Hmm, I think you’re not giving Halo quite enough credit, it has some nuances including that the shield regen stops in its tracks if you take even a glancing blow, so you have to take complete cover. (I haven’t played any Gears.) And the fact that the Elites have regenerating shields with the exact same mechanics is kind of beautiful, whoever currently has the upper hand wants to flank-rush down the other to prevent their shield from regenning (and the AI does do this).
I like the Halos with a health-pack health level under the shield a lot more than those that don’t, though, since that makes minor mistakes (or perfection) feel more meaningful.
yeah, I’m wrongfully lumping halo in with the trope of “health regen”. I remember being annoyed with gears of war in particular for being the first game to rip that mechanic off wholesale, despite there being no narrative explanation, and ditching all the nuance of halo’s shield vs health dynamic.
anyway, funk dis: what if symphony of the night ditched all healing potions in exchange for a subweapon that healed you?
Yeah, Igavania healing systems are pretty much trash unfortunately. Yeah like just go with JRPG world map style healing in your action game, why the hell not
Another thing about Halo: because there is always the shield, the game can be very stingy with how many health packs it gives you. You can’t get savelocked. That contrasts with for example HL2, where I detect a fear from the designers that the player might get stuck before a gauntlet with 6HP, and to avoid that problem they scatter healthpacks everywhere.
I tried to specify poorly designed and didn’t name any specific games because I wanted to just construct an example of what I mean. I agree that a well designed game will overcome the boredom inherent to the most basic form of the cleric. Imagine, for instance, that you are playing a crappy dnd licensed game. In pre 3rd edition D&D clerics did have the deserved reputation of ‘boring to play, but necessary for healing so that combat encounters aren’t totally deadly’. You can still see a lot of this in Baldur’s Gate 1 and Icewind Dale 1. In fact, to quote a strategy guide
The idea here is to come up with a good healer. He should not be designed to fight but should be able to in emergencies. When it comes to spells, he should only learn healing spells at first. His primary job is to stand behind the warriors and heal them should they get hurt.
HL2 spawns at least some medkits based on current health level - possibly only ones from smashed crates. This also applies to the smaller health drop from some Combine. I’m pretty sure there’s numerous static medkits, tho, and all health chargers are static (but rarer). I need to read more on this. Obviously this kind of thing went into the design of Left 4 Dead.
The original SOTN required you to equip consumables to one of your hands (the Saturn version adds a ‘third hand’ which only holds such items) and use them in real-time, but the menu system means they’re still practically instantaneous (and all other forms of healing besides save points become curiosities). Circle of the Moon and onward had in-menu item use, right?
Maybe Zelda could copy the digestion system from Contact. You can stuff your face in the menu, but can only eat so much and then have to wait. Maybe add in a food synergy/nausea system so the player won’t just gobble whatever they feel like, and have a reason to seek out different kinds of foods…
It’s slow to run away. Later monsters punish you for it with charges or ranged attacks. It’s better (and safer) to do it right after a monster whiffs an attack with a long ending animation. That way there’s no chance of an attack during it, and you stay in the fray to apply more DPS. The game is super grindy; you want to spend as little time as possible on each monster.
Monster Hunter also has risk-reward health. When you get hit, part of the damage you took shows as red on the health bar. This red part will slowly heal you as it turns green. If you get hit while this is happening, you lose whatever red was remaining (and gain new red based on the new attack). So if you were good, you could avoid getting hit after a big attack and preclude the need to chug a health potion at all.
I don’t think it’s perfect system. But I also don’t see much difference between it and Dark Souls. The same “run 20 feet away and heal” works there too. Perhaps you could expand on that?
It’s a Zelda-relevant point though, later entries in a series can color and sometimes override our memory of the earlier ones, particularly when it comes to details like this.
Symphony of the Night has quite a bit of unnecessary clunkiness like this. Likewise, Super Metroid. That doesn’t necessarily prevent them from being the two best Metrovanias, but it’s unfortunate. Metroid Fusion and Aria of Sorrow just go down a lot smoother.
This reminds me of the evolution of Souls soul-item multi-use. In DkS1, you have to painstakingly wait for the animations one by one; it’s barely worth my time to use the small ones. In DkS2, they introduced a multi-item-use menu, even though nobody ever wanted to consume more than one Purple Moss Clump. Finally in DkS3 they simply allowed the merchants to buy them from you at full value.
This kind of design problem is often not so easy to solve elegantly. Productivity software companies have professional UX designers that spend all day thinking about problems like this.