Except there is plenty of health lying around so it does not really matter that you take damage.
It terms of building suspense over an extended period of time it is absolutely the same. Regenerative health as soon as your out of combat means that how you fair in one battle doesn't matter to how you fair in the next, at least in terms of health of your avatar. That's Blow's point about the Halo method preventing suspense over prolonged periods of time and multiple battles.
Bioshock Infinite blows. Move along.
When I played Half-Life 2 recently (which, upfront, I am not a big fan of), I noticed that the game basically had you go through these short encounters and then load you up with healthpacks right around the corner (while doing a dated physics puzzle). I thought: is this REALLY a better method than Halo? So I went back and played Reach, and then Combat Evolved, and decided, definitively: no, no it is not. Halo can have a bunch of long, drawn out, intense, and interesting fights in part because it allowed you to get into a rhythm of fighting, getting away to heal, fighting, etc. It's hard, takes skill, and turns out to be a total blast to play. Gears of War 1 was the same way, especially on Intense.
I do think that regenerating shields in the right hands makes for a better experience. I haven't played BS Infinite so I don't know if they did it right, however.
I didn't read "5 minutes" as "multiple battles". And if that was the point he was trying to make, I disagree with it. As I explained in my original post, attrition across an entire level is usually bad.
Bioshock Infinite is actually a very bad game. 1999 mode just makes everything damage sponges. I stopped playing after I saw how bad the balance was.
Dark Ages of Gaming (2007- )
That solution sounds similar to what Resistance series did (and I'm sure others have also)
Have a health bar segmented, if one segment loses health points but doesn't lose them all, it regens out of combat.
That way there's still that tension of 10 sec you can have with a shield and over the long term, as you lose segment after segment, the tension of maintaining your remaining segments increases as they become ever more important.
I haven't played Resistance and haven't seen that mechanic elsewhere either. That's an interesting idea, but it doesn't protect against attrition across an entire level.
Maybe, instead, you only regenerate health to the 50% mark. That way players are taught to avoid damage, but if they completely mess up they can still progress without being forced to load an earlier savegame (which often isn't possible in games with checkpoint saves) or backtrack for a healthpack.
I don't agree that regenerating health is always bad. But it's something that was used by a specific game - Halo - and then copied by numerous other games, even if those games have gameplay that's not at all similar to Halo.
With Halo, it works because there's an legit chance that you will die during the next encounter. The enemies are smart, and some are very dangerous, so you may well end up owned. There's also many difficulty settings, so you can pick the level of difficulty that provides you with the tension desired.
Most games don't have AI and opponents on par with Halo. And most games offer just two, maybe three difficulty settings. And many games make those settings a more-or-less straight enemy hitpoint increase. So regeneration works poorly in that context.
That sound fair.
I totally agree with Blow
*sounds*