Improving "Walk It Off"

Lets face it, there are some merits to Walk It Off. Namely, it means that you don't end up in the house of pain if you recieve a bloody nose at the wrong point. The problem is it cheapens combat by meaning you can just duck behind a wall when you are wounded.

The improvement I would suggest is that you can't recover while in a fight with the enemy. In other words your character doesn't recover from hiding behind a wall, he recovers after the fight.

To break it into steps.

• 1: No combat. Health, if lost, would regenerate.
• 2: Combat begins. Health, when lost, remains lost.
• 3: Player defeats the last enemy. Combat ends, health can regenerate again.

This takes out the "Oh dear, I'm hit, time to hide behind a wall again" element out of the game and turns each individual firefight into a battle of wits again where you have to preserve your health longer than your enemy does. It prevents Unwinnable while removing one of the major complaints of Walk It Off.

Working on a concept for a survival horror game that uses a health level system. If the damage you've taken is less than that required to take you to a condition threshold, you remain at the same level and recover rather quickly — unless you're running or attacking, in which case you recover very slowly. You can't recover above the condition you're at.

As it's a survival horror game, the worse your condition, the slower you move and act, and the more strained your character looks in animations. Action-oriented games would perhaps not want to have damage affect gameplay, but might benefit from this system anyway.

In the end, it allows you some respite from combat, while rewarding careful players with not having to use up items to heal after each confrontation.

Yeah, slicing the healthbar up into regeneration-proof chunks is probably the best compromise. Still rewards/punishes players for their combat performance and resource management, but provides a bit of mercy health to keep the game from getting unwinnable after a major washout.

Now you see the first Halo, which sort of pioneered bringing this into the mainstream, did that by combining shields with health. It meant you always had the protection your shield gave you, but as your health dropped you had less and less mercy from the enemy bullets ripping through you. The problem is that they disregarded this perfectly good system in the sequels and went for the Walk It Off we recognise today.

^ Mostly because the health wouldn't save you from hardly anything.

If you play through Halo 1 on Legendary, you spend most of the time either on full health or near dead (one bar remaining), usually near dead. The health bar didn't protect against anything and there were only a fixed amount of health packs per given level. (Granted in some of the later levels they became somewhat frequent)

It could have been built on though. Making the health guage more resilient and less easy to shave off in one bad move.

Like I said in another thread:

Have a system where if a body part such as a limb is damaged enough, it won't regenerate, so you'll have to find an item that allows the body part to heal back up like normal.

This system is inspired mainly by Deus Ex.

edited 3rd Aug '10 12:36:47 PM by RocketDude

Long story short : it depends on the genre and the focus of the mechanics of the game you're working on. What I WOULD like is for developers to try to think about it a little bit more instead of simply copying Walk It Off.

I like some of the suggestions here, by the way.

A possible compromise solution (which might be good for a survival-horror or FPS-type game): You can regain half of your health from any injury. The other half stays lost without healing. So getting caught in a hail of gunfire = game over, but getting hit a few times = you'll get mostly better.

A possible compromise solution (which might be good for a survival-horror or FPS-type game): You can regain half of your health from any injury. The other half stays lost without healing. So getting caught in a hail of gunfire = game over, but getting hit a few times = you'll get mostly better.

Do you mean you can only regenerate the first half of health, or the second half which is closer to zero health? The second half sounds good to me. Allow players who've gotten real stuck in a mess some leeway to get through, with other means being available to get back to full health later. It even can be HandWaveed to adrenaline!

yeah , but realistically paper-cuts(the upper half of the bar) heals quicker than flesh wounds(the lower). Personally I would like the upper half/quarter to regenerate but the lower to require external healing, that would cause minor error to matter less while still having consequences for major fuckups.

I like the idea of regenerating out of combat, personally. Though what I like even better is using that for Easy and maybe Normal (depending on the game's style), and a straight health system on harder difficulties.

I do however feel that Walk It Off is a lazy excuse for programmers to just make AI's perfect shots with godlike reflexes and not bother to carefully handicap them down to reasonable levels, or bother carefully constructing an entire mission instead of a few discrete thirty second encounters. Not every mook you run into should be fricking Annie Oakley.

edited 3rd Aug '10 3:46:17 PM by Pykrete

I don't know if anybody mentioned previously but I would like the idea of regenerating health in a similar way Marvel VS Capcom does it in which you can only recover a portion of your health while you rest during heavy combat.

For example, if you lose 10% of your health before hiding, then you can recover back to 100% of your Max HP. However, you lose 75% of your health before hiding then you can only recover up to 70% of your Max HP. You can then recover back to 100% max HP until the end of the firefight.

That sounds decent to me.

edited 3rd Aug '10 4:34:14 PM by ariesku

Just Cause 2 did this, and it still felt like Rico could duck behind a corner and be all better, because of the large amount of regen'd health even without a 100% full bar.

A friend of mine figured out a way to enjoy those more recent games that don't actually have health bars, instead opting to just tint the screen red as you take more damage; each time the screen goes red is less health and more luck. Stay out for too long, someone will get a good shot and your out of luck. Hide again, move around, your luck, for want of a better word, recharges.

Not overly realistic, but I've found myself enjoying games just that little bit more from it.

A friend of mine figured out a way to enjoy those more recent games that don't actually have health bars, instead opting to just tint the screen red as you take more damage; each time the screen goes red is less health and more luck. Stay out for too long, someone will get a good shot and your out of luck. Hide again, move around, your luck, for want of a better word, recharges.

According to the entry for Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway in Walk It Off, they explicitly did that - peeking out of cover too much is considered overexposing yourself, causing the screen to go red, so the enemy will eventually manage to place a shot exactly and kill you.

Silent Hill Shattered Memories had a unique take for this that makes sense. The monsters main form of attack is to smother you in order to freeze you to death, walking it off eventually warms you up back to full.

I've always liked Marvel Vs Capcom's lifebar. there's three types of health: Max Health, Max Health for the fight, and current health.

Ninja Gaiden 2 used the "Regenerate a portion of your health after combat" mechanic the OP suggested. It worked pretty well, even if there where a few gaffs that could be taken advantage of to regenerate your health unfairly. Kinda just evening the playing field there though.

I like how Borderlands did it. It had the Shield+Health setup which worked so well in the Original Halo. However, there where also lots of ways to activate health regeneration too... It just happened reeeeal slow. Too slow to be of much use in an immediate firefight, but fast enough that if you avoided any grievous injuries you could recover from the wounds of one battle before the next one.

I've thought of a survival horror game where the enemies do mostly grappling based attacks, and you have to wrestle them off whenever they grab you. Then you could replace the health bar with an "exhaustion" bar where the more you wrestle, the more tired you get, but outside of combat you can rest to restore the bar.

This would fit almost perfectly into most Resident Evil games, if you simply wrestle with the zombies instead of having them bite you for damage. It would also remove the Gameplay and Story Segregation of you getting bitten but somehow not infected.

edited 15th Jun '11 10:07:27 AM by PhiliusLupae

But they aren't zombies anymore. And besides, herbs can heal anything.

I've always been a fan of games that restores your MP(and/or HP) like Lagoon and Quest 64, same with Golden Sun.

I've been thinking about this health system also, and how other games could be made that modify it.

It seems today's games have attacks do a ton of damage to compensate for how rapidly you can regenerate health. I think both should be slowed down. You take less damage per hit, but your health recovers so slowly that you should probably just finish the battle.

Also, to prevent players from hiding for a very long time to wait it out with the slower health recovery, there could be two possibilities: enemies are smart enough to try to flush you out of hiding, or your health only regenerates (however slowly) when you're an active participant in the fight (i.e. enemies can see and are attacking you). Or what another poster said, it only recovers after the fight, but I'd rather it not do that, and instead maybe recover more quickly after the fight, but slowly during it.

Well, this only tangentially related to the topic, but I have an idea of a different kind of health gauge. Instead of whittling down a character's health, they'd start with an empty Breakthrough gauge that is filled by attacking, but slowly depletes constantly, so you have to be quick with your attacks to take the enemy down. When the Breakthrough gauge is full, the enemy is knocked out and cannot fight again until their Breakthrough gauge depletes down to empty again. Of course, this really only works for the specific type of battle system I'm thinking of, but eh.

edited 15th Jun '11 1:01:37 PM by Beorc

Substitute it for mechanics that fufill the same "purpose" (no absence of health items).

STALKER has food, bandages and med kits on most human (and former human) foes, so you aren't likely to run dry between combats, plus medkits are so common and relatively light-weight you can carry tons of them, but they are too slow to use in a "pop under cover, become full" sense. STALKER also makes retreat almost always an option (I think the end-game sequence in So C and a few risked quest failures in the entire series, as well as stealth (the 2nd may require a silenced weapon in parts), so you can't become "stuck" without a way to run away back to a town where you can get a medic. Stalker also discourages getting hit in the first place by making most wounds near instant death.

If you aren't hungry or bleeding, you slowly recover HP, but you will never do it in combat (it takes place over in-game hours) and really only deals with Scratch Damage.

edited 15th Jun '11 1:35:56 PM by deuxhero