217 réponses à ce sujet

[Insom]

Regen health makes it pretty easy. You can eat a sandwich while taking cover behind a box in ME2

[DocLasty]

Insom wrote...

Regen health makes it pretty easy. You can eat a sandwich while taking cover behind a box in ME2

You could do the same thing ME1. That doesn't have anything to do with regenerating health.

[Smeelia]

konfeta wrote...

To rephrase - when I say more emphasis on tactics rather than being a bullet sponge, I want the game's difficulty to be less reliant on general knowledge of the game (which ultimately makes the game too easy; see something like Diablo 2 where you can rather casually beat it with an untwinked poison dagger necromancer after you played it enough times) and more on player ability from the start. Giving a greater initial margin of error with lesser availability of the recovery mechanism works towards that. As for whenever this would make the game too easy, well, that is a different question.

They could implement a system where doing more damage gives more health (kind of like how the Vanguard works with a certain setup and focus on Charge I suppose).  That way the player is forced to constantly engage in the fight to do well and can only survive by killing efficiently while keeping damage below a certain threshold.  I suppose that may not be too different to simply having limited health per fight but it does have the added incentive to stay involved in the battle.

I'm not sure how well that would work though.  It'd be difficult to explain why it works that way in-universe (thermal clips were problematic enough), it might put off players that actually enjoy a slower pace of combat and prefer to focus on careful use of powers than quick killing ability and it would probably give a more limited selection of gameplay styles overall (there are actually quite a few ways to approach combat in ME1 and 2).

[Khayness]

Health regen is only there to promote careless gameplay, what the industry thinks is fun.

New gamers will never experience the thrill of surviving on 10 HP, carefully planning until you find the next HP pack, giving yourself a pat on the shoulder for being so awesome to dispatch a room full of mooks with the least scratches as possible.

[DocLasty]

Khayness wrote...

Health regen is only there to promote careless gameplay, what the industry thinks is fun.

New gamers will never experience the thrill of surviving on 10 HP, carefully planning until you find the next HP pack, giving yourself a pat on the shoulder for being so awesome to dispatch a room full of mooks with the least scratches as possible.

And on the flipside, they'll never experience the boredom of scrounging around for health packs, retracing your steps to get more, stockpiling the crap. And they'll never experience the utter frustration of having to start an entire level over just because you don't have quite enough health packs to be the final boss.

[Notanything]

DocLasty wrote...

Khayness wrote...

Health regen is only there to promote careless gameplay, what the industry thinks is fun.

New gamers will never experience the thrill of surviving on 10 HP, carefully planning until you find the next HP pack, giving yourself a pat on the shoulder for being so awesome to dispatch a room full of mooks with the least scratches as possible.

And on the flipside, they'll never experience the boredom of scrounging around for health packs, retracing your steps to get more, stockpiling the crap. And they'll never experience the utter frustration of having to start an entire level over just because you don't have quite enough health packs to be the final boss.

I loved quick saves for this reason, so instead of coming out of a big battle with less than 40 health, I'd end up doing that battle once more perfectly and take minimal damage by loading the quick save prior to the battle.  Despite how I can agree that it was frustrating to come out of a battle with low health, and no health pick-ups in sight, I have to admit that it gave a specific thrill, and it made coming upon enemies cause a lot more tension.

Modifié par Notanything, 17 juin 2011 - 07:44 .

[konfeta]

They could implement a system where doing more damage gives more health (kind of like how the Vanguard works with a certain setup and focus on Charge I suppose).

A system like that needs to have the entirety of combat balanced around it, which could exclude certain playstyles. And given that this game uses bullet weapons (instant guaranteed damage), it would most definitely exclude the less aggressive playstyles. That system works fantastically for brawler and hack'n'slash type games where dodging damage and rapid movement is the norm, though.

And on the flipside, they'll never experience the boredom of scrounging around for health packs, retracing your steps to get more, stockpiling the crap. And they'll never experience the utter frustration of having to start an entire level over just because you don't have quite enough health packs to be the final boss.

Sounds more like a level design issue than a health pack issue, to be honest. This is like accusing the concept of quests of being responsible for making you backtrack half a game to hand in 10 bear arses.

[Eurhetemec]

DocLasty wrote...

Insom wrote...

Regen health makes it pretty easy. You can eat a sandwich while taking cover behind a box in ME2

You could do the same thing ME1. That doesn't have anything to do with regenerating health.

You could do it much better in ME1, because enemies were much dumber, and much less likely to flank you or actually come up to your cover.

Khayness wrote...

Health regen is only there to promote careless gameplay, what the industry thinks is fun.

New
gamers will never experience the thrill of surviving on 10 HP,
carefully planning until you find the next HP pack, giving yourself a
pat on the shoulder for being so awesome to dispatch a room full of
mooks with the least scratches as possible.

So you liked quicksave-take 5 steps-quicksave-take 5 steps-quicksave-take 5 steps-quicksave method of play, did you? Interesting. I always found it skill-less myself.

And you can get all huffy and arm-wave-y and pretend you didn't do that, but 99% of gamers did, back in those days, because that's what that style of gameplay encourages you to do.

Also, can you name a shooter from health pack era that is better than say, Halo: Fall of Reach, or even Mass Effect 2? Because I played pretty much every FPS from the original Wolfenstein 3D onwards, and I have to say, those FPSes were slower, more boring, and less skilled than modern FPSes.

[Notanything]

Eurhetemec wrote...

DocLasty wrote...

Insom wrote...

Regen health makes it pretty easy. You can eat a sandwich while taking cover behind a box in ME2

You could do the same thing ME1. That doesn't have anything to do with regenerating health.

You could do it much better in ME1, because enemies were much dumber, and much less likely to flank you or actually come up to your cover.

Khayness wrote...

Health regen is only there to promote careless gameplay, what the industry thinks is fun.

New
gamers will never experience the thrill of surviving on 10 HP,
carefully planning until you find the next HP pack, giving yourself a
pat on the shoulder for being so awesome to dispatch a room full of
mooks with the least scratches as possible.

So you liked quicksave-take 5 steps-quicksave-take 5 steps-quicksave-take 5 steps-quicksave method of play, did you? Interesting. I always found it skill-less myself.

And you can get all huffy and arm-wave-y and pretend you didn't do that, but 99% of gamers did, back in those days, because that's what that style of gameplay encourages you to do.

Also, can you name a shooter from health pack era that is better than say, Halo: Fall of Reach, or even Mass Effect 2? Because I played pretty much every FPS from the original Wolfenstein 3D onwards, and I have to say, those FPSes were slower, more boring, and less skilled than modern FPSes.

A bold statement, in the end it cannot be argued, what you're asking for is an opinion to refute an opinion.  It doesn't work that way, nor will it end well. 

[Eurhetemec]

konfeta wrote...

Sounds more like a level design issue than a health pack issue, to be honest. This is like accusing the concept of quests of being responsible for making you backtrack half a game to hand in 10 bear arses.

Oh yeah?

So why don't you name some health-pack-only games where it wasn't a problem.

Oh, you can't? I guess that's because there aren't any! It was a problem in Wolf3D, it was a problem in Doom, it was a problem in Quake, it was a problem in Quake 2 (which was also stupidly easy even on max difficulty), it was a problem in HL, it was a problem in HL2, and those are pretty much the best-designed health-pack-only games of their era.

I mean, seriously Half Life 2. That's probably the best-designed health-pack-only FPS game in history, and even it had these problems.

So if they were a "level design issue", no level designer was ever good enough to get past it. Which makes it a bad design choice.

[Crackseed]

It's a tough debate, since I've played enough of both games using either system. Honestly, as much as the true RPG mechanics have always been about "managing" health out of combat w/o alot of free regen, I really feel that regenerating health supports ME's playstyle so much more. When I consider my recent ME1 playthrough, the health system in that game was actually so much more abuseable then ME2's. In ME2 I HAD to be mindful of when I chose to commit to a firefight on Insanity, since if I played dumb I was dead in 5 seconds whereas in ME1, even on Insanity I could pop Immunity [or even w/o it] - wade out with good armor and mods and just easily pop Medi-gel to heal up, adrenaline rush and repeat if needed.

There's change for the sake of change and change for the sake of creating a better gaming atmosphere and I humbly suggest ME2's choice is the stronger one. If they can iterate the AI to really push us in ME3 and coordinate with more cover-busters, I think it will become an even better decision.

The one thing I did dislike in ME2 was the veins. They really were kind of silly and unnecessary - I like the "Low health" effect shown in ME3 so much better.

[Eurhetemec]

Notanything wrote...

A bold statement, in the end it cannot be argued, what you're asking for is an opinion to refute an opinion.  It doesn't work that way, nor will it end well. 

So are you trying to tell me that health-pack-only games don't encourage the use of constant quicksaving and indeed quickloading if you took too much damage? I'm pretty sure that's indisputable. Just look at the press and the forums from that time.

Modifié par Eurhetemec, 17 juin 2011 - 08:00 .

[Eurhetemec]

crackseed wrote...

The one thing I did dislike in ME2 was the veins. They really were kind of silly and unnecessary - I like the "Low health" effect shown in ME3 so much better.

They were amazingly terrible and off-putting, and didn't even look like they were in the right game. Did anyone like them?

[Notanything]

Eurhetemec wrote...

konfeta wrote...

Sounds more like a level design issue than a health pack issue, to be honest. This is like accusing the concept of quests of being responsible for making you backtrack half a game to hand in 10 bear arses.

Oh yeah?

So why don't you name some health-pack-only games where it wasn't a problem.

Oh, you can't? I guess that's because there aren't any! It was a problem in Wolf3D, it was a problem in Doom, it was a problem in Quake, it was a problem in Quake 2 (which was also stupidly easy even on max difficulty), it was a problem in HL, it was a problem in HL2, and those are pretty much the best-designed health-pack-only games of their era.

I mean, seriously Half Life 2. That's probably the best-designed health-pack-only FPS game in history, and even it had these problems.

So if they were a "level design issue", no level designer was ever good enough to get past it. Which makes it a bad design choice.

Half-Life's games gave you optimal amounts of health and armor throughout the game at every point the developers felt it was necessary.  By saying it's a problem everytime your own faults cause you to have low life, that's basically saying "This game is hard, it doesn't give me health packs everytime I get hurt because of my own negligence: POOR DESIGN!!".  Normal difficulties on games like Doom and Half-life gave you fair amounts of items.  It was only when you rose the difficulty to something harder, would the game take away that liberty of having items all the time.

Guess what?  Isn't that the whole purpose of  harder difficulties, to increase the challenge?  You wouldn't play hard and think it would be easy, let alone as smooth as normal.. Would you?

[Crackseed]

I just kept laughing every time I saw them making random hateful comments like "Oh hey guise, my eyes - they are injured from teh pew pew" and drawing weird glances from my roomies xD

[Khayness]

Eurhetemec wrote...

So you liked quicksave-take 5 steps-quicksave-take 5 steps-quicksave-take 5 steps-quicksave method of play, did you? Interesting. I always found it skill-less myself.

And you can get all huffy and arm-wave-y and pretend you didn't do that, but 99% of gamers did, back in those days, because that's what that style of gameplay encourages you to do.

Also, can you name a shooter from health pack era that is better than say, Halo: Fall of Reach, or even Mass Effect 2? Because I played pretty much every FPS from the original Wolfenstein 3D onwards, and I have to say, those FPSes were slower, more boring, and less skilled than modern FPSes.

I'm an avid player of Serious Sam Coin-Op, sorry, no saves there.

What is better is entirely subjective, but here is my list: Half-Life series, SW Republic Commando (tho' you had shields, but no HP regen), RtCW, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and ofc Serious Sam FE+SE.

I also remember fondly of the first CoD and MoH:AA.

Modifié par Khayness, 17 juin 2011 - 08:07 .

[Notanything]

Khayness wrote...

Eurhetemec wrote...

So you liked quicksave-take 5 steps-quicksave-take 5 steps-quicksave-take 5 steps-quicksave method of play, did you? Interesting. I always found it skill-less myself.

And you can get all huffy and arm-wave-y and pretend you didn't do that, but 99% of gamers did, back in those days, because that's what that style of gameplay encourages you to do.

Also, can you name a shooter from health pack era that is better than say, Halo: Fall of Reach, or even Mass Effect 2? Because I played pretty much every FPS from the original Wolfenstein 3D onwards, and I have to say, those FPSes were slower, more boring, and less skilled than modern FPSes.

I'm an avid player of Serious Sam Coin-Op, sorry, no saves there.

What is better is entirely subjective, but here is my list: Half-Life series, SW Republic Commando (tho' you had shields, but no HP regen), RtCW, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and ofc Serious Sam FE+SE.

Another fellow Serious Sam player!  You know how I feel now.

[Zem_]

DocLasty wrote...
And on the flipside, they'll never experience the boredom of scrounging around for health packs, retracing your steps to get more, stockpiling the crap. And they'll never experience the utter frustration of having to start an entire level over just because you don't have quite enough health packs to be the final boss.

I didn't have a problem with ANY of these things in ME2 with respect to heat-sinks... which are exactly like what we're talking about when it comes to medkits vs. health regen.  ME2 replaced regenerating ammo with essentially limited ammo that you picked up from the battlefield during or after combat.    And while I did occasionally go back over the scene of the recent battle picking up heat-sinks I don't know that I'd call that "retracing my steps".  It's not like I was going back to the beginning of the level or even the last room I was in.  Just going over the scene of the recent battle and then only when I didn't pick them up AS I advanced firing on the enemy.  Most of the time I did.

The same would happen for medigel packs.  Like the ammo, you would not be able to stockpile a great amount, but you wouldn't need to either.  And before and during a boss battle you can have medigel available just as the heat-sinks were.  Your shields would still regenerate.  The only difference is that you can't last forever if you are taking hits in the flesh.  And that's as it should be in my opinion.

[Crackseed]

I dunno Zem - comparing heat-sinks for weapons to health packs isn't really on the same level. Even if one weapon was low on "ammo" you still had others to fall back on, nevermind half the classes could kill with powers alone. But w/o health packs [if that system had been used] it really wouldn't have mattered as you'd be forced to hunt those down everytime just to ensure you could potentially survive a given confrontation. Ammo wasn't exactly "hidden" or hard to find either - it was often in plain view, whereas alot of games that have made use of health pack systems always like to tuck them in corners or stashes. This isn't a major knock against that system mind you, but I just don't think health compares to ammo when it comes to "urgency in finding it/stockpiling it" for the ME discussion.

@ Serious Sam discussion - fond memories of that game and the insane fights in it - SS3 should be interesting!

Modifié par crackseed, 17 juin 2011 - 08:12 .

[Bozorgmehr]

konfeta wrote...

If I may, was this true in the your first playthrough? Any game becomes significantly easier through multiple playthroughs when you aren't dealing with unknowns. I went from insanity adept on the first playthrough to insanity vanguard on the second and the game became dramatically easier/faster because I knew when and where it was safe to move (and this was back when Vanguards "were trash, because a CQC class on Insanity is a suicidal notion.")

Ha, I also played Adept the first time around, but on Veteran I could run and gun through most parts of the game. Only when I ran into the usual suspects (pyros, Scions, YMIRs and the like) I got punished for being too reckless. My second attempt (Insanity Adept) was a rather boring and tedious experience though.

Any game that's easy on the hardest difficulty and on ones first playthrough is very poorly designed imo. The Vanguard class is a perfect example of 'learning how to play' - nobody could go berserk the first time, but after getting familiar with Charge and shotguns it becomes fairly easy and a lot of fun.

To rephrase - when I say more emphasis on tactics rather than being a bullet sponge, I want the game's difficulty to be less reliant on general knowledge of the game (which ultimately makes the game too easy; see something like Diablo 2 where you can rather casually beat it with an untwinked poison dagger necromancer after you played it enough times) and more on player ability from the start. Giving a greater initial margin of error with lesser availability of the recovery mechanism works towards that. As for whenever this would make the game too easy, well, that is a different question. However...

I think this is almost impossible for games like Mass Effect. For the shooting part it could, but it requires knowledge and experience to find out how you can use your (squad's) powers most effectively. Although I did already know about the ME2 Adept's biotic powers and I'm not a terrible shot either, switching to Insanity (for my second run) proved to be challenging (up to tedious) at times. Only after I played around with some other classes, checked the internet for info and watch others play on YT, I managed to play my Adept, on Insanity, in the same (run and gun) fashion as my first playthrough. A fair deal imo.

As an added bonus, it would allow to scale better difficulty towards the latter part of the game by allowing you to break out of the initial enemy encounter designs. ME2's combat feels.. scripted. Walk into area, enemies pop in general direction in front of you, and you move towards each other hopping from conviniently placed chest high wall to conviniently placed chest high wall. I suspect this is a majort part as to why enemies like Geth Stalkers or true enemy flanking wasn't part of this game's combat - such situations force you out of cover without telegraphing it with a huge, lumbering heavy hitter ala YMIR mechs. The limited amount of burst damage you can take really shoehorns the kind of combat situations you can be put in.

Everything improving difficulty in other ways than the common give enemies more health and firepower approach are most welcome.

I think playing ME2 on Insanity without relying on cover and regen whenever possible is very rewarding. When you make a mistake you're punished into cover - which is something I always feel bad about. A regen system still forces the best players into cover every now and then; if they have a supply of medkits for those moments, they can continue without suffering the humiliation to cowardly hide behind cover for a while.

[konfeta]

So why don't you name some health-pack-only games where it wasn't a problem.

Um. You listed them for me. As far as I can recall, "quick-save quick-load" dance was only necessary if you were worse at aiming/moving than the current difficulty required you to be, health items were rather liberally dispensed all over the place.

[Eurhetemec]

Notanything wrote...

Half-Life's games gave you optimal amounts of health and armor throughout the game at every point the developers felt it was necessary.  By saying it's a problem everytime your own faults cause you to have low life, that's basically saying "This game is hard, it doesn't give me health packs everytime I get hurt because of my own negligence: POOR DESIGN!!".  Normal difficulties on games like Doom and Half-life gave you fair amounts of items.  It was only when you rose the difficulty to something harder, would the game take away that liberty of having items all the time.

Guess what?  Isn't that the whole purpose of  harder difficulties, to increase the challenge?  You wouldn't play hard and think it would be easy, let alone as smooth as normal.. Would you?

You don't seem to understand that too much health/armour is as bad as too little.

Half-Life, even on high difficulties, often fell into the "too much" trap. Like there'd be a section where there was more health/armor (thanks to medi and energy stations particularly) than you could even hold, then a section where it seemed like they'd forgotten to put any health, then a wild over abundance again, and so on. So I wasn't impressed.

Half-Life 2, despite having amazing physical level design and visual design, was even worse off, because the levels were frequently so massive and open, it was even more tempting to back-track and keep on max health/armour, and they rarely presented a situation where it was exciting and risky to get health/armour.

And those were the BEST. Most games did a much worse job.

I'm not complaining that those games were hard.

They weren't.

They weren't for precisely the reason you said you loved them up-thread. You could always just auto-save before a fight, then reload if it didn't go perfectly, and keep trying. That made them actually easier than ME2 on Insanity, even on their hardest modes (except Doom and others where enemies respawned on max difficulty, but they just made the game into a speedrun), because oh you lost most of your resources in that fight? Just reload. Plus you were a lot harder to kill in most of those games, taking an awful lot of hits to put down from max health/armour.

What I'm saying is that level designers clearly found balancing the amount of health that they gave out really challenging.

Don't think I'm pretending those games weren't fun. They were. I loved almost all of them. I don't think THOSE games would have been better with health regen, either, but I do think that ME2 is a better shooter than any of them (and it's not the best shooter of it's era).

I mean, let's compare like with like, too. Normal on Doom, or Half-Life, say, was hilariously easy. Normal on ME2 is pretty easy. Normal on Halo: Fall of Reach is actually harder than Doom or HL was on normal, despite health regen. So don't pretend games are easy now and were hard then. They weren't.

[Eurhetemec]

Khayness wrote...

I'm an avid player of Serious Sam Coin-Op, sorry, no saves there.

What is better is entirely subjective, but here is my list: Half-Life series, SW Republic Commando (tho' you had shields, but no HP regen), RtCW, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and ofc Serious Sam FE+SE.

I also remember fondly of the first CoD and MoH:AA.

I will agree that Serious Sam was a bloody amazing game, and harder than most modern games on normal settings. And yeah, without quick-saves, then health management is interesting, so long as the game design is as good as Serious Sam.

Touche, sir, touche.

[Notanything]

-

Modifié par Notanything, 17 juin 2011 - 08:32 .

[Crackseed]

@ Bozo - great points. If they can really push ME3's combat like they are talking about [less available cover/bigger areas] while making the AI really keep us moving in and out of cover, I think it'll be a much more intense experience and make the regen system earn it's keep.