With first and third-person shooters being at or near the peak of their popularity, a major shift has happened over the past decade. Health used to be recovered in games like these by picking up health packs or medkits, which would instantly heal your character from damage. However, at least in my experience, it seems that the industry has shifted towards regenerating health instead of powerups.
Back to the beginning
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In the early days of gaming, when health was still a relatively new concept instead of lives with one or two-hit kills, like Super Mario Bros., Contra and Ghost N Goblins, we learned to hunt down health powerups when you started to take a lot of damage. I remember grinding for them in Metroid, hunkering down by enemy spawn locations to harvest the health power drops that were frequently dropped by enemies.
Other games used items to restore your health, like eating questionable meat items like roast found in the walls of Dracula’s castle in Castlevania, or roast chickens that pop out of trash cans in Final Fight.
When we entered the FPS era, it became common to pick up white boxes with the iconic red cross on them to refill your health. This seemed to become the standard, showing up in a wide range of games. Even the massively popular Fortnite maintains the instant health restoration system, using bandages to heal your character.
Regenerating health becomes a thing
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At some point games started moving away from healthkits and started using the regenerating health method. I first noticed this in Gears of War and I thought it was far more convenient than having to desperately hunt down healthkits when I was near death. Just hunker down and wait for the red to fade away and I was good.
Other games used variations of the concept, like Ninja Gaiden II where you take real damage and temporary damage during each encounter. The more effectively you eliminate the enemies, the more of your temporary damage is healed once you defeat all the current threats.
Why I prefer healthkits
While its incredibly convenient to hunker down in a safe spot for some time as your health regenerates, I think its become a lazy gimmick. Rather than working to balance and refine the gameplay, its seems easier to just give the user a way to turtle up and to work through difficult sections of the game.
I also think that it greatly reduces the realism. While instantly getting healed to 100% from a health pack isn’t much better, I think the argument can be made that in some games it can be excused if its a futuristic game where you can assume that nanobots or advanced technology could actually repair damage nearly instantly. By contrast, it seems absurd that you can get riddled with bullets, duck behind some rubble for a few seconds and suddenly be fine.
In conclusion
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In some games, I don’t mind the concept of regenerating health. When its a shield that regenerates instead of health, I find that much more believable compared to physical damage. While picking up a package of bandages to instantly heal your character doesn’t seem much better, it does keep the character moving rather than hunting for safe spots to hunker down in and wait for your health to regenerate.
What do you think? Are healthkits really any better than regenerating health or is it basically the same thing? Let’s discuss!
Thanks for reading. As always, upvotes, resteems and comments are appreciated!
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I think regenerating health is one of those game mechanics adopted by developers in the hopes of making games more broadly accessible. In and of itself, I don't think it's either a bad thing or a good thing, it's simply a design option that's been around long enough that people take it for granted.
It's basically a tool in a dev's kit to decide just how frantic they want the action, and how frustrating they want it to be to the players. On the one hand, having a regenerating health mechanic like, say, Uncharted means that you don't have to worry about placement of healing items. One of the things Tomb Raider always got dinged for was modern-day health packs and ammo in ruins that had lain dormant and unexplored for centuries. Regenerating health mitigates one of these problems, in that it's assumed the character takes time to bandage injuries, inject some painkillers, or whatever to bring them back up to snuff.
Resistance: Fall of Man and FarCry have a different element, where your health will regenerate, but only so far. The bar you're currently on, if damaged, will regenerate itself after a few seconds, but more serious injuries that have already drained full bars of health require some form of active first aid (medkit, syringe, field surgery, etc...) to restore.
Old school games like Doom and Quake, of course, let you soldier on just as effectively at 1% health as you do at 100%, and it's only when you lose that last bit that you drop completely. At least games like Resident Evil and Dino Crisis affected the player if you got hurt, showing new animations, the player clutching a damaged area, limping, blood loss, and so forth. This is slightly more realistic, and something I'd like to see more games adopt.
The idea that a human soldier of any sort can just squat behind a wall for ten seconds then pop up good as new despite being perforated by a heavy machine gun or caught on the outskirts of an exploding frag grenade is absurd, but it's a way to keep the action going in a deathmatch, as well as reward players for taking advantage of the cover mechanic. I don't see it going anywhere, simply because it makes the game more exciting and takes one less thing (health item placement) off the developer's to-do list. :)
You raise some good points. Particularly about Resident Evil where taking damage effects your character. It seems silly that a character that has suffered 90% damage can still run and jump at 100% effectiveness. I'd love to see an FPS that integrated that into the gameplay, where the more you were here the less you could run and jump and your crosshairs would 'float' making it harder to aim.
I don't think either way is inherently better or worse than the other, it just kind of depends on the play mechanics of the rest of the game.
And automatic healing could be just as realistic. Maybe you have the mutant healing factor of Wolverine or are from Krypton and the Earth's yellow sun allows you to heal faster. :)
Oh my gawd, @darth-azrael, don't even get me started on the colossal number of screw-ups when it comes to representing the Man of Steel in video games.
The Death and Return of Superman has a Kal-El so de-powered that ordinary punks can kill him in the first stage before you even reach Doomsday.
I repeat: ordinary punks can punch Superman to death. No Kryptonite Knuckles, no magical enchantments, just normal humans going toe-to-toe with The Man of Steel. There are nowhere near enough facepalms in the galaxy...
He was probably just a little weak from dying... :)
No, dude, this is before the fight with Doomsday. He ain't even been dead yet! :D
I believe they got rid of health bars because it was always some overlay that takes a away some of the "realism" of the game. So they wanted the player to just see the game and nothing else. The player cannot see his health, but he can´t die in one shot, so they implemented some overlay for making it visible that you are "weak" and have to hide somewhere. To regenerate your health, that is. I never liked it, i want my hearts from Zelda, everywhere.
That's a really tough question there! At first I thought that health regen is sort of a sissy thing, but then again I myself am used to that now! Looking back at it, today I was writing a post about games released in 2001 and remembered playing Serious Sam (just the first example that pupped up) and the sense of danger was real,when in more recent games I would rather hide behind a rock and wait for my health to be back to acceptable values.
I personally don't think it's "stupid", but yeah I prefer medkits-hunting between these choices. And if I may add, I think it's better if there's an animation of your character healing him/herself instead of insta-heal when you pick it up. This can be found in Fortnite, or Far Cry where the character pulls a bullet out of his arm (although that's also kinda absurd when he got shot in his chest but the bullet came out of his arm). That makes medkits more realistic.
But even so, I don't mind having the health regen mechanic, because then again games let us do things that we can't in real life. But, the game has to made it believable enough to not be absurd like you said, 5 seconds of hunkering down and you're as healthy as ever.
Maybe use healing spell in fantasy games or something like that to make it less like a lazy gimmick. That's one example I could think of.
@retro-room
I feel it's stupid
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