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kazil posted:Do people really bitch about this? Because regenerating health is perhaps the greatest innovation in video games in the last 20 years. Are you kidding me? Yeah people still bitch about this, in 2014. Tons of people collectively poo poo themselves when Halo popularized the regenerating shields mechanic and health packs slowly faded away in FPSes. The argument is that there's an aspect of health pack management as a long-term strategy that's being lost as FPSes are "casualized" or whatever. Of course, when the game auto-saves you past a point of no return and you have no health and no health packs that's your fault and not the fault of poor game design because 90s FPSes were all unilaterally perfect.
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Dec 15, 2014 05:32
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Pidmon posted:If this was a dig at me, good job - I looked it up just now and it's indeed the case, so I must've already had a Cube of Meat on the run where I got the Cube versus the Belt with More Options. It wasn't actually, they must altered it because I remember having the bandage ball and the meat cube. Also there is one way to get assured horsemen, reset till you get the book of revelations as your first drop and don't die till the end.
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Dec 15, 2014 05:37
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Alteisen posted:You hit the nail on the head man, way to much difficulty back when I was a kid was just poor design, not necessarily actual difficultly. Eh, this is an oversimplification I wouldn't fully endorse, and when it is true, it's a different issue than what I'm talking about. Non-regenerating health isn't poor design, just design that's hard to do well. I think the most succinct way to describe what I'm saying is that most game studios don't have the resources to make great games, so studios have found ways to make average games inoffensive.
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Dec 15, 2014 05:58
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The Moon Monster posted:My problem with the game is that it was just so easy. I never had any of the cool moments I heard everyone talking about because I never had any trouble whatsoever beating whatever the game threw at me. I can't say that about the Arkham games even on normal difficulty so it's not like my skills are super amazing, the game is simply really easy. They had people playtest the game and it was pretty much unanimous that the game was too hard. Once you understand the mechanics at play the game becomes a complete cakewalk but for a lot of people the game is very difficult.
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Dec 15, 2014 06:04
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The Moon Monster posted:My problem with the game is that it was just so easy. I never had any of the cool moments I heard everyone talking about because I never had any trouble whatsoever beating whatever the game threw at me. I can't say that about the Arkham games even on normal difficulty so it's not like my skills are super amazing, the game is simply really easy. It can feel very unforgiving early on. You find yourself in a fight, no combat finishes, no runes, no stuns and one or sometimes two captains show up and you'll be wiped out. Two caragor hits and your dead. The hunting mission where you get the Ghul matron seemed impossible when it unlocked. By the time I had to kill 4 warchiefs there was still a bit of challenge against when they were inside strongholds and resistant to all instant kills. Once you get to critical hits, shorter streaks, continue streaks after one hit, two finishes per streak, runes for health, focus and arrow on kills, etc it all becomes trivial.
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Dec 15, 2014 07:21
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Alteisen posted:You hit the nail on the head man, way to much difficulty back when I was a kid was just poor design, not necessarily actual difficultly. There were also a lot of conventions that were established for good reasons but took way too long to die after those reasons were no longer relevant. Like limited lives. On arcade machines it makes perfect sense because you need the players to keep putting more money in, and they won't do that if they never have to stop playing. But then they started making games specifically for home consoles/PCs and kept making them all with limited lives, even up to the point where they were making games where you could save any time and everyone just reloaded a save when they died. For example, Wolfenstein 3D; Why are there lives in that game? Looking at it now it makes no sense at all. And limiting lives is a design that specifically exists to cover up for the fact that a game is really short, lacking in variety and has a poor difficulty curve, because it means that you have to play the same bits over and over again in order to see the rest of the game. It seems longer because it takes you so much play time to get to the end, and it seems like it gets more difficult as it goes because you only get a little bit further each time; But the difficulty often remains fairly constant throughout, just with arbitrary spikes where you need to memorise the right pattern or timing to get through. In order to play that section enough to memorise it though you'll have to go through the entire game up to that point as many times as it takes. There were good games that didn't use tricks to cover up bad design, but they've always been the minority. Because good game design is hard, and if your goal is just to sell enough copies to make money, it's also inefficient.
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Dec 15, 2014 08:31
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Plus with limited lives, having a great early-game was important; because who would want to play a boring/poorly-designed first level 100 times? Meanwhile the later levels could be slouched on, because you would only have to defeat them exponentially less than earlier ones in order to beat the game. Unlike today where the early-game is designed so that people would be impressed by quicklooks or tell their friends to buy copies after the first hour. ...of course this is ignoring the idea that a game could be excellently designed all the way through. 
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Dec 15, 2014 08:46
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kazil posted:Do people really bitch about this? Because regenerating health is perhaps the greatest innovation in video games in the last 20 years. There are situations where it's good but there are many arguments to be made that it's a detriment or just a crutch used in place of better design. For one I think it tends to make all encounters feel the same and removes a lot of tension when you start every single fight at exactly the same level of readiness. For example in STALKER Call of Pripyat (with the Misery mod) if I'm at full health I'm ready to go kill monsters for stuff to sell, but if I'm on my way home at 20% health and radiation poisoning and I see a pack of boars in the way, I'm going to want to take a detour. It completely changes the level of tension and it also encourages you to play a lot safer and more strategically, because there are no "acceptable" hits you can take. Regenerating health can be good or bad depending on the game and how it's used but "the greatest innovation in video games in the last 20 years" is a ridiculous generalization.
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Dec 15, 2014 08:48
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Gestalt Intellect posted:There are situations where it's good but there are many arguments to be made that it's a detriment or just a crutch used in place of better design. For one I think it tends to make all encounters feel the same and removes a lot of tension when you start every single fight at exactly the same level of readiness. For example in STALKER Call of Pripyat (with the Misery mod) if I'm at full health I'm ready to go kill monsters for stuff to sell, but if I'm on my way home at 20% health and radiation poisoning and I see a pack of boars in the way, I'm going to want to take a detour. It completely changes the level of tension and it also encourages you to play a lot safer and more strategically, because there are no "acceptable" hits you can take. STALKER isn't a FPS though, it's a survival game in the first person. HALO is all about a space marine murdering xenos for the blood throne or whatever. Managing health takes time away from that. You aren't trying to survive the environment in HALO, you're trying to murder everything that moves. Far Cry 3, for example, has a little bit of health regen, but you'll never get full health without items. That's fine, because the game is both a murder simulator AND a survival game. It's okay to mix and match. You really have to take into account what sort of game you're in when it comes to health regeneration.
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Dec 15, 2014 09:17
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Gestalt Intellect posted:There are situations where it's good but there are many arguments to be made that it's a detriment or just a crutch used in place of better design. For one I think it tends to make all encounters feel the same and removes a lot of tension when you start every single fight at exactly the same level of readiness. For example in STALKER Call of Pripyat (with the Misery mod) if I'm at full health I'm ready to go kill monsters for stuff to sell, but if I'm on my way home at 20% health and radiation poisoning and I see a pack of boars in the way, I'm going to want to take a detour. It completely changes the level of tension and it also encourages you to play a lot safer and more strategically, because there are no "acceptable" hits you can take. Besides, we all know that title belongs to the second analog stick.
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Dec 15, 2014 09:25
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Kimmalah posted:Back to the days when they gave you blank lined pages in the manuals. They just did that because they had space left. After all, a manual is a bound set of paper printed on both sides, one sheet being 4 pages. In the old days they didn't even put the credits in the manual.
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Dec 15, 2014 10:55
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I don't have a problem with regenerating health. Like all game mechanics it depends on the game design around it. For fast FPS type games that rely on a constant risk vs reward when coming out of cover to kill enemies or other players and lots of moment I think it suits.
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Dec 15, 2014 13:04
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Kruller posted:STALKER isn't a FPS though, it's a survival game in the first person. Yeah, it's not a First Person Shooter, it's jut a first person game where most of what you do is shooting. Toootally different.
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Dec 15, 2014 13:24
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Kalos posted:Yeah, it's not a First Person Shooter, it's jut a first person game where most of what you do is shooting. Toootally different. It's honestly sort of a good point. Not every game that's in first-person, and involves shooting, can rightly be called a 'first-person shooter'. Fallout 3/New Vegas is an RPG that happens to have guns as its primary weapons. The Metroid Primes are pretty classic Metroid action-adventure games, regardless of the fact that you're in first-person during it. That's not to say FPSes aren't a genre in and of themselves; there's plenty of games that are all about the shooting. But, just as having platforming segments doesn't make a game a platformer, and just as the occasional puzzle doesn't make one a puzzle game, being in first-person while shooting a gun doesn't make it an FPS.
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Dec 15, 2014 14:38
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kazil posted:Do people really bitch about this? Because regenerating health is perhaps the greatest innovation in video games in the last 20 years.
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Dec 15, 2014 14:43
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Oddly enough the original Halo used a combination of regenerating shields and finite health + health packs, yet despite basically everything else from it being stolen or copied ad nauseam I can't recall all that many games that took that route for health, even though I think it's a great compromise between the two designs. I actually still don't really like pure regenerating health. Triply so if it involves mucking up the screen with red poo poo so it's even easier to die once you take critical amounts of damage.
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Dec 15, 2014 15:07
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John Murdoch posted:Oddly enough the original Halo used a combination of regenerating shields and finite health + health packs, yet despite basically everything else from it being stolen or copied ad nauseam I can't recall all that many games that took that route for health, even though I think it's a great compromise between the two designs. Resistance had a decent system where your health bar was divided into segments and you'd only regenerate up to the last partially full segment. Restoring completely lost bits required health packs.
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Dec 15, 2014 15:32
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I kinda like how Bioshock did it, where you just brought the health kits with you and used them as you needed them. There was health all over the place, but you could only carry so many at a time (I think it was 9 in the first game and 5 in the second).
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Dec 15, 2014 15:39
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Space Marine and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance had what I believe to be a near perfect forms of regenerating health for their respective games. Space Marine had a regenerating shield and a health bar that needed to be refilled. But instead of health packs you regained health through murdering your foes with badass executions. And this worked great for the early game. Sadly in the latter half the difficulty was artificially inflated by just throwing more enemies with stronger guns at you instead of new enemies that needed to be approached in a unique manner. So it became more about hiding in cover and killing your enemies one by one at range and then executing the last two or three enemies to top off your health. MGR:R did it similarly by ripping out your enemies' spines and crushing them in order to splatter their delicious repair-nanomachines over yourself. And it continued to be awesome throughout the whole game. Because it's a perfect game and I can't be convinced otherwise. 
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Dec 15, 2014 15:51
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Mokinokaro posted:Resistance had a decent system where your health bar was divided into segments and you'd only regenerate up to the last partially full segment. Restoring completely lost bits required health packs. I give that system credit for being something beyond the usual (also for actually having a UI element showing the player's health  ), but it never seemed like it was meaningfully different enough. Maybe it was just an execution thing, though. FarCry 3 didn't really have much of a point to it when damage came in too quickly, the per-cell regen was too slow, and it was easier to jab yourself with endless healing syringes.RyokoTK posted:I kinda like how Bioshock did it, where you just brought the health kits with you and used them as you needed them. There was health all over the place, but you could only carry so many at a time (I think it was 9 in the first game and 5 in the second).  Who What Now posted:Space Marine and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance had what I believe to be a near perfect forms of regenerating health for their respective games. Space Marine's system would have worked better if there was some way to regain health (or shields) using more than just execution kills and super mode. Like maybe if headshot kills refilled some of your shields, so that to get the most out of the combat system you want to be switching between melee and ranged more. Honestly a huge amount of the trouble would've been fixed really easily if executions made you damage-proof for the duration, but perhaps that would've made the game too easy. Either way it made all of their "SPACE MARINES DON'T USE COVER" marketing look really dumb! Revengeance also had nanopaste which worked pretty much identically to rations from the other Metal Gear games, which also worked fine. Though spare batteries also used the same equip slot which made them kind of cumbersome to use in turn. John Murdoch has a new favorite as of 16:09 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 16:05
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John Murdoch posted:Space Marine's system would have worked better if there was some way to regain health (or shields) using more than just execution kills and super mode. Like maybe if headshot kills refilled some of your shields, so that to get the most out of the combat system you want to be switching between melee and ranged more. Honestly a huge amount of the trouble would've been fixed really easily if executions made you damage-proof for the duration, but perhaps that would've made the game too easy. Either way it made all of their "SPACE MARINES DON'T USE COVER" marketing look really dumb! Making Captain Titus damage resistant during executions would have been an acceptable middle ground, I think. And while they did increase your shield capacity with the Iron Halo upgrade, they neglected to do anything similar for health which would have been very helpful to alleviate that problem. Also a few more melee weapons would have been appreciated, even if they were just reskins of the chainsword and power axe. Just call them mastercrafted, as long as they made fighting Nobz and later Chaos Marines less of a chore. Eventually every enemy just got dealt with with a meltagun to the face. Which, while true to fluff for the melta to rape everything, didn't make for an interesting endgame. Things dragging Space Marine down: the entire second half.  Sega has teased that a sequel isn't impossible, but Sega hasn't had an awesome track record lately.As for Revengeance, there's a plethora of moves that recharged your batteries so fast, plus taking spines (which you should always do) recharges it to full, that I never even used the batteries. The game has a super steep learning curve though, and unless you've played a lot of Devil May Cry, Bayonetta and the like I can understand needing to use items more often.
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Dec 15, 2014 17:00
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Mokinokaro posted:Resistance had a decent system where your health bar was divided into segments and you'd only regenerate up to the last partially full segment. Restoring completely lost bits required health packs. I think the Riddick game was the first game to do that, and it worked really well. The melee combat in that game was amazing, too. So of course it had a sewer section where you had to shotgun a bunch of weak mutants.
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Dec 15, 2014 17:09
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The bunker level in the first Uncharted game. Up until that point you have been in these beautiful, open landscapes and suddenly you're playing Doom 3. I also got real tired of that loving church.
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Dec 15, 2014 17:30
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I find regenerating health can be a problem even in fast paced murdershoot games too. I can think of a lot of cases (every Call of Duty I played was like this) where the game is pushing for nonstop action but if I take a lot of damage the only solution the game has left me is to resolve the situation by huddling motionless behind a brick wall for 10 seconds. It completely breaks the flow of the game and just feels awkward. Serious Sam 3 for example is maybe the fastest-paced FPS I've ever played and it just has health pickups and it works just fine (partly because it also actually lets you quicksave, but quicksaving is another argument...) I like Monster Hunter's system too where roughly half the damage you take will regenerate extremely slowly (unless you get hit again) but the other part of your health is definitely gone. The regeneration is so slow that I think most players don't even pay attention to that mechanic but healing items take a long time to use so I find it matters. It also rewards you for not getting hit consecutively.
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Dec 15, 2014 19:10
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Who What Now posted:
The Punisher had something similar, if you successfully interrogating someone (i.e. tortured them) you got health back.
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Dec 15, 2014 19:18
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I wonder how much of people's criticisms about regenerating health is rooted in the awful design decision to mute all sound and fill the screen with pulsing redness when hurt? Not to say the criticisms aren't otherwise warranted.
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Dec 15, 2014 19:23
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Who What Now posted:I wonder how much of people's criticisms about regenerating health is rooted in the awful design decision to mute all sound and fill the screen with pulsing redness when hurt? Not to say the criticisms aren't otherwise warranted. That would be a big part of mine. I'm playing through Saints Row 4 and they do something similar. Since it takes place in a simulation when you're low on life it makes it look like the simulation is glitching out and turns a shade of green. It's annoying as gently caress.
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Dec 15, 2014 19:38
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John Murdoch posted:Oddly enough the original Halo used a combination of regenerating shields and finite health + health packs, yet despite basically everything else from it being stolen or copied ad nauseam I can't recall all that many games that took that route for health, even though I think it's a great compromise between the two designs. ME3 did it and the Resistance thing mentioned earlier. You have a shield, then a segmented life bar. The shield recharges when you aren't getting hit or when you use certain powers, but if a bar of life is lost it's gone until you use a medi-gel (portable health pack), of which you have a limited number.
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Dec 15, 2014 20:15
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Who What Now posted:I wonder how much of people's criticisms about regenerating health is rooted in the awful design decision to mute all sound and fill the screen with pulsing redness when hurt? Not to say the criticisms aren't otherwise warranted.
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Dec 15, 2014 20:20
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Lotish posted:ME3 did it and the Resistance thing mentioned earlier. You have a shield, then a segmented life bar. The shield recharges when you aren't getting hit or when you use certain powers, but if a bar of life is lost it's gone until you use a medi-gel (portable health pack), of which you have a limited number. Borderlands 2 also did the shield/medpacks thing, although you can unlock skills that will give you healing in other ways.
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Dec 15, 2014 21:23
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I thought Infamous had a good explanation for regenerating health - since Cole's a human battery, he absorbs the ambient electricity from the city's power grid. If you go into areas of the city without power, you stop regenerating.
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Dec 15, 2014 21:28
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Mokinokaro posted:Resistance had a decent system where your health bar was divided into segments and you'd only regenerate up to the last partially full segment. Restoring completely lost bits required health packs. I feel like this is slowly becoming the standard in non-CoD shooters. Far Cry 3, Deus Ex Human Revolution, and Wolfenstein TNO all used this system. It's a great compromise, IMO, since it resolves the problem of having to face a combat encounter with 1HP, without abandoning the concept of non-regenning health.
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Dec 15, 2014 21:30
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Who What Now posted:As for Revengeance, there's a plethora of moves that recharged your batteries so fast, plus taking spines (which you should always do) recharges it to full, that I never even used the batteries. The game has a super steep learning curve though, and unless you've played a lot of Devil May Cry, Bayonetta and the like I can understand needing to use items more often. I never used them either and I still don't really know what they're for. A player that's really struggling is never going to unequip the repair paste and the average player has no compelling reason to switch either. So that leaves high level players that are probably going for no-hit runs...but at that point do they really need or want to be using items? Not to mention that as your skill increases the rate at which you refill your energy also increases (and you'll probably be hunting down/buying all of the capacity upgrades, plus extra absorption). It just seems like their optimal use case is incredibly rare and there'd be little downside to letting you equip them alongside repair paste, but I guess I could be missing something.
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Dec 15, 2014 22:24
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While we are on the topic I love the poo poo out of Platinum Games, but out of all of them I find the original Bayonetta the hardest to go back to. One problem I have is that the health system in that game has always felt needlessly punishing, I'm cool with enemies hitting like truck but health restoring drops are super rare and you get punished really hard for both using inventory items and dying. I appreciate the "git gud" mentality of Platinum games, but man does the game make it hard to learn with how harsh it can be. Also I kinda feel like the enemies in that game are a little over designed to the point where I have quite a bit of trouble telling when enemies are attacking or not. Lastly the hardest difficult (Infinte Climax, I think) takes away the games key gimmick by removing witch time which makes every fight into a giant slog. Basically MGR:R took every problem I have with Bayonetta and fixed it, I hear Bayonetta 2 is better about some of this too.
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Dec 16, 2014 00:08
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I played Bayonetta all the way through after playing MGR:R, and holy crap did Platinum learn a lot of lessons between those two games. Metal Gear Rising has difficulty, but it always felt fair, while Bayonetta had more than its fair share of moments where I felt compelled to cry "Fuckin' really, Platinum? FUCKIN' REALLY?" Also, Bayonetta makes me cringe so much. I feel like I need to be put on an FBI watch list.
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Dec 16, 2014 00:26
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Screaming Idiot posted:I played Bayonetta all the way through after playing MGR:R, and holy crap did Platinum learn a lot of lessons between those two games. Metal Gear Rising has difficulty, but it always felt fair, while Bayonetta had more than its fair share of moments where I felt compelled to cry "Fuckin' really, Platinum? FUCKIN' REALLY?" While I did/do like Bayonetta when I first played it I have never beaten it. The core gameplay is really solid but the whole game really does feel skeevy. I suppose there can be merit in a character that not only is a sexual object but acknowledges and owns that fact and uses it to their advantage, but Bayonetta didn't do it right IMO.
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Dec 16, 2014 00:33
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Kaubocks posted:They had people playtest the game and it was pretty much unanimous that the game was too hard. Once you understand the mechanics at play the game becomes a complete cakewalk but for a lot of people the game is very difficult. I feel like this is an issue that could have been solved with multiple difficulty levels. Given how much they did copy from the Arkham games, I'm not sure why they didn't copy this. The only times I died were intentional deaths to power up an orc or reset a challenge to get the optional objective. Some of the orcs were tough to kill, or at least took forever since they were immune to everything other than exploding campfires or whatever. The only fight I found challenging was the ghoul matriarch, and that was more because the fight played like nothing else in the game. I really want to like it, and if they release a patch with "Istari difficulty mode" or whatever I probably would.
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Dec 16, 2014 00:58
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The Moon Monster posted:I feel like this is an issue that could have been solved with multiple difficulty levels. Given how much they did copy from the Arkham games, I'm not sure why they didn't copy this. The only times I died were intentional deaths to power up an orc or reset a challenge to get the optional objective. Some of the orcs were tough to kill, or at least took forever since they were immune to everything other than exploding campfires or whatever. The only fight I found challenging was the ghoul matriarch, and that was more because the fight played like nothing else in the game. That ghoul matriarch was loving horseshit, though. The only reason I cleared it was because I had saved up enough points to buy every life upgrade from the first to the final one at a time to refill my health. I hadn't meant to do that, I just never felt like I needed upgrades, but I'm glad I did.
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Dec 16, 2014 01:28
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Who What Now posted:That ghoul matriarch was loving horseshit, though. The only reason I cleared it was because I had saved up enough points to buy every life upgrade from the first to the final one at a time to refill my health. I hadn't meant to do that, I just never felt like I needed upgrades, but I'm glad I did. Hit her twice then roll away. Her pattern is super obvious.
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Dec 16, 2014 01:39
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Kaubocks posted:They had people playtest the game and it was pretty much unanimous that the game was too hard. Once you understand the mechanics at play the game becomes a complete cakewalk but for a lot of people the game is very difficult. This seems to be a problem that games that rely heavily on unlocks are really susceptible to, where the beginning of the game is unnecessarily restricting and full of bullshit to give you more rewards to unlock and the end game is a cakewalk for anybody who does any optional content. I've been playing Rogue Legacy and the fact that you get almost no invincibility after getting hit until you unlock an expensive late-stage upgrade is bullshit, doubly so when most enemies can hurt you just by touching you. In general the game's controls don't feel nearly tight enough for the kind of precision and difficulty the game demands.
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Dec 16, 2014 01:52
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