Regenerating health in shooter games go hand-in-hand with with taking cover. Having to take multiple pauses in every long fight due to getting hit a few times (you can't take many before dying) makes you want to take cover. Now, there isn't anything inherently wrong with abusing terrain to avoid taking damage from enemies. People do it all the time in all shooters.
Doing it to regenerate your health in the middle of a fight for a number of seconds just slows down the pace of the game, wastes your time and promotes passive play. I don't want you to think that I'm arguing that all games with regenerating health are bad though. I'm not. I am, however, arguing that in nearly every game that features regenerating health, the system dumbs down the game, and hinders the gameplay.
It's not all bad though. Pausing for several seconds every now and then lengthens the game time, but then again, do we really want a game that takes more time to complete due to having dead time, or would we rather be playing a shorter game with no such wasted moments? And with recent trends, is that even the case? I need you to know that I don't have an agenda against the Call of Duty games, but they are one of the largest FPS-series right now, and because of that I will be using them in multiple examples throughout this article.
The latest Call of Duty game, Black Ops features the regenerating health, just like almost every other modern FPS game. Despite it having loads of dull moments and time wasted by just sitting down, most can easily complete the entire single-player campaign on the first run in just four to six hours. I don't think this is solely due to the dumbed-down nature of the regenerating health-FPS, rather than a general decline in the FPS-industry, but it is a note I wanted to bring up.
The passive play that I've mentioned also comes naturally with the infinitely regenerating health-low max HP. If you know that there are enemies around, you won't move far away from cover unless you want to die. It just won't happen in a normal run through of the average shooter featuring regenerating health. Unless there is only one or two enemies left a live, rule of thumb says you will get shot down.
There we have boring, time-wasting and passive gameplay in the soup. Another thing the regenerating health adds is a complete lack of skill-requirement. I'd like to add that all games consisting of PvE (the single-player component) generally can't be compared to PvP (the multiplayer components) skill wise, as the AI can only be so complex, and the game generally favors that you should win, else people wouldn't play it. I won't go into that now however, it isn't the point of this article.
I believe that with sufficient patience, a player with no experience at all will be able to beat a game like Call of Duty without much problem, as long as they get a few pointers from the start. To test this out, I actually managed to convince a friend with practically no gaming experience to try beat the Call of Duty: Black Ops single-player. This was the very first shooter this player had ever touched, and besides short encounters with old platformers, the first game as well.
After having my "test subject" getting used to how to actually control the game (PC version), I explained the basics of the gameplay and showed a few minutes of gameplay of the first level in the game. I made sure to let my test subject really understand the importance of taking cover as soon as the screen flashed moderately red, and to also move forward really carefully, and to never stray too far away from cover unless necessary.
This test wasn't completed in one setting, and it took quite a bit longer than my first five and a half hour playthrough of Black Ops, but despite me having so many years of FPS-experience, my test subject completed the game with fewer deaths than my first run, just because I played much less carefully and didn't care about cover as much. Although this isn't a scientific study by any means, it proves that the skill requirement really is taken away in these kind of shooters. I highly doubt anyone with no experience would be able to beat Doom, Quake or even Halo (no real emphasis on cover), despite its regenerating shield, just like that.
Like with most things, there are positives here too. The general easiness of these games is one of the reasons I believe the FPS and 3PS genres have boomed so much in these last years. The appearance of casual FPSes in abundance has really helped the market grow, and never before have we seen FPS games being sold in such high numbers, getting so much attention. Anyone with an urge for action can pick up Call of Duty and have a go with it without any trouble. You don't need to be a hardcore gamer to play these games nowadays. It's great for the entire gaming industry, but it might be a bit detrimental to the genre itself, with mass production of cloned games being released all the time.
I have brought up many negatives with the regenerating health-shooter, and the specifically cover-based shooter is just like everything I have written above, but even worse and more extreme (in general as always). The core flaw with these games is that the gameplay is just not fun. I don't care what you say, but the way you play these games really are no fun. Hear me out before you dismiss this.
Passive gameplay is no fun. You don't want to just sit around when you play games. This is one of the reasons you never have long passages of just walking from A to B in games. At least not in well-received games. The same goes for short passages of waiting around, when there are so much more of them, taking place every other minute or so.
Camping isn't fun. People hate campers in multiplayer games, and being the one camping is seldom as fun as running around and killing people all over the place could be. These games have camping as pretty much a core mechanic in their single-player, although not as extreme as it can be in multiplayer environments.
The gameplay isn't as rewarding. In shooters where you have finite health and the only way to regenerate it is with pickups, ever bullet you take feels much more, compared to games where you just have a timeout from the action for a few second and you're ready to go again. I'm not saying that you start crying for every HP you lose, but there is no such thing as the tension of being low on life, not knowing how many enemies you will face and where the next medkit is in today's games.
Every death in Call of Duty can happen in the blink of an eye if you're not careful, but the consequences are hardly felt at all. With an abundance of checkpoints after nearly every skirmish, death is nothing but a minor annoyance that sets you back not more than a few minutes. You will likely die if you don't play carefully, but there is no punishment to dying, so there is no real incentive to play carefully.
When you take damage in a game like Half-Life, you regret it, you wish you didn't take that damage. It might cripple you in the future, you can be unsure if you can survive the coming encounter with your remaining health, and you have no idea when you will get the chance to refill it. When you die, you die. Without autosaves around every corner, you will at least have to make the effort to quicksave if you think you might face something extraordinary dangerous.
You might be thinking "What the hell, if all these games suck so much, why do they sell so much? Your point is obviously invalid!" - No. I am not trying to say that these games are all bad. What I'm saying that their core gameplay (although not as core as shooting enemies with guns) is bad by default. That doesn't keep me from enjoying games like Black Ops, and Killzone 2, as a couple of examples. What makes these games fun to play though, has nothing to do with their core gameplay.
What makes these games fun to play is that the basic objective of them, that is shooting people, feels good. With the default bad gameplay these games contain, to make a game really good, the other parts have to be extraordinarily good. Killzone 2 would be nothing if the graphics weren't stunning and the feel of the combat was bland. Black Ops would blow if the environments weren't interesting and nice to look at, the act of shooting enemies felt awesome.
A game with bland set pieces and bad core gameplay makes a really boring or bad game. A game with really good set pieces and bad core gameplay makes a good game. Sometimes the set pieces are extremely, extraordinarily good, and manage to compensate enough for the bad core gameplay to be really quite great. The other parts of a game can in some cases be so good we forget about how boring and unchallenging the gameplay really is.
Killzone 2 is such a game that comes mind that wasn't released all that long ago. With universal acclaim from critics, the game made us forget about the boring core gameplay by looking so damn good, having among the greatest designed enemies in a game ever, ridiculously polished mechanics, guns that felt completely perfect, and an unbelievable response from enemies when we shot them. Few games can really come close to Killzone 2 when it comes to how actually shooting an enemy feels. Despite the fact that you most of the time sat behind a piece of conveniently placed chest-high cover.
I believe I have written more than enough examples, and that you by now should get my point and are able to find what sets the good modern shooters apart from the bad ones. The bad core gameplay is not impossible to overcome, but the amount of good you have to achieve in all other parts of the game to pass a certain standard is quite ridiculous. And the modern gamer has been spoon-fed with these games for so long now that playing a shooter without heavy emphasis on cover almost feels strange. We have become allergic for shooters without the "tactical" tag in them. And this I find sad.
I like overusing the phrase "bad core gameplay".
I feel that I should also point out that there isn't anything inherently wrong with tactical shooters -- I have had lots of enjoyment with games like Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon, what I do wonder though, is since the older games worked perfectly fine without regenerating health - why do the newer ones need it?
Edit: I'm not sure anyone will notice, but I accidentally wrote that my first run of CoD:BO only took four and a half hours - I was thinking of Halo 3. CoD:BO was five and a half hours.
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