If other games had Regenerating Health:

Ultraman: Towards The Future says "hi."

edited 14th Jun '11 2:18:39 PM by NULLcHiLD27

> Managing the health packs is often the challenge.

Yes, because that's what I want to do in shooters.

Search for more health packs. Shooting is for casual noobs.

   I will consume not only your flesh, but your very soul.   

A Megaman playable character using a command function to generate a powerful field just like a Cave Troll, healing lost energy points. Well, that's just me advertising my Megavania idea

What profit is it to a man, when he gains his money, but loses his internet? Anonymous 16:26 I believe...

It absolutely does. Health packs are finite, regenerating health is not. It means that your success in one fight has no bearing in the next. As long as you get through the fight, no matter how cheaply or narrowly, you're as good as new in the next fight and there's no punishment in the long term for your mistakes. Sugarcoat it as much as you want, but the standard implementation of regenerating health is a replacement for difficulty.

Furthermore, it takes the tension out of a fight. When you've only got 1 hp left and there's enemies left to kill, there's a sense of something at stake, if not panic, that makes the game more fun. Regenerating health? Go hide under the nearest indestructible piece of cover and try not to cry until your booboos heal. Back to the fight. Nothing at stake, no sense of achievement, no sense of "I can't believe I got out of that alive".

This is not to say that the idea is unworkable. I think regenerating health could be a great idea, even in something that's supposed to be tits-hard like Devil May Cry or Ninja Gaiden - but only if it regenerated between fights and not during. Conceivably, this would remove the need for health packs while still encouraging players not to get hit. It would change the way the game treats success though - pass/fail instead of a constant challenge where one fight leads into the next. To remedy this the fights themselves would have to be made even more difficult. This is another part of the equation that modern shooter developers seem to forget.

Yes, because it's more fun to sit perfectly still behind cover, sobbing and waiting to heal, than actually putting yourself at risk to go out and look for health.

Sit behind cover. Shooting is for casual noobs.

Halo says "Hi, wanna try that just to see how long it takes the enemy to find your hidey-hole and skull fuck you?"

And by "look for health" do you mean backtrack to a previous room where you've already disposed of your enemy forces leaving no threat what-so-ever?

Now this pathetic argument between a bunch of noobs that don't seem to understand that it's not the mechanic, but how it's used got old the second it started. Stick a fork in it.

edited 14th Jun '11 5:23:55 PM by NULLcHiLD27

The only reason looking for health packs in modern shooters would be considered backtracking is because they are so linear that they might as well be on rails. Backtracking for health in Half-Life would be incredibly boring, I agree, because it's a boring game all around. Part of what I enjoyed about the old generation of shooters was looking for secrets, something that is virtually non-existent in modern shooters.

This is also an advantage of the compromise I suggested - the fights would actually be challenging, but you don't have to trek down empty hallways to get health.

Thanks for announcing you didn't read my post. I said that the idea is perfectly workable, it's just that to my knowledge, nobody has done it in a way that avoids neutering the difficulty yet.

edited 14th Jun '11 5:42:15 PM by Mammalsauce

^^ Does Resistance's hybrid system of partially regenerating health and picking up health packs to recover the rest count as a way to keep the challenge up?

Good that you brought that up, I forgot about Resistance. I really liked that implementation of regenerating health. I can't think of an action game that wouldn't be improved with that hybrid, possibly tweaked in that it only regenerates between battles.

edited 14th Jun '11 5:50:37 PM by Mammalsauce

Yes, because the oldschool games were the embodiment of perfection and never did any of the sort.

Thanks for announcing that you're the fucking sun and that everything anyone says is directed specifically at you.

And again, Halo says "Hi, come on in, take your shoes off, we're obviously gonna be here awhile."

edited 14th Jun '11 5:59:04 PM by NULLcHiLD27

^And Halo went to the Xbox and the PC market went on to accommodate Valve shooters.

"Hipsters: the most dangerous gang in the US." - Pacific Mackerel

I'd say in any RPG, it'd involve playing a lot more defensively with barrier and defense skills being more common and more valuable.

The thing about making witty signature lines is that it first needs to actually be witty.

As said earlier, Halo was only a partial example. The shield regenerated, not your health, until 2 got lazy anyway. Reach apparently goes back to the basics. Because they were better.

Anyway, health pack management I was referring to mostly for multiplayer. You don't have to do a lot of back tracking for Health in one player because health is randomly dropped(or always dropped) by enemies. The idea was the enemies do more damage than the health they give so you have to get hit less than you hit the enemy. Regenerating Health throws that out. You only have to be good at not getting hit for a period of time, and the game design encourages it usually.

The later Halo game compensated by having you get splattered in 5 seconds of sustained combat. I still thought the multiplayer was good, but not the campaign, even with endless continues.

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

You quoted my post, if you don't want someone to draw the conclusion that you're speaking to them, then don't address them. You also might want to make a habit of reading the post immediately preceding yours, which you quoted, so you don't say something like when 'it's not the mechanic, but how it's used' is exactly what I addressed.Did I ever say they were perfect? No, only that some of my favorites had something in them that I miss these days. You are arguing with a statement that I'm not even making.I'll take your word for it.

PS take a chill pill bro

edited 14th Jun '11 6:20:44 PM by Mammalsauce

..........where did the Cave Troll part come from?

"Every opinion that isn't mine is subjected to Your Mileage May Vary."

D&D reference, trolls in fantasy influenced by it all have regeneration.

Hmm… How about Gauntlet, which has the exact opposite? I guess you'd just have a straight-up timer instead.

Quoting for effect, debates on the mechanic's merits (or lack thereof) may better belong in a thread like this.

That's Rubber-Band A.I., which is already ubiquitous in racing games.

This reminds me of the incredibly weird compromise Medal Of Honor had, where enemies randomly dropped medkits, so you'd have to leap out of cover or close the distance with snipers before Everything Fades ingested dropped medkits in order to get health, which made me feel… Rather ghoulishly vampiric for an otherwise mundane historical setting.

To be honest, Heal Thyself and Walk It Off are both pretty ridiculous from a Gameplay and Story Segregation perspective, the best approach I can recall is probably a refinement of good ol' Meaningless Lives, like in Ghost Recon where you switch from squaddie to squaddie as your team gets more and more shot to pieces absent any healing, often limping (yay Subsystem Damage, another thing regen kills) to the finish line full of casualties after a long mission.

Eric,

I thought Trolls were just invulnerable to everything except against fire and acid?

"Every opinion that isn't mine is subjected to Your Mileage May Vary."

Nah, mon. We get da regeneration and da cool Jamaican Troll accents.

Sorry, I can't hear you from my FLYING METAL BOX!

No, that's just the only way to stop them regenerating.

There are too many toasters in my chimney!

The regenerating trolls in Oblivion were a real pain if you had a poorly built character. At one point they were gaining health back faster than my sword was taking it away. I didn't keep playing that character for long.

Well, it depends on the RPG using it. It's great when the programmers add it in as an excuse for them to amp up the difficulty and have the monsters go to town on you during battles, since it makes the game both challenging yet still fair. But when they forget to ramp up the difficulty to match the auto-healing, it makes the random battles feel like Padding.

edited 15th Jun '11 6:50:19 AM by Servbot

> It absolutely does

God I hate people who only pretend to think.

You forgot that part where, y'know, regenerating health implies dying much, much faster. Oh, righto, I forgot that it's only a challenge if you're unkillable.

edited 15th Jun '11 3:24:45 AM by Aminatep

   I will consume not only your flesh, but your very soul.   

^Except that he explained that even if you take damage faster all you have to do is hide behind a chest high wall for a while until your wounds heal (and I really haven't seen many cover based shooters where the enemies pull a HL 1 if you're in cover and just chuck a grenade at you-so it's not like hiding behind cover is a risk or anything).

True, but said short term is usually only a few seconds which is just too short for any real difficulty to take place. I think Mammalsauce's idea of health regenerating after the encounters is one of the better ideas for regen health I've seen imo- it does what you've said but makes sure that the individual encounters are still difficult for longer than 5 second stretches.

edited 15th Jun '11 3:39:31 AM by ShadowScythe

It replaces long-term costs for mistakes with much increased challenge over the short term.

There are too many toasters in my chimney!

@Signed : Cave Trolls are kind of a dangerous mook in Castlevania series. I think they first appeared in Symphony of the Night, then got buffed in Order of Eclessia. They're usually not magical creatures, but the field they generate out of emergency and deadly spite is impressive

edited 15th Jun '11 3:42:18 AM by Cassie

What profit is it to a man, when he gains his money, but loses his internet? Anonymous 16:26 I believe...

So much for "just for fun" and "something like a forum game".

But it would have been naive to hope that this will not degenerate into a "regenerating health: good or bad?" discussion/flame war.

People aren't as awful as the internet makes them out to be.