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.

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.

The Madman:
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.

Used to be in my day if you did shitty in a fight you had to pay for it, forcing you to play better in the next few and to, as a result, become better at the game. Oh sure it could be frustrating if you walked into a big unexpected fight with two health and a peashooter, but on the other hand if and when you actually won that fight it just felt amazing as a result. You accomplished something awesome (Insofar as anything you do in a videogame can be considered an accomplishment) and felt great as a result. Classic risk vs. reward.

Just imagine System Shock 2 or Half-Life with regenerating health, it wouldn't work. 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? And what's the worry about scavenging and conserving?

Which isn't to say that health packs were perfect or that regenerating health is always bad. Depends on the game. But it's also easy to see why many, myself included, prefer one over the other.

Agreed. I quite like the old health meter system. It could create situations where you are essentially screwed, running around with an army of monsters chasing you while you're at 10 health. To some, that might not seem fun, but the greatest thing is if you somehow manage to take them all out, dodging bullets, swords, claws, rockets, fire, lightning, axes, and everything else, and making it out alive.

It also makes standard monsters dangerous, but not deadly. With regenerating health, it doesn't matter at all if you take a bullet or two to the face, because it'll regenerate anyway. Headcrabs in Half Life, on the other hand, are small, and hardly deal any damage. Yet they are dangerous. Let them off for too long, and you'll be in trouble in the long run.

For that matter, another reason I like the old health system is that it gives the player a little extra motivation to explore the level. If you can find an item that gives you more than the standard maximum health, you'll want those things. Same thing with armour. In them old games, you'd constantly be on the lookout for body armour and things that increase your health above the standard 100. Having those meant you had some breathing room, but you wanted to be careful anyway because you knew you'd need them for the boss at the end of the level.

Regenerating health takes most of that away. Hardly have to bother preparing for a boss, because you're at full health anyway when you enter the room (assuming there are bosses at all). Ammo isn't a big deal either most of the time, which is also sad. Interesting secrets are slowly disappearing from the fps genre.

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.

ManThatYouFear:
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.

Das Boot:
I believe they dont like it because ITS EVIL!!!!!

The Madman:
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?

Das Boot:
I believe they dont like it because ITS EVIL!!!!!

The Madman:
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.

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.

XMark:

Don Savik:
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.

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.

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

Elamdri:

Actually, regenerating health also plays into encounter design. Without regenerating health, a developer has no clue how much health a player is going to have going into any given encounter but the first for each level.

With regenerating health, a developer knows that all players will go into every encounter with full health, thus removing a variable, and therefore making it easier to tune each encounter's difficulty.

You mean that it is lazyness to balance the amount of health they give out. Every mediocre to good FPS gives you the least amount of health you need to survive an encounter. It gives you a reason to give your best and perform best and be it just to have more health later.

Simple example: I player thourgh Serious Sam 3: BFE on serious. No encounter on the list is impossible with 1 health, they still give you over time enough to survive at least one hit and if you are not braindead you can perform well enough against every kind of opponent to have near full health for new mobs / bosses. Also, you can defeat every boss with just 1 hp (or the amount of HP which allows them to oneshot you).

Regen health makes tuning easier which implies that they actually tune the encounter that way. In most cases they just want to save the time of proper quality control and balancing.

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.

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.

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.

Das Boot:

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.

Das Boot:
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?

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.

XMark:

Don Savik:
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...

renegade7:
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.

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.

^
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.

The Heik:

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!

WhyWasThat:
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.

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.

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

Das Boot:

Kahunaburger:

Das Boot:

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.

Das Boot:
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.

WhyWasThat:

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.

Das Boot:

Kahunaburger:

Das Boot:

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.

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.