Comments on: Change: Health

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By: Ben "ChaosSmurf" Barrett

Ben "ChaosSmurf" Barrett — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:29:21 +0000

@JuJu – That actually never occurred to me as an ancestor, but it seems pretty obvious now. I played StarLancer, which had a massively simplified system of shields/armour that basically worked exactly like Halo’s system. Thanks for the reminder.

By: JuJuCam

JuJuCam — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 09:22:20 +0000

Halo may have popularised the mechanic in a first person shooter context (and by extension, other person shooters), but it’s far from the first title to use the notion in general. The Wing Commander series, riiight back to the very first released in 1990, involved shields and armour. Although it was a far more balanced system than the current model – shields drained, and regenerating them took energy from a pool that was shared with the main guns of your ship. Armour, on the other hand, was irreparable whilst on mission (at least in the early games).

Also, in subsequent games in the series if not the first, your shields were split into fore and aft (and you could redirect power to strengthen either sector IIRC) and your shield module could get damaged (amongst others), leaving you basically defenceless.

This classic space dogfighting model is one that led to more tense moments of unbelievable victories against overwhelming odds than any gaming experience I’ve had since. It’s no wonder it was co-opted for a shooter.

By: mbp

mbp — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 08:53:31 +0000

One unfortunate consequence of automatically regenerating health has been the emergence of infinitely re-spawning enemies. These were a feature of both CoD2 and CoD4. I guess they are there to prevent players abusing the health system by waiting for full health to respawn between every kill. I do think they are a mistake however because they turn a first person shooter into a first person runner where getting to the next trigger point becomes more important than shooting the enemy.

On the other hand I fully agree with @Kimari’s point about regenerating health making the difficulty curve predictable. Arriving at a boss fight on your last bar of health was never fun. It would have been a simple matter of game design to strategically place a few health packs but there were always a few sadist developers out there who loved to make us suffer.

By: Kimari

Kimari — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 01:15:47 +0000

Here are some of my thoughts on the subject:
* The use of health points functions as permanent punishment for every single “mistake” the player makes.
* Health points make the difficulty curve unpredictable. Say, this room here with three enemies should be a piece of cake, but what if the player has only 1 point of health left? … What if he has full health? I remember that in every single zelda game you’d have something like 10 pots filled with fairies, hearts, arrows and bombs just before every single boss.
* Regenerating health is the extrapolation of this kind of thinking. Since we know that the player is going to have full health in the right moments, difficulty is a far more predictable subject. One thing less that we designers have to take into account.
* Health points also function as a “soft progression limit”, if you will. You _are_ going to make mistakes, your health _is_ going to get low and unless you find a medkit before it’s too late, you _will_ die. The question is when. And that question can only be answered by factoring luck and skill, which ends up being a somewhat random amount of time.