In first person shooters these days, a once universal item seems to be appearing with less and less frequency. Whether it’s the steaming whole chicken-on-plate of Wolfenstein, or the white box with a red cross from Doom, health kits have become an endangered species. Muscling in and out-competing these gentle creatures has been the animal known as ‘regenerating health.’ Featured more prominently in recent games, it has beaten its opponent to the point of it possibly becoming extinct.

To truly examine this issue, we need to go all the way back to the grand-daddies of today’s first person shooters: Doom and Wolfenstein. Both games gave their players fixed amount of health they had to carefully manage; if it reached zero they died and had to start the level over. Scattered around were items that would raise this number back towards the maximum of 100%. This mechanic forced designers to place strategic (and often hidden) health drops for players to find in areas before or after they knew they would be encountering enemies.

Players were forced to focus on managing their health, planning for encounters, and scouring the map for any hidden caches of health. If a player ended up mismanaging their health it could lead to some very difficult encounters, such as having to fight multiple enemies with a very limited amount of health. A fight that normally would be of little consequence could suddenly become quite difficult. It added an element of strategy, planning, and challenge to otherwise monotonous shooters.

On the other hand, players that make poor choices, or a game that has been poorly designed, can leave players snapping their controllers in frustration. Picture this: You have very low health, and there’s a room full of enemies just ahead and no way to go back and get more health – you’ve exhausted all the previous drops. Some players, no matter how good they are, will see this as a complete dead-end. This is the largest problem with having a set amount of health. Granted, this can be fixed partially with well thought out design, but anyone who has spent a deal of time playing FPS games has probably run into a situation like the one described.

Now contrast that experience with more modern FPS games where there is no health bar: As you move from fight to fight, any health you lost just comes back. You are 100% fresh for anything you are going to encounter. To top it off, if you are ever damaged in the actual encounter, you can duck behind a piece of cover and wait for your health to slowly fill back up. This allows you to engage in longer, more intense firefights because the penalties for taking damage are merely a “time out” while your health regenerates.

While this does lose some of the strategy, planning, and difficulty of the health pack system, it also solves a lot of the “stuck facing a nearly impossible fight” scenarios that used to plague older FPS games. A major source of player frustration is completely removed, and a designer can feel comfortable throwing waves of enemies or rolling battles at players with less fear of them running out of supplies. This enables developers to more freely explore design possibilities since they have one less factor to worry about.

However, while this eliminates one problem, it introduces others: Regenerating health removes a lot of the feeling of danger and challenge from a game. A player who has nothing to manage other than their ammo supply faces little “danger” when fighting enemies. This can sometimes lessen the depth of the players experience, and turn fights into monotonous slug fests; moving from cover to cover, whittling down and eventually killing enemies with little regard for how many bullets they’re taking since they can just duck behind a rock and make everything better.

Both design approaches have their ups and their down, but since the popularity of Halo and its sequels, the health kit has been on the decline in single player FPS games, and even some multiplayer FPS games have seen designers ditch the health kit in favor of regenerating health. While some games have utilized the mechanic masterfully, others use it as a crutch to allow players to hobble around, both online and offline. One thing developers seem to have forgotten is that the first Halo had a merger of both systems, a player had a portion of their health, “the shield”, that would recharge over time, and a fixed health bar. This merger addressed some of the issues, particularly the “getting into a large fight with no health” issue, but it still allowed players a fairly large handicap in encounters.

The biggest problem with the decline of health packs is the lack of diversity it can inspire in FPS design. Without health packs, encounters can be strung together in a more linear fashion, giving the player less motivation to explore, and giving them more “down time” between fights to recharge their health. In order to make a game “harder,” designers can simply give enemies better accuracy instead of tweaking the number of foes, or the scarcity of health.  The hardest enemies become expert marksmen, pegging you from across the level, forcing you to go hide in another corner for a few seconds before trying again.

I think I’ve faced more controller snapping frustration at games when they arbitrarily jack up enemy accuracy rather than doing other, more interesting things to make them more difficult (like having less health/ammo, having more enemies, or having the player take more damage) than I have in any other types of FPSes. Can we have our healthpacks back now, please?