I actually quite like regenerating health with upgrade perks :P Otherwise I tend to horde health packs far too much. I guess health that can't be carried is the answer there. 

Regenerating health is a really poor system IMO as it fosters very boring "hide and regen" gameplay seen in a lot of games that also combine with high damage hitscan enemies.

The oldschool way of doing things encourages you to actively run and gun which is far more FUN. That's the key word here. If you want to be lazy about health then a better method to regenerating health would be carryable med-packs like Duke 3D. 

Health: I think regen and packs both suck, it's just that packs suck less...

Running low on health can give you the adrenaline rush thing of trying to stay alive while frantically searching for a healthpack. Regen just makes it a game of retreating back into a corner and twiddling your thumbs. Problem with packs is backtracking for health, wich is perhaps even more boring. 

regen is terrible, health as an inventory item can add strategy, DN3D did it well.

But yeah, health pick ups are best for arcade shooters. 

Would have been more interesting if all the medkits were Nali Seeds, I think. 

"Regenerating health is a really poor system IMO as it fosters very boring "hide and regen" gameplay seen in a lot of games that also combine with high damage hitscan enemies. The oldschool way of doing things encourages you to actively run and gun which is far more FUN."

One could argue the complete opposite here. Regen puts you often dangerously close to death and you have to frantically get out of danger to recover. The 2-3 secs of waiting is boring, but the rush is that you came so close to death. The oldschool way does the opposite. It's not run and gun because you know if you get hit and damaged, you won't be getting that health back (unless there's a health pack around), so you end up playing more carefully.

Regen health promotes more action in the gameplay than the old school methods. The problem is combat is much slower these days. 

 

Is that a SP mod yet? Should be. 

Also I always kind of liked Halo's hybrid system (only played the first one). But don't think that would work for every kind of fps. 

...I thought it was a great aspect of The Masquerade. Might be difficult to implement in a different genre though ? 

There is a lot of truth in what Kona said. For instance, in Gears I would often take chances in combat simply because I knew that if it didn't work out, I could take cover somewhere and regen a little. If I was on a finite amount of health, I'd be a lot more careful.

I don't think either system is perfect BUT I don't think regen is as flawed as people want to make it out to be. If the player can simply run away and hide and heal up then maybe the problem is in the AI and/or the level design - not the health system. 

In both health systems being discussed, you can choose to be more of an adrenalin player or play the run and wait game. Sure different health systems may nudge different people into one of those two styles but at the end of the day its upto the player how they want to play the game and how much they want to enjoy it. 

I implemented this in one top down shooter but in a way I hadn't seen before.

Basically, scoring recovered your health, and the scoring system awarded you more points (more health recovered) the better you did.

I was trying to solve the 'run and hide' gameplay which is a risk in the timed health regeneration system.

The idea was to encourage risky but good play.

Everything else in the game was based on making the player more aggressive as well - camera angles, damage of melee vs ranged attacks and a special leap attack to replace the standard grenade / rocket.

Unfortunately it seems a lot of the players struggled to realise the score vampirism because we had a very poor interface and I ran out of time to have a crack at improving it myself.

The 'health pack' was a group of refugees who got cheered and got beamed up when you collected them, awarding 5000 points. 

What was said before about play style being defined by player and level design and not health packs vs regen makes sense, I agree.

For me though, and I don't know if this goes for anyone else, health packs provide a more "survivalist" vibe which fits in better with the stranded marine blasting his way desperately through hell's hordes. That survivalist vibe comes from health pack collection being a better analogue to actual survival - acquiring vital resource to make it as you go.

Magical 20-200 second health bar autorefills kill the (I'm not sure how to define this) vibe/suspension of disbelief for me. Or maybe in more words kill the analogy of the game to an arcade game version of "reality" - which is a concept I believe games from Doom's era worked from as inspiration/starting point in their gameplay design not having had much to base themselves on game wise prior to their creation.

/rant/ These days I feel games base off other games in an attempt to improve on previous formula, which works great plenty of times but also slowly leads to a loss of perspective, to more and more abstract gameplay styles in the service/hope of "this game is so much better than the previous one because its improved guys, even if it did not need any improving!"

You can make better than previous with the exact same ingredients, don't need new ones automatically to achieve this. This goes de facto for a million subsets of art and entertainment, why not games more? Its a pissing contest most of the time. /rant/ 

It's a balancing act that developers constantly walk.

If you don't change anything, you get slammed for same-old, same-old.

If you change things, you get slammed for killing the franchise and forgetting what make the original so great.

There's a sweet spot but it's actually pretty hard to get right. 

Killes, there was nothing broken or improvable about healthpacks. They reinvented the wheel to make fps easier on a joypad.

I would have liked Rage a lot if it wasn't for the absolutely tension-killing fact of just having to stop a while to recover health... and the resurrection mechanics.

Kona:
"Regen health promotes more action in the gameplay than the old school methods. The problem is combat is much slower these days. "

mmmh.... actually if a game had a constant onslaught of aggressive enemies coming for you (ie not enemy soldiers constantly taking cover) it would make for some very hectic gameplay, forcing you to kill enemies as soon as possible to have enough time to recover your health. But obviously health regen is part of a bigger problem, the let make fpses as easy as possible with the joypad school of design

(another variation would be to have a thrill seeking protagonist with health slowly crawling to 1 unless you keep killing, with health regen speed based on how much damage you are delivering)

but yeah the point to me is that health kit was an already perfect system 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fog1J2Rw7OU

layers upon layers of lol 

not sure i'm too impressed by that 

will be for attendees only 

I reckon there will be leaks. 

Made the game look even better than it did in reality. The bad video and sound quality just made my mind fill in the blanks and get incredibly excited. The leaked code was far less exciting, but the final game was fairly fun aside from some of the problems we already beat to death in the Doom 3 thread 10 years ago.

10 years. Fucking hell, I'm getting old. 

it's probably pretty fkn sad that we all play video games still lol. it's just too addictive to give up though :P 

I don't buy that. Why isn't it sad that some people watch sports for their entire adult lives? Hobbies are hobbies, fuck what other people think. 

Like any other, and potentially a superset of all others. Of course, they're huge timesinks in creation and consumption. Probably very self-indulgent also...