Wrath of Dagon

Based on what? On how much you've already done in that level and what your objectives are. Obviously it'll vary from game to game. Which is why I think that the health mechanics of DX3 is largely irrelevant. They're relevant unless you planning to take a completely non-combat approach. Often how much health you have left will determine how you will play out the rest of the level, which is a good thing. Plus it's good that there's a possibility of failure, even if it's small and consequences not that severe (having to restart the level if you can't somehow figure out how to make it through with the amount of health left).

I think that's more of a theoretical problem than a real one. You should have an idea how much health you can lose and how much of the level there's still to go and make a judgment whether to redo the fight. Anyway, most games deal with it by distributing health packs through the level, so that you can't use them all up too fast. In an RPG it's often possible to proceed without losing any health, so it's even less of an issue.

But if they do that once, wouldn't they remember to watch their health more closely next time? Besides, it they don't save during the level, when they die they'll have to start over again anyway. Edit: What I do is only save when I'm in relatively good shape, i.e. still have enough health and resources to continue. That way if I die, I just go to the nearest point from which I can proceed reasonably well.

You don't have to get everything perfect, but you have to do well enough to take an acceptable amount of damage. How many times you retry really depends on your skills relative to game difficulty, which is always the case so long as it's possible to die. You may have to retry 1 or 2 times extra to get decent amount of health left, but conserving your resources seems like a good reward for the effort. But it makes sense in an RPG to have to conserve your resources, I don't see a problem with that. No, I'm fine with regenerating health so long as you're fighting a series of unrelated battles, not trying to solve a mission. In particular it works well with more fast paced shooters, less well when there's a tactical element to proceeding through a level. Edit: Note that in Dragon Age forum I actually argued for regenerating health (which is what they're planning apparently) because since combat is normally the only option, the battles would be unrelated, and the rules based nature of battles already imply that you have to think about what you're doing.

Difference is, saving is out of game, and med pacs are in game. To an extent you have a point, if you can't save during the level it makes you careful just like having limited health would do. The problem is, it's far more tedious to start over the level from the beginning and redo everything you've already accomplished successfully than to reload right after the battle if you died or survived but used up so much health you may not make it to the end. The second alternative gives more choices to the player, which I consider a good thing.

FSW is a great game, if you like strategy and shooters, although it's not a shooter. Play it on hard difficulty, or it may get a bit repetitive.

Yeah, that nulifies the fact that I enjoyed the game, having played HL2, Gears of War, Deus Ex, KotoR1/2, BG1/2, Fallout1/2 and Icewind Dale1/2 before it. There's just no way I could play all those games and still enjoy Mass Effect for what it is. I never said it's not enjoyable for what it is, an average shooter with pretty cinematics. I don't see where your post even disagrees with my statement, just with the strawman argument you made up yourself and attributed to me.

It's not really that I want to penalize someone for taking the direct approach (his build would be better equipped to do that anyway), it's that I want an incentive to consider the entire mission as a whole. If you regenerate your entire health back after every gunfight, there's no incentive to be particularly careful about each battle, or to plan ahead. I'm assuming you can save at any time, if you can only save after you finish the mission, it pretty much does the same thing, but I really dislike not being able to save when I want to (unless it's only restricted in combat, which is OK).

Like I said before that's really not true. Your example was healing during combat, I was talking about healing in between combat. I hate games that throw waves of enemies at you non-stop, and DX certainly didn't do that.

Sounds like rationalization if you ask me. Any reason I give you you can call rationalization. Rationalization of what exactly? I want some challenge, not a ridiculous amount of challenge. Having to redo things once in a while is challenge enough for me, but thank you for your advice. That's right, I use my metaknowledge and get through more cleanly, if you don't like that, don't do it. I prefer that to having to set the game to a lower difficulty setting, which is what I do if the game only allows checkpoints.

The problem is you don't have to be careful about preserving your health through the entire mission, so long as you survive each battle your condition at the end does not affect the next battle, so there's no incentive for you to look for alternate paths which might reduce your damage. Instead of the mission being a single entity you have to find your way through, it just becomes a string of independent battles. As far as running out of healthpacks, that's part of the challenge, it's never really been a problem with games which dole out a certain number of healthpacks for a given amount of progress that you make.

So reloading constantly to ensure you successfully complete each encounter optimally is better? Better than proceeding through the game sloppily, yes. I don't always have to reload, but I like to have the opportunity if I need to. You can avoid that situation in either case, the difference is with medkits you have to use your head, with regen it's done for you so you can just plough through.

If you want better combat, play Half-Life 2. If you want a better RPG, play just about anything.

Hey, I don't yell, I just don't understand how so many people miss the lousy quality of this game. Does repeating the same barren planet 35 times and claiming you're exploring the galaxy give no one a clue?

We know ammo is unlimited, but what about health? I don't think regenerating health is a good idea for this kind of game, as we're discussing in DX3 thread in Computer and Console. Scrounging for healthpacks during a mission isn't realistic, so I would suggest being given a certain number of healthpacks before the start of each mission, and you wouldn't be able to use a healthpack while in combat. You'd still have the problem of an in-game explanation of how healthpacks work, but heck, it's a game.

It just sets off alarm bells that this might really be an accessible shooter with token RPG elements, but who knows, they might implement it well.

Difficulty level with autohealing only affects individual battles. What happens in one battle has no bearing on the next battle. However if you have limited healing resources per game level, you have to be careful about expending too much of it in any one battle, and thus may have to rethink your whole approach. Sure, you can still take the careful approach even without incentive from the game, but then you're not really competing against the game, which is kind of the point. With the ability to quick save and quick load, are you ever really competing against the game? If the game is hard, then people compensate by saving and loading more frequently. Kill a guy without taking damage? Save! And so on. What is frustrating is that the end of a level becomes impossible to complete because you have no health and there are no medkits around, but you just barely made it through some tough parts. Time to start it all over then I guess. It's a double edged sword, and don't really care one way or the other. If I had to choose I'd probably choose a slow regen. I do that a lot. So what, the point is I have to take out each enemy carefully, even if I have to try multiple times. I'm not saying make the game frustrating, I'm saying make it so alternate paths and taking the entire level into consideration has an incentive. I think the point you're making about low health is more valid for shooters, in a game like DX you have plenty of opportunity to avoid that kind of situation so long as you don't just use brute force, which is much of the fun. And slow regen just makes your stand around and wait when in low health, which is the least fun solution IMO. I hated when I kept having to do that in Oblivion.

I don't think it needs to be that complex, though personally I don't think there's such a thing as too complex, so long as it's not confusing. The main point is that you need to be careful in each battle, so instead of taking on 5 enemies in a row, may be hack the turret or sneak through the vent instead, or find some cover from which you can snipe them efficiently.

Difficulty level with autohealing only affects individual battles. What happens in one battle has no bearing on the next battle. However if you have limited healing resources per game level, you have to be careful about expending too much of it in any one battle, and thus may have to rethink your whole approach. Sure, you can still take the careful approach even without incentive from the game, but then you're not really competing against the game, which is kind of the point.

The real problem with regenarating health for me is that it allows you to take a lot more chances during combat. You can run and gun, and so long as you have a sliver of health left, you're fine. Which is OK if the objective is just to survive each individual battle, but not if the obective is to properly approach the entire situation, as it should be in this kind of game.

I assume the game mechanics will be different from the other games. I don't know, canon isn't very important to me, but I guess a lot of people are quite concerned about it. As far as consequences in IW, when I refused to kill Paul Denton for the Illuminati, they started sending their Elite Troopers after me. I think you can also agree to work with the Templars, but I don't know what that does. Other than that, I didn't notice much.

They have biomechanical augmentations, so may be tiny internal robots that repair your tissues? I think those kinds of experiments are being conducted now.

It had a fairly gentle learning curve, it did get harder though, especially on the high difficulty setting.

People only say IW is bad because it's not exactly like the first one. Evaluated on its own or compared to any contemporary game or any game made since then, it's a great game. I only hope AP will be as good. This new one though, they're only planning to spend 2 yrs on it, I don't see how you make a great game in that amount of time. Plus this regenerating health thing makes it sound like they'll make a run and gun shooter and slap the DX name on it. I'll reserve my judgment until I get more info though.

Can't wait.