10 Things Ruining Video Games
7. Automatic Health Recovery
You are on the edge of death after taking dozens of bullets to upper body. Your vision turns red and blurry, and voices of your teammates are muffled. You think you are dying, but within just 10 seconds you are back on your feet. You react just in time to see another bullet hit you on the face and you drop near-dead on the ground. But no problem, you will be back on your feet again in another 10 seconds.
That is call of duty’s near death experience in a nutshell for you, and it’s similar in other franchises too like Assassin’s Creed, Battlefield, and Uncharted. It is a mechanic killing off suspense in AAA games that are apparently trying to soak us through different degrees of realism.
I agree on one thing that we should not just return to Doom style medkits, but I think some kind of middle road is needed. On top of my head, one example may be a segmented health recovery, where health only recovers to 25% only to give you a fighting chance or health can regenerate after an encounter is finished.
Once again I have to mention Dark Souls, the fear of death is really one of the most intoxicating experience in gaming and dying helps us not to make same mistakes again when we take on similar challenges. Various AAA games today have lost touch with this fact.
