Implications of fast regen in an FPS

One curious thing I've noticed about Splatoon is that it very fast health regeneration, combined with very high damage-per-sec weapons. The result is that when you encounter an enemy, it's over very quickly, and either you're fine or your dead.

This is quite different from other FPSes we've played (mainly Quake III and TF2), where you can accumulate damage over time. That leads to things like seeking out health packs or adding healing powers to the team.

Nintendo never takes game design lightly, so I'm sure this difference was carefully chosen. What do you think are the pros and cons of this fast-regen, high-DPS game vs. the more traditional balance?

 

I haven't played Splatoon myself, but I love FPS in general, and i can say that I hate how weapons are balanced most of the time. Right now I am playing Heroes and Generals, a great game, but weapons are completely out of balance, a Sniper can instakill you with one shot from 200 meters, while you may need three or even four machine gun hits from one meter. I remember playing PAM HC mode on CoD Modern Warfare and it was the funniest experience I've ever had, it was more based on skills than standard games, you could take three enemies out by yourself if you were good enough. Good Old times, I'd say.

 

I tend to play snipers myself, so that sounds like great fun to me. But yeah, I can see how that would get pretty annoying.

I'd balance that by having the sniper rifle be very slow, and require careful aim, making it pretty much useless up close. Does H&G do that? Or do you still find it unfair?

I've never played that one. Can you explain what made it more skill-based than most games?

Here's a vague general idea I'm toying with: more skill-based games are likely to build a small but loyal base of fans, but find it harder to recruit new players (who get frustrated because they get clobbered instantly). Less skill-based games are more casual, thus making it easier for new players to get into it, but those players are not likely to stick around as long.

I have a hunch Nintendo was purposely pushing Splatoon in the more casual direction with its DPS/regen balance, as they did with Smash Bros for fighting games, etc. Nothing wrong with that, and there's still plenty of skill development to be had, but I still can't shake the feeling that something important was lost.

 

It keeps you in the action. The player either keeps to the engagement or returns to painting the world. You don't end up with a "walking dead" situation, where the player has to stop everything and run away to find health. You are either totally in the game or are waiting to respawn.

 

Don't take me wrong, I am fine with powerful sniper rifles, but I don't see why other weapons should be less powerful just because they can hit you from one meter as well. If I shoot you in the back from ten meters you must die, no matter if I have a pistol or a rifle. In any case, it's free to play, if you're working on something similar it's worth giving it a look.

competitions were turn based, you had 24 rounds and they were all 5vs5, if you died, you had to wait the following round to respawn. No UI, no radar, no hit indications, and weapon were strong as hell. You could rely on your weapon, your eyes, and your ears.

 

The other damage/regen pattern I see a lot is that damage and regen are both relatively quick, but there is a long delay before regen starts. I has been awhile since I played The Division but if I remember right, that's an example.

 

In cover based shooters, a long delay before regen means you have to stay in cover- giving a natural time for the opponent to press forward.

Regen itself is a mechanic to reset the mechanic loop that is an engagement. You are never really meant to start an engagement with anything less than full health.

 

This isn't specific to shooters. You see this in other games with health systems, such as action adventure games or RPG games (two come to mind--Dragon Age Origins and Final Fantasy XIII).

It's just a different way to do things. As others have mentioned, it changes the way you play, and especially in a multiplayer game it has you moving between encounters quickly, rather than spending time trying to "stay alive" by healing and/or avoiding other players.

I think you're right about that. Consider games like CSGO compared to Call of Duty.

Eh, I dunno about that. Having each encounter be its own event changes the way you play, but it isn't necessarily better or worse than the attrition of low/no health regen. There are some more casual games that have low/no health regen (Dragon Age Inquisition), and some more traditionally "hard" games that do have the regen (DA Origins). It's all in how you design your game.

 

It would seem like an intuitive conclusion, but it actually is false (if you are implying CS:GO being less popular on steam because it is more skillbased and has a higher skill ceiling). According to steamcharts CS:GO has roughly 24 times as many concurrent players in the 30 day average, than ALL Call of Duty games combined (including singleplayer and coop):

http://steamcharts.com/app/730

http://steamcharts.com/search/?q=call+of+duty

COD has more media coverage and maybe even more public awareness, because they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing over the years, whereas CS:GO doesn't do or need to do that. CS is popular because it is the better competitive game, with a broad enough playerbase to be enjoyed by a wide array of player skillgroups.


Honestly I think the health regen isn't that big of a factor in multiplayer FPS. I think it's more important whether there is a way to vastly out-tank the other player by denying them pickups like megahealth and red armor in Quake 3. In that game if you pit 2 equally skilled players against each other the one with the better "resource management" and map knowledge will absolutely crush the other one. If you time all the health and armor respawns, deny them to the other player and keep yourself above 100 hp and 100 armor at all times, in every encounter your enemy will have lower health and armor than you and will have no weapon to one-shot you (unless you let em get quaddamage) because Quake 3 has no headshots. In CS:GO an AWP shot to upper body or an AK headshot is always an insta-kill, even with helmet and kevlar vest. There is nothing the other player can do in preparation to prevent that, so the 1 on 1 encounters can usually be decided by landing a headshot first. And in that situation it doesn't matter much whether you have 100 hp or 1 hp. If you headshot the other player before they have a chance to react, you win.
In COD the time-to kill isn't very long (though still too long for my taste, I would prefer shooters where just every weapon is a 1-hit kill), so health regen doesn't really factor much into actual moment-to-moment decision making. It will have some long-term effect of enforcing the rich-get-richer mechanics of killstreak-rewards, because there is no health-attrition, but that's about it imho.

I would argue that it makes a lot more difference for playstyle choices, whether a game has dedicated servers or p2p networking. The "peeker's advantage" somewhat ruined games like COD or Rainbow Six Siege for me (the later of which I think is the most innovative shooter I've played in recent years). When you play against a competent player with a 200+ ping and they rush around a corner in front of you, you're dead before you even saw them get around the corner on your screen. You'll see them and you'll shoot, but you will still die no matter what, because the fight was already decided before you even knew it began. With dedicated servers this is a bit less extreme imho.

Then the machinegun needs a buff to be at least a 2-shot kill.

 

I don't know. I cut out the second half of JoeStrout's paragraph, because it mentioned "casual," but other than that--

--it mentions that players do not stick around as long. COD has more players when the game first comes out, but loses them more quickly.

Additionally, Steam (and PC) definitely isn't the central market for Call of Duty, so using the PC metrics is probably a bad idea. My comparison was probably kind of poor--it would be better with two games that are central to the same platform.

 

Yeah, that's the other curious (to me) thing about Splatoon: there are no pickups. But then it's primarily a team game, rather than free-for-all, so probably that is related.

(I only played TF2 once or twice, but my understanding is that the only pickups there are health, which of course goes away when you have fast health regen.)

You'd like Splatoon, in this regard at least: every weapon is almost a 1-hit kill. It's possible to survive a hit with some weapons if you're very good and you react very quickly (getting out of the enemy ink that you're now standing in and moving to your own ink color to regenerate), but in practice I very rarely see anybody survive more than a second or two after the initial hit.

To me this makes for a somewhat monotonous game: run, run, run, splat! Run, run, run, splat! There are other things to do (mostly painting the arena), but there isn't the resource- or health-management aspects of other shooters. You never switch from "attack mode" to "hide & heal mode" because you either don't survive an encounter, or you survive it and insta-heal. I generally like having different modes of play... like in the card game Spades, where you switch from trying to take tricks to desperately trying to NOT take tricks. (How's that for bringing in an analogy from a game genre as far away as humanly possible?)

But I'm being too harsh... there certainly are what we might call micro-modes: painting vs. attacking, swimming vs. shooting. It's just that you switch so quickly and frequently between these, that it doesn't really have the same feeling; it's tactical rather than strategic.

Interesting point; I had to google "peeker's advantage" to get up to speed there. I think I've got the idea now.

But I'm not sure what you're saying about dedicated servers vs. p2p. In both cases, the lag may be high (or not), no?

I'm somewhat hijacking my own thread here, but if peeker's advantage is a problem, couldn't you address it by having hits always computed by the target, rather than by the shooter? (Obviously makes more sense for slow-moving projectiles, such as globs of paint, rather than essentially instantaneous weapons like bullets.)

On the other hand, I suspect it's just a non-issue in a game (such as Splatoon) which rewards constant running around anyway. Seems like it's really only an issue for a slower-paced game where there is incentive to camp out.

 

I think you hit upon why it makes for a great casual experience- Victory isn't decided by accuracy and headshots and cover ect. it's about putting paint on the ground. Even somebody unfamiliar with a twin-stick control scheme can contribute to splashing paint around. Your only meaningful resources are ammo and territory.

There are elements there to add depth- ie. you move faster through your paint, thereby reinforcements can arrive faster on your turf. And yet, the core stays simple.

 

I've noticed this trend with many recent FPS games. The infamous CoD series in an excellent example.

People complain about how immersive a game isn't way too much imo. Halo gets a bad rap because you can unload a 60 round magazine in to an opponent and then they die.

I personally never liked twitch games. I was actually terrible at MP PVP in the game my project takes inspiration from (Freelancer).

Call it a feature, call it a problem but quick deaths just turn the game in to a competition of reactions, network speeds, and whoever shoots first ('specially with that stupid flinch mechanic in CoD). I think its terrible design but that's just me.

I've never shot an Ak-47 or anything (I've seen video...) but from what I've seen in games those guns seem to have a faster firing rate than in reality.

 

In reality a clip is gone in like 3 seconds. Guns fire really, really fast.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rate_of_fire

 

You've either never played CoD, only played on console, or have only played with S*** randos. If you've never seen a server go from guns blazing to dead silence, you haven't had the full experience. Siege exemplifies this even more, but the game is fundamentally about patience and initiative. The person ready to fire will always win, not the one with the fastest reaction time. Tactics here are about putting the crosshairs where someone will be, not where they are. The strategy then is about robbing people on their initiative.

Compare this to Halo where you have to spend relatively long periods of time tracking and responding to a person's actions. Now which one of these really sounds like your reaction time is more important?

 

So essentially you've said exactly what I have but put a spin on it?

I will never understand how twitch games can be fun. I won't debate the merits of one meta over another (I'm merely stating my opinion--relax) but I don't think losing a gunbattle to an opponent simply because you didn't make a hit first doesn't seem like fun to me. I'd like to ya know, be able to fight back in most situations.

 

I'm saying it's not twitch based. If you are running and gunning in these games, you are not playing the game properly. If you tried playing CoD like it's Quake without having tourettes, you won't be very successful because it's not the way it's supposed to be played. Sniper duels are the farthest thing I can think of from being twitchy. Classic CoD multiplayer usually punishes the person who moves first and rushes. Modern jetpack CoD I have no idea about since I haven't played one of these damn things since MW2.

The problem I have is that I have seen far too many people prescribe that X game is twitchy, when the reality is they just don't know how the game is played and think it's played like a completely different game. Hell, one of the closest comparisons to CoD is chess, and I don't see people complain about the ttk there.

 

I actually just dug out my old xbox360 again to play some COD MW2 spec ops missions and maybe play through the campaign again. It is interesting how very different the COD experience you describe is from what I experienced when playing its multiplayer back when it was first released. On console, mostly playing deathmatch, the game was pretty dominated by overpowered builts like akimbo g18, akimbo p90, akimbo shotguns, commando pro kniferunner, one man army + noobtube, booster duos with tac-insert and ac-130, and even most of the snipers were running around with their Interventions and quickscoping. I had somewhat upwards of 150 hours playtime and chess really doesn't come close to describing it. However I could see how you might have a very different experience if you only played for example hardcore search and destroy on PC, or something like that. Is that maybe the reason our perceptions of the gameplay differ so much?
MW2 arguably was one of the most broken CODs in terms of balancing, but the map design was amazing and it's my favorite COD game, and will likely remain my favorite for a long time. The Spec Ops mode indeed requires lots of strategy to beat the harder levels because you face so many enemies that twitch-shooting alone won't save you. The multiplayer certainly was flawed as hell, but the mapdesign allowed for (imho) more interesting tactics than most of the subsequent COD multiplayer maps. The areas weren't as tight and compressed as in later games. It also felt more asymmetric and interesting instead of forcefully balanced like in the later games, where every decent sniping spot had at least one additional entrance you can't effectively cover alone, and the maps where smaller and more circular in general.

 

Played on PC, almost exclusively on hardcore mode (and I didn't play MW2 for long because of bots), so probably.

 

FPS games without health regen tend to make players fear even the slightest damage, especially if health packs are hard to come by. A lot of frequent saving, and going back to saves when damaged, even if you haven't died, just because you know you've lost too much health.

Fast regen on the contrary makes for a game where small amounts of damage is easily ignored as long as you survive at all. Personally I think it is more fun, though less realistic. A lot more time is spent playing the game rather than replaying a specific part of the game over and over until minimizing damage taken.

 

There's also a middleground like in the Wolfenstein reboot where your health will regenerate towards the next full increment of 20 (or 10, can't remember). Far Cry has the same system with bars on a healthbar, partial bars will regenerate. I like this system because it doesn't remove "consequences from failure" entirely, and always gives you a fighting chance to recover as long as you survive just barely. And not every minor mistake has permanent consequences.

 

I was thinking specifically of online multiplayer FPS games, though — so no saving and replaying. How does that affect this view of things?

 

Or you get Doom where a health pack is a glory kill away.

 

I found this video on Bioshock Infinite to contain some really relevant info on health regen.