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last updated 2023-09-06
Many games offer the player a healing ability. I even have a bias toward this type of ability - if a game offers me a choice between having more health or being able to heal, I tend to choose healing, even if my balance intuition tells me it's weaker. But the mechanic is often implemented in ways very destructive to player enjoyment. To illustrate, I'll talk about the 2005 Revenge of the Sith Xbox game.
In this game, you can use the Force to do special moves or heal, and it regenerates slowly, in or out of combat. So if you're really playing to win, you'll stop between each fight and wait for your entire force bar to regenerate as many times as it takes to get you back to full health before proceeding. But that takes so long that if you're not really playing to win, you'll often get impatient and go into the next fight with less than full health. See the problem? The game forces you to choose between playing without interruptions and playing at your best.
Another facet to the problem is that it messes with the level-section model of progress saving that the game uses. Since most levels give you an opportunity to heal between each fight, if you're patient then each encounter becomes a self-contained challenge... except you don't save after each one. The game is balanced according to the progress-saving model it uses, so it's very hard to die on most missions, as long as you don't get impatient. The only parts that actually gave me trouble even on hard were the boss fights and the rare level with no safe spots (like the Utapau battle). Those were the parts of the game that worked. Sadly, they were a minority of playtime.
How to save the player's progress correctly
Well, the boss fights *mostly* worked. They avoided the above problems, but they sometimes had another: most of them are other Jedi, who can also heal, so if both the player and the AI are bad at punishing healing, they can both get away with it often, leading to very drawn-out duels.
Now I'll talk about another example from a different kind of game: Hellcard.
This is a roguelike deckbuilder where you fight through 12 floors of monsters with limited opportunities to heal between floors. But there are some cards that let you heal during battle. If you have any of those cards in your deck, you'll want to kill just enough of the enemies so that you can block all damage from the remaining ones indefinitely, then stay in the fight as long as it takes for you to draw your 1 healing card as many times as it takes to get you to full health. This can be very tedious.
For an example of a game with healing that avoids all these problems, see Star Wars: The Force Unleashed.
In this game, healing isn't an ability you have; you heal by killing enemies. This means it's never the optimal strategy to hide in a corner and heal for a while. When you're low on health, the only thing to do is get out there and fight. It's also very in-flavor since you play as a Sith in this game.