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[Sowelu]

Duke Nukem 3D let you kick people no matter WHAT gun you had out.  I think you could even kick while firing.  Take that, Halo.

(And if you had your foot selected as a weapon, you could kick with both feet at once, while jumping.  He's just that badass.)

Um, L4D1 promised that it was going to have more campaignS and more special infected added, at least one more.  In L4D1.  They added a total of three maps throughout the entire life of the game...three campaigns would have been pretty awesome and totally not dissable at all, but they added one survival-only map (who plays survival?) and one short campaign.  And no new special infected.

I got it when it was half-off (like apparently almost everyone else did) and I thought it was worth that GIVEN the additional content they said they were working on.  Shiva stacking still makes me sad.

If they had released L4D2 as an expansion for L4D1, or even discounted to owners of L4D1, that would be cool for me; for now I'm waiting until it drops in price pretty hard.

[Puck]

About the regenerating health system in several FPS:

It doesnt make any sense, and it has no place in any game that claims/tries to be close to realistic.

BUT!

We all played ye olde shooters, starting with the first Wolfenstein. I hope. I dont know if you guys remember all this backtracking to healthpacks? It just is not fun and it does not add much to gameplay.

Personally -even as a fan of complex and realistic games- I'd say it was one little change that makes FPSes more enjoyable. Regenerating health is not going to make you survive an encounter you messed up, but it's going to save you time between encounters. And no matter how realistic a game is, its still a game.

In L4D, the health system works alright, imho, and there would be no sense using regenerating health to increase fun. In fact, in this setting, with the pills and the way health packs work (and their distribution) regenerating health would just screw up the game. MAYBE if you healed small wounds, like when you're still above 90%, but thats nitpicking.

And something else about l4d: Its solid, its good, a good deal above plain old mediocre, but its STILL (and i cant even stress this enough) not enough content for the 30 bucks it goes for.

It's more a "proof of concept" than a full game. And if you watch the dev commentary included with the game, youre going to hear them rambling on about how great the director AI is and how designing new levels is a breeze.

So why the eff didnt they just make some new levels? Gimme a few more hours of mapspace to travel and I'd say damn, thats a good game.

Replayability my ass, when you know a map in and out, it loses a lot of appeal.

On the other hand, its full of good design choices, too, but still, more "proof of concept" than "game".

[Ioric Kittencuddler]

Regenerating health can't save you if you screw up?  Yes it absolutly can.  Say you screw up and get hit allot but not quite killed?  Well, instead of looking for a health pack you can just sit behind cover waiting for your health to regenerate.  Or how about this?  Take a peak out and shoot someone, get hit slightly, and duck back behind cover, waiting for health to regenerate before popping up again.  Do this 15 times, thus surviving enough damage to kill you twice over by simply not taking it all at once.  Really, the best way I've seen it done gameplaywise to make it actually still a challenge is the segmented health regen bar where the bar is broken into segments and each individual segment can regenerate to full but if you lose an entire segment you need health packs to heal it.  It still has the second problem, but only if you're especially careful, and the first problem is pretty much gone.  Of course the game I played this in was Resistance where enemies actually have regeneration too (supposedly, thuogh I haven't really noticed it.), so it should make it more even, and remove the second problem as well, unless you're even more careful.

Of course most games don't do this.  For instance, Call of Duty 2 and up.  You take 5 bullets in the face, then run to cover panting heavily, and after a few second you're miraculously cured.

DN3D was quite different, and it was Halo who first did it the way everyone else does it now.

[Puck]

Well, instead of looking for a health pack you can just sit behind cover waiting for your health to regenerate.

Well, most of the time, you actually know where that last healthpack was and dont need to go looking. Two titles I remember in particular when talking about this funny thing common to most (older) shooters are Goldeneye and Halflife 1. The game usually breaks down a bit into several encounters with breaks in between. I think that's also a somewhat accepted technique to make the action feel more tense.

Sure, there are exceptions, (tank and train levels in goldeneye for instance) and there everythign you said holds true. But for the general flow of all the shooters I played since the first wolfenstein I remember this backtracking thing to be true. It's a part of the nature of every gamer of ye olden days, I'd say. We'd been stashing mushrooms in Super Mario Bros if the game allowed us to walk backwards, I tell ye.

But still, this leads us to:

Say you screw up and get hit allot but not quite killed?

three options:
1) You backtrack to the last pack (rhyme not intended) which is not even a simulated success, one of the major reasons to actually play video games. It's, mostly, just backtracking and wasting time. And playing games might be considered wasting time already...
2) You dont know any locations of healthpacks, but you manage to find a new one. Yay! cheap thrill, running around with 1hp! (Not so bad, actually...)
3) You get hurt along the way and die. For modern shooters that means level restart or reload. Big whoopin deal.

Or how about this?  Take a peak out and shoot someone, get hit slightly, and duck back behind cover, waiting for health to regenerate before popping up again.  Do this 15 times, thus surviving enough damage to kill you twice over by simply not taking it all at once.

This is just a case of very, very bad AI and/or implementation of the regeneration system. The AI usually has the upper hand, numberwise, so it should try to flush you out of cover, either with grenades or a rush from two sides. But there is still the case of a shootout between the player and that last NPC, in which even a good AI should decide not to flank the player. And not only for that eventuality the health of the player just should not regenerate as long as somebody is shooting on them, regardless of whether they miss or hit.

A lot of finetuning also can be done by the quickness of the regeneration. Generally I'd say the most appealing way is to have a timer since the last hostilities, let's say 30 seconds or so, that is pretty long for the ADS and SAS guys And then you just start of with a very, very weak regeneration, just enough to make the player notice and reward him for waiting, slowly but exponentially ramp that regeneration up to a point where it becomes useful.

Generally, shooters that actually used to use medpacks and a hitpoint system could benefit from regenerating health by "streamlining the gameplay".

Seriously, I'm a fan of roguelikes, I'm all for permadeath (what would that mean for "Goldeneye"? The cartdridge self destructs so you have to go and buy another one?) and realistic injury systems. But there is deffo a style of shooter that just benefits, if pulled of properly.

[Ioric Kittencuddler]

Trying to backtrack for health in the middle of a fire fight is allot more intense than sitting behind cover with a shotgun out waiting for it to recharge back to full.

Your suggestion though would simply remove the healing from fire fights.  It would basically be one set piece after another where you kill everything in an area in one try or die and restart, then your health automatically recharges and you move on to the next stage.  I could see this working for a game styled after like, a game show or something, but for a game like CoD or pretty much any other FPS where the focus is on constant action this would just slow things down as much if not more than back tracking for health packs.

[Jakkarra]

The cartdridge self destructs so you have to go and buy another one?

There is at least one game that breaks itself in the event of you losing.

I forget the name, but it didnt sell well, as people oftentimes died from a freak accident, and they basically got given a giant middle finger,

[Ioric Kittencuddler]

There was a mech game that deleted your save data if you didn't eject from your destroyed mech.

[Shzar]

There was a mech game that deleted your save data if you didn't eject from your destroyed mech.

That would be Steel Battalion. It went pretty intense with those simulation aspects.

[Jakkarra]

It also had the best controller ever.

Those things cost hundreds of pounds.

[Puck]

Trying to backtrack for health in the middle of a fire fight is allot more intense than sitting behind cover with a shotgun out waiting for it to recharge back to full.

Very arguable.

Your suggestion though would simply remove the healing from fire fights.  It would basically be one set piece after another where you kill everything in an area in one try or die and restart, then your health automatically recharges and you move on to the next stage.

This is how it works already, actually most shooters consist of set pieces. That is actually why the regenerative system even makes sense and how it's supposed to work.

I could see this working for a game styled after like, a game show or something, but for a game like CoD or pretty much any other FPS where the focus is on constant action this would just slow things down as much if not more than back tracking for health packs.

That is just not true, I dont now where to start... for one thing I already covered the up and down in tension and how it's accepted and used in shooterdesign. And the second thing is... COD4 for instance is a prime example for the use of set pieces. If you thought you experienced constant action and didnt notice the "safe downtimes" that happened several times in almost every level (heck, even the railshooter levels had this) I guess you're lucky since you didnt break immersion for yourself as often as I did.
 
Also, there's a difference between your bread and butter FPS and a tactical simulation. And you toss any discussion about what the game will be out of the window the second you have a level designer place the first medpack. Might as well boil gameplay down to what it's supposed to be. Namely, pew pew.

Games that would not work well with regenerating health rarely ever use medpacks in the first place, sometimes they dont even use hitpoint based systems anymore.

L4D is one of the very rare games that made proper use of the medpack and hp system.

[Sowelu]

Yeah, L4D really nailed the health system IMO, keeping it tense on both sides in versus.  It IS a very good game, it's just that the lack of content and shiva stacking make it not as good as I'd hoped.

(Those two actually go hand in hand.  Shiva stacking = since you can walk through other players, everyone just crowds in one corner and points their guns in different directions, so nobody can get hit from the side--and even smokers and hunters can barely disrupt it, IF they get through the hail of bullets at all.  And lack of content = most existing maps have too many places to shiva stack, and people often win them in the exact same ways.)

[Puck]

I wonder when finally somebody will come up with ... sensible use of the term "procedurally generated".

Seriously, what good is the director AI if the game cant come up with "random" maps. And I surely dont mean Diablo-random maps (Actually, I'm so starved for this feature, that I'd probably even set for that...)

Or, ffs, what about racing games? Why the eff didnt include every racer since Test Drive 1 randomly generated mountain/countryside roads? Perfecting times on known tracks is only one side of racing, driving in a way to get the most speed out of an unknown track with enough reserves to react to all the possibilites behind the next corner is a completely different ballpark.

And even with my limited coding skills I could imagine it aint all that hard to come up with algorithms that create a pretty and plausible track, even with some scenery. I think there are even some games that kind of pull this off in an abstract way, but nothing on roads, with vehicles, sadly.

[Sowelu]

I heard of one L4D1 fan map that took place on a big city grid, and moved roadblocks around each time you played.

The problem they ran into is that you're designing a lot of content that won't be seen in a given play-through, and there's only so big you can make the map.  I think it would work a lot better if, instead of an open square grid, you had three parallel tracks that joined at given places, and sometimes the roadblocks were partway down a track so you would have to backtrack, or even find a side door sometimes.

And it's always good when you have one obviously-open but very vulnerable path, and other paths that may or may not be a dead end.  Which chance do you take?

Sadly, I've tried mapping and I'm not very good at it.

[Ioric Kittencuddler]

Trying to backtrack for health in the middle of a fire fight is allot more intense than sitting behind cover with a shotgun out waiting for it to recharge back to full.

Very arguable.

Your suggestion though would simply remove the healing from fire fights.  It would basically be one set piece after another where you kill everything in an area in one try or die and restart, then your health automatically recharges and you move on to the next stage.

This is how it works already, actually most shooters consist of set pieces. That is actually why the regenerative system even makes sense and how it's supposed to work.

I could see this working for a game styled after like, a game show or something, but for a game like CoD or pretty much any other FPS where the focus is on constant action this would just slow things down as much if not more than back tracking for health packs.

That is just not true, I dont now where to start... for one thing I already covered the up and down in tension and how it's accepted and used in shooterdesign. And the second thing is... COD4 for instance is a prime example for the use of set pieces. If you thought you experienced constant action and didnt notice the "safe downtimes" that happened several times in almost every level (heck, even the railshooter levels had this) I guess you're lucky since you didnt break immersion for yourself as often as I did.
 
Also, there's a difference between your bread and butter FPS and a tactical simulation. And you toss any discussion about what the game will be out of the window the second you have a level designer place the first medpack. Might as well boil gameplay down to what it's supposed to be. Namely, pew pew.

Games that would not work well with regenerating health rarely ever use medpacks in the first place, sometimes they dont even use hitpoint based systems anymore.

L4D is one of the very rare games that made proper use of the medpack and hp system.

Why are you even talking about Tactical Simulations?  If you're calling CoD 4 a tactical sim I'm just going to stop talking to you right now.  CoD 4, from what I've seen of it, is an action movie in interactive form, it's definitely not a Tactical sim if it's got regenerating health.  And your suggestion wouldn't work with it, at least not what I've played of it.  All it would do is increase the necessary downtime between firefights or if it immediately restored your health once all enemies were dead it'd be just like a game without regening health but with strategically placed health packs.  Something like Sin Episodes.

[Puck]

First of all, I never called cod4 a tactical shooter (the only reason I talk about them is to point out there is a type of shooters that wont benefit), and secondly, it uses regenerating health, and it works, and it doesnt increase downtime, at all. Even when you changed regeneration to not happen while being shot at, it still would work, just the same.

not sure you even read what I typed...