo, where my options when ambushed are "Attempt Sticky Grenade, attempt to flee, Try to outplay my enemy from a disadvantage while hoping for backup, rely on my stronger weapon, maybe I have a tool/item/whateverthosewere that can help, maybe I can use the terrain to my advantage, at least try to wear him down so that if an ally finds him after my death they can kill him easily, etc"

That and Outside of boss fights and Ultimate Vault Hunter mode, I never had a problem with enemy HP bars in borderlands. Yeah, you use a lot of ammo, but ammo also drops a lot, and some classes can either do rediculous damage with launchers and snipers, but I played Siren a lot which relies on painting the target with lots of elemental ammo damage and then focusing on another target while the first one died to my Damage Over Time.

Plus, it's fun to be popping off medium endurance enemies while running and taking cover very briefly before sprinting off again and using abilities, and then having a super-stong Badass variant show up and cause total mayhem. A lot more fun than "hide in cover, play enemy whack a mole by peeking out, or just ambush and instantly win".

So put me on team "More bullets = more fun".

 

[sXeth]

While I do hate bullet sponge enemies, what I hate most is when shooting someone has literally no effect other than to tick down their health bar. You just got shot, curse at me or something man!
I don't even mind having to double headshot someone as long as their helmet flies off spectacularly after the first shot

Yeah, although not a great example (since the limbs all have health bars that sometimes end up equally spongey), I always liked being able to take out limbs in Fallout to get some tactical effects (though 4 took out shooting their weapons, instead making it an RNG effect on some perks)


OT : Are you sure they weren't just in some area way beyond their level? (I'm assuming Division is a shooty-mmo Destiny-esque thing, from my vague knowledge of it and posts). Speaking from practical experience in Destiny, where most non-boss monsters can be 1-2 shotted *once you're not underlevel and suffering damage debuffs"

 

[Hero in a half shell]

In multiplayer I like a large enough healthpool that I can realise I'm getting shot at, spin around and have a chance of defending myself against an enemy.

Not necessarily bullet-sponges, but enough that I'm not running around and suddenly drop dead in 0.05 of a second because someone with an smg took a potshot at me from half a map away.

 

[Foolery]

I always preferred Halo's methodology for building an interesting shooter. Have weakpoints. Like taking out Jackals by shooting their hands, then shooting them in the head when they wince. Plasma pistols to take down shields or armour, stop vehicles, etc. Hunters have squishy bits on their backs to try and blast, preferably with a shotgun. Makes it interesting.

 

[The Wykydtron]

Thinking of Borderlands, I eventually did get annoyed with the bullet sponges because I was playing single player and they don't drop the average enemy HP pool low enough to compensate for how i'm lacking the bunch of random yahoos in my game nicking all the good guns and playing shitty music over their low quality microphones when i'm trying to get into the story.

But the thing that killed it for me was how you always have to spend so much time staring at the ground textures to pick up ammo, cash or compare that gun that just dropped (spoilers: it's absolute garbage) it's a small thing but it really killed the fast pace of a fight, having to stop every few yards to pick up stuff.

I think Halo did it right, you usually have the time to react to someone coming up behind you while the guy who got the drop on you still has a sizeable advantage. The enemies in the singleplayer had their own cool methods and equipment, in Borderlands I can remember nothing but bigger and bigger numbers with no signature enemy moves.

 

[Zhukov]

These things don't really apply to Borderlands. Most enemies will die from 10 shots or so, and only the biggest bosses will lose that little health from bursts of fire. The bosses are meant to be big climactic moments, so if they dropped from firing a single clip into them the spectacle wouldn't really be that spectacular, would it? Also like I said, enemies in Borderlands are varied enough to keep the player moving and the player isn't a bullet sponge. Standing still will get you killed in seconds in Borderlands.

My prevailing memory of Borderlands 2 is backpedaling away from "Badass" class enemies while spraying half my ammo reserve into each one of them.

I also tried out the Tiny Tina DLC and found myself backpedaling away from orcs while spraying half my ammo reserve into each one of them.

Neither scenario was particularly engaging.

 

[Bombiz]

Snip

Ok So after reading your response I was going to reply to each point but after playing some Fallout 4 ( a game which I considered to have bullet spongy enemies' and watching some gameplay footage of the divison I realized something. I don't hate 'bullet sponges' or shooters where enemies have high HP bars. I just hate it when some of those games decide to have some of their enemies charge at me while shooting at me and then their friends who are in cover also start shooting at me and then I just end up getting destroyed because the AI bum rushed me not because fought strategically/used tactics.

 

[MysticSlayer]

I don't care much. Normally I think I'm going to hate it, but once I'm in the game, I tend to not really mind. This happened with every BioShock game. It happened when I tried out Boarderlands. It happened with Fallout. It happened with Halo. It even happened with the STALKER and Metro games.

Now I'm not sure about The Division specifically, but at least from my experience with other games, I don't really care how much health the enemy has so long as the game is built well around it.

 

[MysticSlayer]

I just hate it when some of those games decide to have some of their enemies charge at me while shooting at me and then their friends who are in cover also start shooting at me and then I just end up getting destroyed because the AI bum rushed me not because fought strategically/used tactics.

Oh, man, does this bring back awful memories from Mass Effect (just the first one). It still baffles me how anyone looked at that AI and thought, "Yep, that's totally fair and believable!" I refuse to play the game on anything beyond Easy simply because I got so tired of having half a dozen Biotics charging me all using some power that stunned me. It wasn't fun. It wasn't helping establish anything in the world. It was just broken design that I can only guess existed due to budget constraints.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

I find that I don't like either. Twitch shooters are only satisfying if you're doing really good, if you're not you spend most of your time looking for people, with a about a second of shooting or getting shot per life. Healthbar-em-up shooters more often than not get really tedious, particularly if the gameplay is a cover based shooter where you just pop up and down over and over again until they die, or a game like Fallout where you backpedal away from the enemy until they die.

I like something in between. Give enough health that being spotted first isn't a death sentence. Enough that you can duck into cover, recuperate, and make your plan of attack. It makes encounters a lot more interesting when you're not dead after the first 2 bullets. This is hardly a revolutionary opinion, but I think that Halo got a good balance (In multiplayer at least).

That being said, I think that larger health bars can work so long that as the gameplay is interesting and dynamic enough that it doesn't just devolve into the tedium of unloading clip after clip into the enemy. You don't see that that often in straight FPS's, but HAWKEN does a pretty good job at it I think. You're always moving around, ducking and weaving between cover. Or you're running away to repair. If you're just unloading clips into the enemy, you're probably dead

 

[SmallHatLogan]

I just hate it when some of those games decide to have some of their enemies charge at me while shooting at me and then their friends who are in cover also start shooting at me and then I just end up getting destroyed because the AI bum rushed me not because fought strategically/used tactics.

Oh, man, does this bring back awful memories from Mass Effect (just the first one). It still baffles me how anyone looked at that AI and thought, "Yep, that's totally fair and believable!" I refuse to play the game on anything beyond Easy simply because I got so tired of having half a dozen Biotics charging me all using some power that stunned me. It wasn't fun. It wasn't helping establish anything in the world. It was just broken design that I can only guess existed due to budget constraints.

There were some crazy balance issues there. The scenario you described can happen which makes the game feel way too hard, but if you have a biotic specialist (Liara or adept Shepard) tossing singularities all over the place then it becomes way too easy.

 

[Zhukov]

Oh, man, does this bring back awful memories from Mass Effect (just the first one). It still baffles me how anyone looked at that AI and thought, "Yep, that's totally fair and believable!" I refuse to play the game on anything beyond Easy simply because I got so tired of having half a dozen Biotics charging me all using some power that stunned me. It wasn't fun. It wasn't helping establish anything in the world. It was just broken design that I can only guess existed due to budget constraints.

Yeah, that old ME1 AI showed no mercy.

On the harder difficulties you would get bum-rushed by Krogan who could regenerate almost as fast as you could kill them.

The key was to fight cheese with cheese. Take a fully biotic squad and just continuously ragdoll everything in sight.

 

[Paradoxrifts]

I honestly haven't played an entry in the twitch shooter genre in over a decade. I wouldn't say that I've been going out of my way to avoid them in recent years, it is just that nowadays they rarely contain a single player campaign that is worth the price of admission.

So as I don't really care all that much for online multiplayer, twitch shooters have largely passed me by.

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

Thinking of Borderlands, I eventually did get annoyed with the bullet sponges because I was playing single player and they don't drop the average enemy HP pool low enough to compensate for how i'm lacking the bunch of random yahoos in my game nicking all the good guns and playing shitty music over their low quality microphones when i'm trying to get into the story.

But the thing that killed it for me was how you always have to spend so much time staring at the ground textures to pick up ammo, cash or compare that gun that just dropped (spoilers: it's absolute garbage) it's a small thing but it really killed the fast pace of a fight, having to stop every few yards to pick up stuff.

I think Halo did it right, you usually have the time to react to someone coming up behind you while the guy who got the drop on you still has a sizeable advantage. The enemies in the singleplayer had their own cool methods and equipment, in Borderlands I can remember nothing but bigger and bigger numbers with no signature enemy moves.

I am kind of surprised people call borderlands(1/2/TPS) bullet spongy. It's not and actually that is what bugs me about the game. The game starts with everyone being able to take a hit. You need good sustained fire on a enemy take an enemy down, and they need good sustained fire on you in order to drop you. It's nice. Then as the game goes on, damages start to out pace health. You start to kill enemy in fractions of seconds, and they kill you in the blink of an eye. The whole thing becomes much more twitchy and I like it less.

I totally agree about the looking down thing though. I tried complaining about it, but people think it's too minor.

 

[Fox12]

This is why I hated Halo. It always felt wrong that I had to gun away at things before they'd die. Especially brutes. I don't like shooters, but if I had to chose one, I'd choose ghost recon. Both you and the enemy would die in one hit, so you had to prepare an ambush and place your soldiers carefully before every engagement. Especially since you were typically outnumbered. It became a sort of chess match. The thinking mans COD.

Unfortunately it kept the whole homophobic/xenophobic/nationalistic aspects present in COD, so I stopped playing.

 

[Afro Man]

Aaaaaaand... it's a healthbar-em-up bullet-sponge fest. Y'know the sort, where you have to pour two magazines of ammo into standard human enemies as they hemorrhage numbers. Think Borderlands. How dull.

Seeing how your character is equally tough, I don't see how this is a problem, unless you just simply don't like that specific kind of game style.

And now I'm a wee bit salty. I've just never understood why anyone would want to play one of these things. And now this nefarious trend has ruined, ruined I say, a maybe-possibly promising game.

You know what's satisfying? Drawing a bead, firing off a burst and watching an enemy drop.

You know what isn't satisfying? Drawing a bead, firing off a burst and watching an enemy lose 2.5% of his health bar.

See, that's just an opinion. Because I in fact, am of the opposite standing. You know what I don't find satisfying, dying instantly due to somebody with a quicker hand/eye response twitch than me. You know what I don't find satisfying, leveling up a character, signifying them being "stronger", and they still drop with one hit. I've played shooters like that, and they fucking suck.

You know what is satisfying to me? Being able to strategise with a team and work on how to take down a tough opponent over an extended period of time. Of having to plan out if this is the time for me to drop a smoke grenade for cover, or maybe pull out my shield ability to cover my allies, while we advance, so they can flank. That's fun. Trying to do all of that, and dying in .02 seconds because someone with a better latency, and quicker nerve impulses was my opponent, is not fun.

It also tends to drag down a game mechanically as well. In a game where combatants can die in 4-8 shots positioning and cover and the element of surprise actually matter. In a game where it takes 40 odd shots, not so much. One person opens fire, the other returns fire and then they stand there drilling away into each other's health bars until the one with the bigger numbers wins.

Uuuh...yeah no. Sorry but in this example, the person actually using cover/position is still going to be better off. Seeing as you aren't fighting 1 on 1, sure you might be able to do a slugfest with 1 guy, but his 8 buddies are going to eat you for lunch if you don't get some freaking cover. The footage I've seen, from people play testing it, showed pretty clearly that if you try and Leroy Jenkins that shit, you're going to die, and die fast.

So where is the appeal in the latter style? Explain this to me. Justify your subjective preferences.

Because if you are someone like me, who isn't a 17 year old twitch response gamer, it's fun to play a game where planning, tactics, and the effective application of talents/abilities/gear is what you need to win, is infinitely more enjoyable than some deathmatch slugfest with tweens who spend the whole time acting like little fucksticks. Give me a game where I can try and plan out how to best support my team, to give our group the edge we need to survive the long fight, over the extended period of time, any day, compared to some .05 second response time deathgame, where all I see is the fucking "you are dead" screen rotating over and over.

Exactly, with the whole point of the new combiner genre "RPS (Role Playing Shooter)" the health bar complaint stated by the OP is small. Hence why they are releasing another Tom Clancy title with the opposite, and typical shooter mechanics.

As far as I am concerned, just don't play the game, and move on.