"Yeah yeah mike we all know about that....you dick!" AH but do you????
Do you know why all FPS decided to take this mechanic, and how it changes a FPS almost completely.
First off, before this me had the old trusted med-kits and Armour, yay to doom and half life.
Then came halo, with the strange shield mechanic, although at this was fully used.
And now we have games like cod, gears of war and crysis 2 which don't just have a regeneration mechanic, no sign of med kits.
But why do most FPS's use this now, why is it so popular??
Well this look at the obvious difference between the 2 mechanics, with med-kits, you had to keep an eye on your health, no just jumping out of cover and shooting, hiding again and back to full health, gamers had to be way more careful, although with 100% health with this mechanic, you could take way more bullets than with the new one.
The other thing is you had to go and look for med-kits, which forced you to explore, with new mechanic, players don't need to do this, so normally don't explore that much, so designers had to make sure all the ammo and what not was in their path, rather than make them look for it.
However the biggest thing is the placement of enemies, with the old mechanic, the designer had to guess (on average) how much health player had, at each stage of the level, sure there may a super health pick on the level, but would the player find it?? if he did he would need a few enemies to face for a challenge, but what if he didn't?? Then there couldn't be too many enemies or they couldn't get through the level. This was a challenge for the designers, but cured by halo.
With the new mechanic, the designer knew at every stage of the level how much health the player had, so the placement of enemies was easy, this was the greatest advantage for designers with the mechanic and is most likely the reason they use it now, to save lots of level designing time.
So...... a random post lol, but might make people think twice about the much under thought about health system
Have you played Vanquish? Possibly one of the best uses of this mechanic. In some other examples, it failed slightly because all you had to do was run and hide to heal, which not only slowed the action down but made it too easy to get full health.
ReplyDeleteI prefer medkits, but then it's probably just nostalgia talking. Vanquish worked because the core gameplay was based around timing, so naturally, the health system being based around timing too, worked.