With first and third-person shooters being at or near the peak of their popularity, a major shift has happened over the past decade. Health used to be recovered in games like these by picking up health packs or medkits, which would instantly heal your character from damage. However, at least in my experience, it seems that the industry has shifted towards regenerating health instead of powerups.
Back to the beginning
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In the early days of gaming, when health was still a relatively new concept instead of lives with one or two-hit kills, like Super Mario Bros., Contra and Ghost N Goblins, we learned to hunt down health powerups when you started to take a lot of damage. I remember grinding for them in Metroid, hunkering down by enemy spawn locations to harvest the health power drops that were frequently dropped by enemies.
Other games used items to restore your health, like eating questionable meat items like roast found in the walls of Dracula’s castle in Castlevania, or roast chickens that pop out of trash cans in Final Fight.
When we entered the FPS era, it became common to pick up white boxes with the iconic red cross on them to refill your health. This seemed to become the standard, showing up in a wide range of games. Even the massively popular Fortnite maintains the instant health restoration system, using bandages to heal your character.
Regenerating health becomes a thing
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At some point games started moving away from healthkits and started using the regenerating health method. I first noticed this in Gears of War and I thought it was far more convenient than having to desperately hunt down healthkits when I was near death. Just hunker down and wait for the red to fade away and I was good.
Other games used variations of the concept, like Ninja Gaiden II where you take real damage and temporary damage during each encounter. The more effectively you eliminate the enemies, the more of your temporary damage is healed once you defeat all the current threats.
Why I prefer healthkits
While its incredibly convenient to hunker down in a safe spot for some time as your health regenerates, I think its become a lazy gimmick. Rather than working to balance and refine the gameplay, its seems easier to just give the user a way to turtle up and to work through difficult sections of the game.
I also think that it greatly reduces the realism. While instantly getting healed to 100% from a health pack isn’t much better, I think the argument can be made that in some games it can be excused if its a futuristic game where you can assume that nanobots or advanced technology could actually repair damage nearly instantly. By contrast, it seems absurd that you can get riddled with bullets, duck behind some rubble for a few seconds and suddenly be fine.
In conclusion
Image source:Level-clear
In some games, I don’t mind the concept of regenerating health. When its a shield that regenerates instead of health, I find that much more believable compared to physical damage. While picking up a package of bandages to instantly heal your character doesn’t seem much better, it does keep the character moving rather than hunting for safe spots to hunker down in and wait for your health to regenerate.
What do you think? Are healthkits really any better than regenerating health or is it basically the same thing? Let’s discuss!
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