Health Systems?

[MyNameDidntFit]

Well, I was perusing good ol' Steam Forums and there was a discussion (or, rather, a bunch of people posting their opinions without caring what else had been said) on the different health systems in games, and which people prefer.

So, I figured I'd bring it over here for some good and proper discussion.

I'll quickly sum up the two most common methods:

Medkits
You have fixed health meter that goes down when hurt, and doesn't go up until you get some of that lovely medkit Bacta (either insta-heal, a la Half-Life, or carried around for later use, a la F.E.A.R.).

Regeneration
You can take a bunch of shots, but if the enemy gives you a bit of alone time, you're back on your feet without a bullet hole in sight.

Then you have games like Halo with a regenerating shield and health that requires a medkit, or Far Cry 2 with it's "drown; pull bullet from leg" method of healing, or even Ghost Recon with it's "no healing for you!" method of... well... not healing. Along with others I've likely missed.


Anyway, personally, I'm split. When I want a challenging game, I want something like CoD (on Veteran) where your health will regenerate, but you can only take a couple of hits without dying. However, if the game isn't going to be deliberately challenging, I want a more Half-Life-esque game with medkits because, let's be frank, regeneration is just cheap when you can absorb a whole clip without dying.

What're your opinions?

[Rob]

I prefer medkits over regeneration but not in the current form. Every game I have come across make medkits an object you burn through just like ammo. If you see it then you should probably use it and soon. Why have developers not included a gameplay mode that takes medkits and then applies some degree of logic to their use? You take damg and can then use a medkit to heal but with each subsequent use the effects diminish to the point of you just try to stop bleeding. At that point pills come into effect. You have pain killers and then you have the hard stuff... wait a minute did Max Payne do diminishing returns on health packs? I just woke up.

Overall I would like to see more challenging shooters where a health pack was a single or limited use item so you truly had to go through level with strategy. Also popping ten bottles of pills should destroy you in that mode. A simulation mode put into some games would make them more re-playable for hardcore gamers.

[MyNameDidntFit]

Max Payne didn't do diminishing returns. You just kept on gobbling those pills :D

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. had a reasonably realistic health system, now that I think about it. But it wouldn't work outside of RPGs. It had different types of kit depending on your wounds: bleeding? Use bandages. Radiation poisoning? Anti-rad drugs.

What you're talking about would be kind of cool. Though, it'd be really hard to implement well. The main issue being that if you stuff up at the start, you're screwed later -- especially as difficulty tends to rise as you progress.

[Rob]

The thing is that developers have to make money and even dedicating a mode within a game to this kind of difficulty would really be for a narrow audience. That is unless the experience is built around the difficulty from the ground up. The number/power of enemies would have to be tailored to the gameplay with precision. When I use a medpack or a bandage or whatever its because I made a mistake and that bandage is going to keep my character alive.

Realism in L4D2 sort of scraped the surface of my idea but in that type of game with so many zombies you can't really do this type of health system. Think L4D2 realism but with no respawns, stronger zombies, less zombies... meaningful specials that are more boss like in their appearances/style/damg/hp. A unique experience peppered with random spawns so health really is something that saves your ass instead of just another bottle of pills.

Try and convince a corp to invest money in that kind of game and watch them laugh their way to Halo 4 and the bank where they keep their gold dubloons.

[Betty]

Im oldschool-I still like being able to find little health containers. (for example, hearts in Zelda, or coins in Super Mario 64)

[Konrad]

I like both, depends entirely on my game. Action games I like having hopped on the regeneration bandwagon. To me it's far more conducive to keeping proper pacing in the game. For example, i much prefer the regeneration of ME2 to the healing in ME.

Do I mind medpacks though? Not at all.

[CemeteryGates]

I rather liked the health system on Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of The Earth, where you had health items for different types of injury, such as broken limbs or cuts.

[Jason]

Actually, MNDF mentions Far Cry 2, but I thought that had quite an innovative method of healing. Not so much the animations, but the fact that your health bar had 5-6 'segments'. If your health bar was depleted, it would eventually regenerate a la Modern Warfare, Halo and so on, but only to the top of the current segment. So if your health was between 2/5ths and 3/5ths, you'd recover up to 3/5ths, but no further.
If you wanted to heal any further than that, you had to use a health kit. I thought that was an interesting approach that offered the best of both worlds.

[MyNameDidntFit]

Ah, true, in my haste to abuse it's healing animations I'd forgotten the rest of the system. The segmented health bar was actually quite good.

[Konrad]

Hmm, true that was different than most games and it worked fine.
Speaking of healing systems, is it just me or is it wonky as hell in Bad Company 2?

[MyNameDidntFit]

It's not wonky, it's just that there's no indicator of your own health. When you get hit you get the CoD-esque redness, but I don't think that going away is actually you getting your health back -- you only get health back from kits I think.

I'm not even sure :/

[Konrad]

Sounds wonky. :p

[MyNameDidntFit]

I wasn't sure of your meaning of 'wonky' :p

[Konrad]

Just meaning strange really. I still have trouble figuring it out, though my understanding was that health goes up constantly but is sped up by healthpacks. Originally I thought it was the way you described it though so maybe. Either way, I'd like either a full-recovery system indicated by the amount of blurriness on the screen, or a good ol' fashioned health counter.

It's strange really the way they went. I'm guessing for the sake of immersion and realism they went without health bars, but then vehicles do have the old-style, equally unrealistic type of health.

[MyNameDidntFit]

I'd like them to keep the vision distortion as just an after-effect of damage and leave health indication to a number/bar.