A good read.

[DarkHalo003]

http://calitreview.com/17280

Here's a good read I think we can all agree with. It's something I also full heartedly support: realistic health regeneration.

What do y'all think?

[thehoodedsmack]

I agree. Wolverine is broken.

[Donut]

well the guy is definitly speaking from a 1990s point of view. he contradicts himself multiple times when he says "regenerating health has no effect on difficulty" but then turns around and says regenerating health removes all sense of difficulty because of lack of "scratch damage". i agree with some of it, but hes blaming situations where, for example, you can just run through fire because of regenerating health on the regenerating health. bull shit. thats a design oversight that lets the player actually run through the flame. you need an invisible but collidable wall there. i counter his argument with literally the EXACT SAME situation from tales of phantasia on the SNES. theres a part on floor 9 of the moria gallery (because fuck your GBA translation) where there are 4 fire plumes shooting out of the wall blocking a hallway. you can run right through them and suffer a decent amount of damage, but you can heal yourself with heal magic or something. that difficulty (or lack thereof) is not the health systems fault, but rather the fact that you can pass right through the fire.

basically, my point is that this guy is attributing many design problems to health systems, when in reality it is so much more than that. i will say that i completely agree with his position on LA noire and blackops though. fuck bloody screens. he makes good points, but hes just failing to take other design aspects into consideration. i assume his suggested plan of action will follow in part 2.

as for my opinion on a health mechanic, you kind of need both. he makes a lot of references to halo 1, which i will agree with. you need regenerating health to an extent, but even halo 1 violates his opinion on scratch damage. the shield takes damage first, THEN the health. anything that drops your whole shield is not scratch damage anymore. but just a bare health bar is a pain in the ass too. i just beat farcry 1's single player on NORMAL, and that game is ridiculously difficult. it does not have a regenerating health bar, and it has pre-determined checkpoints. more often then not, i have gotten a checkpoint with maybe 8/100 health left, making it so i have to just run my ass off and hope i can make it to a medkit or another check point before i die. thats horse shit, and it makes for bad gameplay in a game where avoiding damage involves a lot more than making mistakes. but again, that is not entirely the fault of the health system. that involves things like AI and the environment.

so i now point at halo reach and farcry 2. in halo reach you have shields, but if your health starts taking damage and goes below a certain point, it will regenerate up to that certain point, but it wont regenerate fully. i thought this was an awesome health mechanic, but even in this situation, youre still immune to scratch damage because the shield takes damage first (what ever happened to "passes through shield" damage btw? did we EVER have that in a halo game outside of custom edition?). farcry 2 has a health bar with increments on it. if your health drops below an increment, it will refill to the nearest increment instead of refilling all the way. if it drops below the last increment, youre now in a very bad state where your health continues to drop even if youre not taking damage, until you either fix yourself, or die. if you fix yourself (as in, pull a bullet out or something), your health goes back up to 2 bars.

i could go on forever with examples here. i was about to type a section on the metroid series until i realized i already have a tidal wave of text fit to take down a house.
E: this is definitely a good thread. will be following this one.

[Warsaw]

The over-damage was removed only in Reach, and Bungie made a big deal about it. I guess they thought it was a good idea.

[DarkHalo003]

The over-damage was removed only in Reach, and Bungie made a big deal about it. I guess they thought it was a good idea.
I like it. I think it keeps things organized and allows players the ability to predict when their shields will fail and know that when they fail nothing bleeds through. However, that doesn't happen with the Sniper and explosives, I have noticed.

[Warsaw]

All you need to know is how many shots it takes to kill you. 18 with the plasma rifle, two with the sniper rifle, five with the pistol, etc., etc. I don't really care about the over-damage, it just seemed unnecessary.

As for regenerating health: I still liked F.E.A.R.'s approach: give the player a limited number of medkits, but make their health non-regenerating. Bad Company 1's system was also cool.