The Ant Nest

When I started writing about the rather radical overhaul that the health system has received in Call of Duty 2 in my previous post, I found myself writing, well, quite a lot. It made more sense to spin it out into its own post, so here it is:

Gone is any kind of visible health bar and any health packs, and in its place is regenerating health that is invisible to the player unless they sustain enough damage to negate the benefits of that regeneration and bring themselves close to death. At that point, the game warns the player visually - through a red mist effect around the edges of the screen - and aurally - through heavy breathing and a heartbeat effect - that they need to get out of the line of fire or risk dying. Avoid the warning and you’ll die, but duck back into cover and you will recover just fine.

Apparently this counts as an “invisible Halo health system” to some, but that’s just … wrong. Halo has two ‘health resources’ - a regenerating shield that is depleted first, and then a finite quantity of health that is depleted after that. Here, in CoD2, there is only one (regenerating) resource. Sure there are similarities, but so too are there very significant differences caused by this distinction.

My opinions on this system are mixed. It certainly brings many advantages to the table that are common to Halo. For an experienced games player, it solves the whole obsessive-compulsive/perfectionist ‘quickload if you lose even a tiny fraction of health in any given encounter’ behaviour problem that can completely destroy any semblance of intensity in the game experience (and ‘intensity’ is pretty much Call of Duty’s calling card). It encourages the player to experiment. It tells them that it’s okay to make mistakes; that they can rush into the fight rather than hovering on its sidelines (though I seem to remember that the first game was pretty generous in giving you your first bullet hit for ‘free’). You can make them feel like they’re coming under heavy fire, without worrying that deliberately shooting the player will violate that ‘rule’ about how every time the player fails it should be evident to them that it was their fault. For a beginner gamer, it gets around the problem of explaining just what the hell ‘health’ is, what ‘health packs’ are (hardly an intuitive concept, when you think about it).

For everyone, it’s much easier to ignore (which is a bad thing) a small health bar in the bottom corner of the screen than the intensity of the you’re going to die effects. I really like the pronounced sense of mortality that those effects lent proceedings, in spite of the immortality of the whole, and it’d be interesting to see this aspect picked up and developed further.

But on the flip side, it has a significant disadvantage when compared to Halo’s system (or any other traditional health system for that matter). There’s no permanence to CoD 2’s system. It has the memory of a goldfish. There is no consequence to getting shot, outside of the Now. I can take a bunch of bullets and then a few seconds later, I’m ready to go again. That sucks a whole lot out of the game. For instance, there’s no tension of “I’m in really bad shape, I hope I find a health pack soon”. (Of course, it’s debatable whether that tension exists any more in the world of quicksave/load, but I recall Aliens versus Predator as doing a great job of making every scratch count in the fight to survive.)

Indeed, if you aren’t playing on the right difficulty level for your sharpshooting skills, there’s essentially no tension at all. One certainty in all this is that if you’re playing on the wrong difficulty level, the facade of intensity falls away fast. The first time I played through the demo, I got it wrong and was quickly amusing myself with 50 Cent-esque bullet absorbing antics rather than playing the game ‘properly’. Perhaps a dynamic difficulty level that tailors itself to a player’s skill level is a must-have feature to accompany this health system?

On balance … well, I don’t want to form an opinion. Let’s see how things play out. My instinct is that it will fit well with the game’s focus on The Moment and the game being the series of those moments. Infinity Ward get my respect for trying a new take on a problem that seems to be vexing a number of developers today. For example, you can see that Valve was struggling with the same kind of thing in Half-Life 2, but their solution was to leave health packs around the corner of every major encounter.

At its core is something I touched on in an earlier post and something that I see just about every developer asking themselves. What is fun? Is fun winning? Kicking ninja ass, however excruciatingly difficult that may be? Or is winning something that gets in the way of having fun? Should games offer up any challenges anymore? Is it even right to call games “games” (which are intuitively about winning or losing) anymore, or is “interactive entertainment” a better description? Is the sole purpose of interactivity to provide an even stronger feeling of “being there” than cinema can provide?

So many questions, so few answers. Maybe I’ll write some up in the future. A cynical, lazy take on the issue is to split it down a “hardcore gamer vs mainstream/casual gamer” faultline and start talking about how the former have been brought up on a diet of winning and losing, and somewhere an executive counting beans in his tall tower wants to push winning and losing out of the picture to sell to as many people as possible, but that hogwash can stay far away from here. The way I see it, if winning/losing as a source of fun heads off towards the horizon (for some games, that is), then that suggests that we have found more sophisticated sources of fun and that’s a positive sign for the maturity of the medium.