Inexperienced or just poor fps players will have a hard time of it anyway, what holds true for health and health packs also holds true for ammo. Should fps games go the unlimmited ammo route as well? Because not every enemy drops ammo on death, and it’s just as inorganic to reload or backtrack to find more ammo as it is for health.

There are lots of different ways to go other than regenerating health, it really depends on the type of game. Would Call of Duty games be more palatable if instead of regenerating health you were knocked immobile, Republic Commando style, screaming for a medic or one of you squad mates to come patch you up. How about that for immersion?

But probably the best solution for health pack placement would be to have those enemies that already drop weapons and ammo to drop small health kits as well. Leaving the large health kits to be found in logical places like supply dumps, vehicles and field hospitals.

Halo’s regenerating shields make sense in context – particularly as the Elites have them too. If you deplete their shields, they’ll seek cover and try to regenerate as well.

The other thing is grenades. Halo makes use of grenades like no other game. They’re a plentiful all-purpose tactical weapon instead of a limited resource. A single grenade will take out a shielded enemy, so at any point you can still be taken out by a grunt with a sticky grenade. And because they’re so plentiful, they’re perfect for flushing regenerating people out of cover or scattering enemies so that you have a chance to reach cover and regenerate. It’s a very well balanced aspect of the game.

Regenerating health isn’t a cop-out. It’s just a design choice. The thing I’d say about health kits is that it must be difficult for designers to balance their placement for differing skill levels. It can leads to the ‘elastic progress’ Radiant mentioned, and encourage inorganic play. You can have a large firefight and have enormous fun with it, but finish up with very little health. Do you crawl forwards towards the next healthpack area, and have to keep reloading because a single shot will kill you? Or do you reload the enitre fight and try to get through with more health?

@Radiant: I don’t see how frantically searching for a medkit while pinned down under heavy fire could do anything but aid immersion. Moments like that make for some of the most exciting – and occasionally annoying – in shooters. For comparison, take the older GTA-ish game The Getaway. You regenerated health in that game by leaning against a wall and catching your breath. It was looney, and especially so seeing it third-person.

It’s well-implemented in games where it makes sense in context (Halo) or doesn’t play so big a part (Portal). For everything else, I’m fine with healthpacks until someone thinks of something better.

More meaningful choices means a deeper game.

Without regenerating health, bolting for cover and hiding in mid-combat is not a useful strategy; you’ll still be almost dead, and the next person who spits at you will kill you. Having the option to disengage and reengage – as opposed to keeping your crosshair over the enemy and hoping to hell he’ll die before you – is a meaningful combat choice, which adds depth.

Limited weapon selection means that you don’t have the opportunity to just switch to another weapon if you run out of ammo. Resource management, which gives a meaningful choice, which makes a deeper game.

Lets look at one of the other best shooters in recent years: Halflife 2. Beautiful world, well-told story, lots of fun. But lets look at the meaningful choices you make during combat.

“Whoops, he’s too far away from the shotgun. Better switch to any other weapon.”
“I don’t have a lot of magnum ammo. I guess I can’t use it all the time.”
“Oh, that’s a strider. I guess I better hide behind my crate of infinite rockets until it stops shooting at me.”

In terms of combat, Half-life 2 is a tremendously shallow game. It feeds you medkits and ammunition whenever you need them, and the only real issue of “resource management” is trying to figure out where that sawblade flew off to after you shot it at all those zombies. I love HL2, and I’m not NEARLY a Halo fanboy . . . but looking at Halo and calling it simple and shallow is a little silly.

More casual? Maybe. Since it’s on a console, it’s less twitch-reliant. Which makes it, technically, less hardcore. But shallow gameplay? Nah.

The reason I like regenerating health is that it keeps the emphasis on the shooting instead of on the rooting around for health. Historically on FPS’s, the only purpose of cover is to limit the number of enemies shooting at you at once. And especially on higher difficulties or against skilled opponents, there’s little to no benefit of firing from partial cover. Regenerating health means that your position in combat is much more important.

It’s not necessarily a step forward if not thought through and implemented properly. I like the COD4 “invisible health” approach, for instance. It gives you a “Shit, I’m being shot at!” jolt when you get hit, but once you’ve found cover you don’t have to sit and try and think back to the last place you saw a medkit. On the other hand, it’s now become the “new thing to do,” and there’s a better than average chance that an FPS will use it without actually taking the time to figure out the best way to implement it.

Conversely, Health packs in HL2 work well because they encourage exploration. If you’re low on health or ammo, poking around a little will get you some – so you don’t have to backtrack. In TF2, regenerating health would make the Medic redundant, and though medkits are there they’re scattered rather thinly over the map. In both cases, the placement of healing items are important facets of level design . . . while in Halo and COD4, the presence and placement of cover is equally important. Much more important than it is in TF2.

And I don’t want to be the one to say it, because my distaste for fratboys is as well matured as anyone else’s, but Halo’s not actually all that bad. Halo 1 especially had solidly presented storytelling, and was the first mainstream, story-based shooter to champion Regenerating Health and “Carry around two weapons at a time” over the established “Percent Health + Armor refilled with medkits and armor bits” and “Carry a pistol, shotgun, machine gun, rocket launcher, sniper rifle, and alien weapon around all at once and pull the one you need out of your ass at any given moment.”

Are the former two mechanics inherently superior to the latter two in all incarnations? Clearly not; as with anything, the implementation is important. But they’re distinctly viable solutions which Halo’s success introduced to the mainstream.

Also, the pistol in Halo was the most useful weapon in the game. Which was, you know, an innovation: in any other game I can think of, your starting weapon is only there as a placeholder until you get your hands on anything else. Also, for innovations: quickbutton for grenades, cooperatively manned vehicles, melee kills from behind . . . none of these are things that had never been done before, but they were ALL things you barely saw in shooters back in 2001.

You ever hear the phrase ‘elastic progress’? In games using non storable health packs, Q4 and D3 in this case, you make forward progress up to a point wherein you have to backtrack half the map to pick up the health.
So you’re always tethered elastically to the last health drop point [adding to the problems of repetitive scenary].

And storable medkits, as used in Fear, bring up there own issues too; if two players go through the same fight but one player leaves with only 1 health pack left but the other guy playing the same fight had the skill to come out with 8. The difficulty has increased exponentially going forward for the player who isn’t as good at shooters.

Not to mention, as someone else pointed out elsewhere that it breaks the immersion hunting around for healthpacks [whilst your fighting nazis].

Regen health unclutters the hud, simplifies inventory management, provides a brief break in the fighting to regroup with out having to retread your steps and zeros base gameplay difficulty for all players [the hidden health bar also allows some wiggle room to devs to go 'easy' on players in some sections without making them feel rubbish or making them die first; I think Cod4 did this when you rescue and run to the chopper with the pilot].

Yeah it comes with it’s own problems [enemy bullet sponges aka the 'these fuckers wont die!' syndrome] but it solves so many issues it’s hard to ignore as something that’s really pushed the genre.

First, what ‘genre pushing’ things did Halo do? The shield health system was around before Halo. So was a godawful starting weapon. So was shitty stories in FPS’.

I will admit that a sci-fi hero in a BMX outfit is fairly original.

Also, you cannot, in any way, successfully use regenerating health as progress. If anything, it’s a crutch for shitty design. “This part is too hard for our testers.” “Ok, put in some rocks they can hide behind to regenerate their health.” It’s total bullshit. It switches from being about skill to being about move, get shot/hide/move, get shot/hide.

In fact, I can’t think of a single trend in recent shooters that isn’t more of a cop-out of decent design than regenerating health.

And did you just refer to Quake 4’s story as ‘overly complicated’? Humanity invades Stroggos… kills Stroggs. Where’s the complication?