http://www.onlysp.com/2012/11/25/tom...and-cant-swim/
That, coupled with the already obvious "PRESS X TO GAME" gameplay doesn't leave me much optimistic at all. Sure, it looks nice but if I wanted to look at pretty graphics I'd watch the Futuremark tech demos
I'm not too concerned about regenerating health these days, because often the alternative is a breadcrumb trail of medkits that look like they went out of their way to go in your path, combined with copious quicksaves. Both systems are ridiculous, the best system would be a hybrid between the two (much like Far Cry 2). They probably just need to stop calling it health and make it something else, like a level of pain or endurance that you can suffer before you go unconscious or screw up and die or something. I mean in real life I don't have a HUD that gives me 100% health.
Wish it did, would make my job a lot easier.
Originally Posted by soldant
You mean like Left 4 Dead or Max Payne where you're sucking down painkillers.
Or America's Army Online or similar tactical shooters where healthpacks are non-existent but, for the purposes of the match you're in, a teammate can staunch blood loss.
Gets my Seal of Approval. Pills here!
Maybe he fashions a compression bandage tourniquet out of two rubber bands and a paperclip?
Clearly with games there's a bit of abstraction so I guess what I'm saying is slightly absurd, but it seems like whenever someone mentions "regenerating health" people are ready to come out and complain about how ridiculous or unrealistic it is, while simultaneously advocating the classic system where medkits are strewn across the map like they're raining from the sky.
Or broken bones that heal instantly: Just need one (1) doctor's bag.
There's an idea for a wargame: Nothing heals. If you're injured, you're screwed. If you die, somebody else must take your place. The game then becomes how many people you throw at the mission. "Oh, I got through the favela level, but I went through 32 highly-trained members of the police force to do so."
I dislike regenerating life because more often than not, it makes staying alive irrelevant. With the healthpack system, there's nothing you can do until you reach a medkit.
I don't care about realism, games should be gamey.
There's little in games that'll make players attempt to save their own lives. Death is and will always be a minor annoyance, because death means the player can't play and the game is always about allowing the player to play.
But I think this whole Lara Croft thing is just illustrating how the uncanny valley works in narrative, too: If they want the game to be an in-depth insight into Lara's origin story and a realistic depiction of her efforts to survive (cough not torture porn cough), then reviewers will naturally point out every single instance where the gameplay diverges from this lofty ideal, even when they wouldn't do so for other games.
It didn't matter that I got shot forty-three times and run over by an SUV in Saints Row 3: I'd pop up, good as new, twelve hours later at the hospital. Even my clothes were laundered and pressed. Nobody complained about that because Saints Row 3 wasn't attempting to be anything more than silly fun.
I understand that. But many games depend on the illusion of failure to stay fun, at least for me.
Of course on some games, like Saints Row, I couldn't care less about that.
The way the games are designed now are encounter-centric á là D&D. You have this much health for this encounter, and you will have it full for the next one so level designers can balance it around that. The problem with regeneration is in-encounter, where you could potentially just complete part of it, regenerate, and come back to it, thus reducing difficulty. There are fixes like the double-health bar, but none is 100% effective.
I'm not sure many of the complaints about regenerating health are about realism (criticism about gameplay mechanics should rarely be about realism) but more about the fact that the two systems are incredibly different mechanically. Regenerating health gives you fewer possible states to finish an encounter in: dead or perfectly healthy. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of taste. I don't really like it so much. It certainly removes some possibilities for the way the game plays: you can't really have a game like Thief with regenerating health, for instance.
Irrelevant on further examination of the rest of the thread.
Not seeing what the big deal is. Like Soldant says, you want this mystery island (and all it's dusty tombs) to be littered with Medpacks or something? That would be less satisfying and more immersion breaking in truth even if you swap out food for medpacks ('so how did these bananas end up down here exactly?'). I think you need to liken damage to endurance & fatigue. You get in a fight and you get the stuffing knocked out of you, but nothing serious in the damage stakes and it takes time for you to get your strength back.
Last edited by Kadayi; 26-11-2012 at 09:41 AM.
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*blush* I'm flattered by the attention boys, but please let's not make the thread about liddle old me
Soldants suggestion rings true. Replace the idea of "health bar" with "endurance" or "stability" and it suddenly makes much more sense.
Also what Kadayi says is true. If you're going to complain about "regenerating health is breaking my immersion", explain to me how in Tomb Raiders 1-4 (I haven't played the rest), there are small and large health kits hidden away in ancient ruins of civilizations long gone?
I always thought of it as previous raiders having gone down and then died, but the lack of corpses and skeletons and other detritus kind of ruins that illusion.
No, I'm fine with medpacks. They don't do the first thing with my immersion. Prefer them completely over regenerating health.
Jesus_Phish: The reason is that some peoples suspensions of disbelief are triggered by different things to others. I don't care about healthkits, but a clown car of infinitely spawning enemies bugs the crap out of me. The opposite may be true of others. This is accented by the fact that in games that involve regenerating health, the most effective tactic is often to sit behind the biggest rock you can find and whack-a-mole the enemies, not moving the entire time. I know if there's a stash of health and armour behind the next rock, however, I'm more encouraged to perhaps, move.
I'm fine with either medpacks or regenerating health, because I think a game can still have have a juxtaposition of cutscene and gameplay content and still be engrossing, because well...it's a game.
I highly dislike regenerating health if it results in gameplay found in CoD/most MMS titles: "Oh crap, my screen has suddenly gone all red and shaky, the sounds are all muffled and my character is breathing heavily. I'll just wait 5 seconds behind this sturdy looking box before I move on like nothing has happened."
It's not even a matter of realism IMO, it's just not a fun gameplay mechanic. That said, there are a lot of games which do this in a more subtle way and I don't mind. The system used in Far Cry 2 was also quite good.
This thread got derailed pretty fast, huh?
But it's largely rendered irrelevant by level designers placing health packs near to these encounters to offset any damage. And if there's a save feature (especially quicksave) it further weakens that argument: "Oh awesome I just gunned down those four HECU marines and two Bullsquids... my health is only 25, better reload."
Healthpacks are breadcrumbed in an absurd way that the state you leave the encounter in is often quickly compensated for. It's true that the regenerating mechanic can make some encounters too easy (say if its delay is far too short to recharge) but the cumulative effects of multiple encounters is lost anyway. I mean even going back to Doom or Wolf3D level design mappers would always ensure that you were replenished after difficult sections.
Hence why I think a hybrid system might be better, like in FC2 where a partially-depleted health bar segment can regen, but if it's fully depleted you need to use a syrette containing christ knows what to recover that segment. It avoids magic medkits (in terms of placement etc) as well as infini-health scenarios. Halo's shields and health system isn't so bad either. They provide the flexibility to prevent quicksave-quickload mentality (which artificially extends gameplay life) while still maintaining a challenge.
I had this idea way back, how to make the entire series of health-regen-chest-high-walls FPSes more believable. Take the on-screen strawberry jam, change its color palette to white(or black. Or negative! Negative would be fun) and call it the Danger Sense®. Which will be the protagonist(s)'s magical(mystical? Mythical? Scientifical? Go wild) ability to, you would never guess, sense danger. The gameplay would remain 100% the same, except you would die when shot; the Danger Sense® would simply be an indicator of how close you are to getting shot.
Indeed, if designers are going to offset health loss with immediate health replenishment, there's no real difference between the systems. Perhaps designers should concentrate on not offsetting health loss with immediate health replenishment, though. I don't play many FPS games, but in most of the games I play with non-regenerating health, using a healing potion or spell to recover from one fight means you can't use it in the next fight if the going gets tough, so there are more than two states.
No, quicksaves don't weaken the argument. Unless you reload the game whenever you take any damage, which makes you an enemy of gaming who we shouldn't worry about, there are still more than two states.And if there's a save feature (especially quicksave) it further weakens that argument
Irrelevant on further examination of the rest of the thread.
I would have called it suppression or panic or something - get shot at and the screen starts go a bit strange (not the massive screen obscuring crap we have now) to represent the player getting suppressed or panicking while coming under a hail of gunfire. Stay there too long and you get hit and die (or lose a health bar segment or something that doesn't come back). But yeah, same idea, makes it more palatable.
Except that they get replenished fairly quickly anyway to the point where you can just burn through your gear for the most part. And again, this goes back to the so called golden age of PC FPS games like Doom and Quake with their "non linear" (read: backtracking) gameplay and level designs. Often you've got so many health potions or whatnot that losing one ultimately means very, very little to the point where you can forget how many you have.
I'd be more willing to accept that argument if that's how people played. I'd say use of quicksaves to avoid leaving yourself in a hole is a pretty big reason for having them. Otherwise Iron Man modes wouldn't be such headline features these days...
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