Passive Regeneration - yes or no?

on one hand:

  • regen reduces cost of fooling around
  • makes the game appear more safe and comfy.

on the other…

  • it allows - or forces, depending on your view - a boring and annoying tactic of sitting still until your health returns. out of combat regen may or may not help depending on how strict combat detection is. could maybe have healing mode that is enabled manually during which player takes like x10 damage - so no combat detection required and it’s all on player to not regen while getting shot at.
  • most players avoid using consumables unless they’re shown early that it’s totally fine to pop some when you need them. lack of regen clearly shows that it’s never wasteful to heal yourself if you’re far from safety.
  • lack of regen increses value of having a base nearby since it may contain a source of healing that is free or works much faster.
  • if there are shields - they already make taking scratch damage acceptable.
3 Likes

As for regeneration, i like dual-systems where there’s a shield which has not much points but has a fast auto-regen, and there’s health which may have more, but without regeneration. Using this pair will decrease cost of “fooling around” and make useless long sitting for regen. Also, dual-system will give more sence to healer or engineer with healing pod in long missions where healing is unaviable.

4 Likes

Also, duplicate from discord: No health regen makes healing class usefull in hard missions. I like the realisation i saw in some zombie shooter. The healer there had a tommy-gun with healing needles. In fact, he shooted allies with healing and damaged enemies. Sounds like cool idea for FPS-shooter game

3 Likes

Maybe passive regeneration could only exist in “safe zones”, such as towns?

  • When the player’s out in the environment - regardless of if they’re in combat or not - there is no passive regeneration.
  • When the player enters a town, they’re “safe”. Passive regeneration can be enabled here.

It may also help with separating the player’s concerns based on what they’re doing.
Being out in the environment, the player is likely either in combat or looking for combat, so they need to care about their health.
In a “safe zone” like a town, players are more concerned about trading/crafting/upgrading/etc., so their health is not relevant here.

4 Likes

makes sense. how about stations that project a regen aura? that way it could be one of the objects involved in the base building, maintenance and defence.

2 Likes

Yeah, that makes sense and creates a reason for people to actually spend resources for upgrading a base, which is a good resource sink. Also regarding shields - they might be a very important aspect of balancing a combat. We even had a poll on Discord about energy-pool related combat mechanics where jetpack and shield are co-dependant, so you won’t be able to just stay mid air most of time to avoid damage and be overly mobile.

Perhaps go a step further and allow builds to have smaller shield capacity or zero shield at all.

If equipment stats were on a sliding scale, reducing shield capacity would increase movement speed, max health, or damage output, ect ect. Having zero shield would be a part of that sliding scale.

5 Likes

right! i’m a fan of trade-offs too. i like the idea of having several armor slots, some of which can give a stat from a limited selection of them. so maybe it’s just the starting configuration that has shields. maybe you want to replace armor plates with shield generators. or general power generators that regens both shields and jumpjets, but way worse than specializes generators.

don’t know what to say about making jumpjets incompatible with shields as i don’t know how much of a problem it was or could be to have both dodging and free health. but i feel like losing shields from just staying in the air is a bit awkward. i’d rather have shared energy pool for both with an ability to turn off shields.

1 Like

I like the flow of ideas here. I think my ideal configuration would be to have passive out of combat full shield regeneration, with some % health regen, something like 10-50%, which can be altered by upgrades etc. This is in part due to shield pierce weapons one shotting players with low health because they do not have any heal items. Shield regen would be relatively fast, some % per second, depending on upgrades etc. Health regen would be probably 10-25% of the speed of shield regen, at least relatively speaking, not exactly though. both would have an out of combat requirement, and those requirements may not be the same. I also like the “safe zone” idea with a twist, possibly something like 10x regen speed, though it wouldn’t affect the out of combat requirement to avoid abuse. And as everyone should know I am very in favor of player creativity and being able to customize play style so the armor slots idea certainly has my vote and has already been brought up. Making the player, their weapons and their gear modular is going to be incredible. Please give some feedback and keep sending out ideas!

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Closed Beta FF had a time with slow regeneration but the bioframe could heal you much quicker.
I liked this as going into bigger battles it was advantageous to have a bioframe in your group…
But you didnt need one if you were dependent on your own skill.

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I do wonder if some regen could boost social interaction, due to a natural pause for example?

My point of view is that many games today discourage social interaction in favor for convenient and a faster gameplay. Thus I don’t think people want to slow down unless necessary.

Some regen could therefore cause a natural pause to ensure you are fully ready, geared up and not wasteful with your resources in the event of a bigger fight. Althought this pause might come naturally due to the circumstances anyway, with or without regen. Still something I would like to take into consideration anyway.

One way I think might be interesting is to have a very slow regen, but with items or gear that can boost it. This items or gear could come with a big trade-off and potentially not wanted in combat. Example such as slowing down your movement speed, not providing sufficient armor or straight up boosting damage taken. This could give room for the player to decide their gameplay. You can play it safe using said items/gear only when safe to do so - or finding creatives ways to use them at a fatal price if you’re unfortunate.

For shields, yes. I’m still a fan of shields being linked to jet pack energy so those who won’t get hit (snipers, passive engineers) still have reason to upgrade their energy, while those that do get hit can tank, and have to manage their movement rather than being incredibly mobile.

Health. Some slow regeneration to allow players who are soloing out in the field to remain alive if they’re willing to rest for a moment, but fast regen in a non-combat area. One-time use items or abilities can be used out in the field for a quick boost if health gets too low.

While I don’t care for the idea in horde games, coherency regen could be an idea as a multi-class perk, where being near players with that perk imparts an increase to passive health regeneration, while a biotech-type frame would have this as an ability.

Another possibility could be “permanent” health damage, where any passive regeneration outside a non-combat area deducts from a pool of “healing nanomachines”. The only way you can restore these is returning to base, or being healed by a biotech frame.

2 Likes