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

[Blitsie]

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.

Good lord that just brought back bad memories, I managed to drudge my way to the four ghost kings bosses and just rage-quit after it took me half an hour to whittle down the health of ONE king to death (while they easily mangle me), my best guns had the destructive effect of flinging a damned toothpick at them.

Fuck bullet-sponges, I don't see the appeal, both tactical or fun, at spending 20 minutes popping in and out of cover pinging away at some enemy who is just standing in the open relentlessly firing at you anyway. Its boring, it sucks, and holy crap was Destiny an awful PvE game because of it.

Anyway; I'm skipping out on Division for exactly that reason, I tried it at an expo last year and its hella jarring landing that first headshot on a person and seeing him go on like you just lightly caressed his cheek with a feather, only to have to deliver five more headshots to finally have him drop down. Its hilariously ironic since the game is being advertised as this semi-realistic look into a near post-apocalyptic future of a city, yet human enemies tank bullets to the face like you're firing at them with nerf guns.

Its just a case of having it balanced, no need to make it ArmA levels realistic but at the same time not this kind of laughable un-realism, heck at the very least give me a reason why normal human beings can survive lethal shots like its nothing, or actually put in effort and make them weaker, but the AI much more tactical and challenging? Its just lazy otherwise if the challenge mainly derives from the health bar.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

Actually after playing some borderlands 2 the other day I have a complaint about one specific enemy's HP bar. Everything else is fine (Small guys take one shotgun blast, bigger guys take 2, Robots take about 3), but CONSTRUCTORS?! GOD I HATE THOSE THINGS. They are bullet sponges with artillery fire. Augh. XD

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

I find it vastly preferable to "Squishy" shooters where it's all about who gets the drop on who rather than who can win a sustained fight.
Plus having reasonable amounts of health makes melee a viable option, and melee is always more fun.
The fact that as a top-of-the-line super-cyborg you were too squishy to survive if you were spotted was a big part of what ruined Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
The term is "Full clip shooters" as in it takes a full clip to drop an enemy.

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.

pretty much both of these sum up my opinion (not that I think melee is always more fun, but I think it does add to the strategy, something you need to consider in enemies and/or if you run out at the last clip whether it's worth charging in for a melee or finding cover.)

OT: I've played years of twitch/small health shooters amongst friends and classmates, and *even* with myself doing well, I didn't like it, there wasn't as much strategy involved and gun consideration wasn't as big of a deal since it was twitch based and *pretty much* who saw who first.

This is also a problem online, you might beat two people in a battle, and then instantly get dropped from someone else who just spawned by you or saw the gunfire on their mini-map, you get no time for a rebuttal at all even if they hit you in the foot/leg with the shot.

Some of my most cherished memories are in the heat battles with someone else, strafing between cover and knowing when to shoot and when to hold back so I could catch them off guard or if I needed to retreat for a moment to reload/use explosives/etc...

Also depending on the game, it can be a decision "do I keep running knowing this grenade/c4/claymore is gonna take a piece of my health out and I can flank the opponent, or do I roll/dodge backwards and re-evaluate?" vs "oh, no health at all to start with? looks like I died from rando-bomb #5"

now on the flipside, having TOO much health (this is mp only that I'm referring to) can also be troublesome and lead to just a giant clusterfuck, so I do think there is a nice balance to consider, especially depending on if you have control of your characters health/shield/etc customization beforehand.

 

[Action Jack]

I wasn't too big a fan of Borderlands, but the health bars were never part of my complaints. If you stuck to level-appropriate missions, basic enemies would always die after a reasonable amount of hits.

 

[Battenberg]

I straight up don't understand how or why the OP is, in their own words, "salty". Are they annoyed because a game got made that's not in a genre they like because if so they could always just not play it. It's not like there's a shortage of typical shooters. It's not even like I particularly enjoy this style of game either but complaining that they even exist just seems pointless. Variety only serves to improve the games industry.

 

[Zhukov]

I straight up don't understand how or why the OP is, in their own words, "salty". Are they annoyed because a game got made that's not in a genre they like because if so they could always just not play it. It's not like there's a shortage of typical shooters. It's not even like I particularly enjoy this style of game either but complaining that they even exist just seems pointless. Variety only serves to improve the games industry.

Because, while typical shooters are indeed in plentiful supply, open-world multiplayer shooters with both PvE and something like the cutthroat free-form PvP of Day Z are basically non-existent. The only ones are half-baked, poorly made, unpolished early-access indie games.

This was my chance to get that along with some triple-A polish and they've gone and fucked it up with lame shooting.

Hence, a bit salty.

 

[Cowabungaa]

What I think could be a useful analogy is that between sprinting and running a marathon. Like twitchy one-burst-dead shooters and bullet sponge shooters, sprinting and marathons share many superficial similarities but in the end test very different skills. One goes for pure speed and reaction time, the other has pacing, resource management, etc.

However, this is in theory.

When it comes down to actual games, and what I actually prefer, it all boils down to execution. I've enjoyed both sponge-y shooters like TF2 and Mechwarrior Online and fast, twitchy stuff like Counterstrike. Both styles of shooter gameplay has their own possibilities and merits, but if a game doesn't capitalize on them it ends up feeling unsatisfying. Bad twitchy mechanics lead to feelings of unfairness, create a high barrier to entry, that sort of thing. Bad endurance mechanics can lead to it feeling like a slog, etc.

What is true though is that bad endurance mechanics are more prevalent. It seems somewhat as a default option and an easy way to both pad the game and lower the barrier to entry.

In the end I like to stand a chance in shooters. I'm not as fast as I was as a teenager, but when it takes too long to down an enemy I get annoyed as well. I like a solid middle ground most of the time.

 

[Cowabungaa]

So I've been keeping half an eye on Ubisoft's Division game that's coming out soonish. I was half hopeful that we'd finally be getting the triple-A DayZ knock-off I've been hankering for ever since all of the world's indie devs proved themselves mysteriously incapable of actually finishing such a game.

Finally got around to watching some unedited, non-trailer, non-press-release gameplay footage.

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.

I just realized, here's the problem though; The Division is basically a sort-of MMO, with an open, relatively seamless multiplayer world. If it were a real twitch shooter you'd keep walking and randomly dying because you didn't have a chance in hell to check all the myriad directions someone could shoot you from. The griefing would be unreal and even the PvE bits would be a pain in the ass as you could just randomly die. That, or move so freakin' slowly and carefully through the big open world that it'd still be a slog, just for different reasons.

Even a game like ArmA 'only' sticks to giant-ass maps which isn't the same as playing in a persistent open world. But even that game is for an incredibly niche audience and arguably isn't a real twitch shooter, you can't blame for a developer or publisher to want to reach even a slightly bigger audience than something like DayZ.

Looking at some beta footage the health still does seem to be a little high, but as it's a beta those values might change a bit. But I can definitely not see real twitch shooting combat like Counterstrike working. The world design simply isn't made for it. I mean, let's be real; DayZ's world is mostly empty bullshit. But The Division is Manhattan, and a well-fleshed out one at that. 99% Of the time you'd have no clue where that random bullet that killed you came from and it'd be a very boring affair.

The comparison with Borderlands is less good because that game's level design, in most areas and in the ones that did less so it'd be not much of a problem to fix, and other gameplay elements (just being PvE for instance) would have suited more twitch-y shooting. But The Division has a completely different structure to it than Borderlands does, a structure that fits a more sustained form of shooting better than Borderlands.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Later Halos feel like they suffer from this without showing you an actual health-bar...I agree with you though about Borderlands: It had a neat premise (millions-of-millions of guns on an alien world) but the fact that your guns shoot numbers at an enemy's numbers instead of causing direct damage just completely turned me off of the game. I like RPGs. I like RPGs that feature guns. I don't like to play a game that presents itself as a first or third person shooter but is, in actuality, an RPG. Isn't Destiny like this too? I had no intention of getting this game but now that I know what it actually is, my interest is still in the realms of 'No'.