What's the point of Health Potions and Armor bonuses in Doom II?

[Havok]

They only increase your health and armor by 1 and they're usually found as a single item or as a small group of items so when they're collected they don't have much of an effect compared to getting a Stimpack, Medikit or Mega Armour. The only point of them seems to be so you can get 100% completion of the level for collecting all the items.

[ChaoticReverie]

Doom was originally going to be a score-based game. I believe they were intended to increase your score similar to gold in Wolfenstein. Soul Spheres were going to be extra lives.

 

Why they kept them in the game after the fact, I don't know. Some mods increase their effectiveness at least.

[Fernito]

They give you the feeling that you're picking up goodies, and that's always a good feeling :)

[baja blast rd.]

Quote

What's the point of Health Potions and Armor bonuses in Doom II?

one

 

 

They might not look like much but they can add up if the map uses them often (example Arrival). Especially when it comes to armor bonuses sustaining a blue armor. Also they play some sort-of-gameplay roles that aren't related to balance, like subtly signaling 'you can get up to this area' (useful for some types of secrets) or reinforcing exploration by giving you light rewards for looking around corners or nudging you to move in one direction or helping you keep track of where you've been. They can be used as McGuffins.

 

That said, they do tend to have very low impact but that is not a bad thing imo. Not everything in the game has to have a balance purpose. It's just really fun to pick stuff up. Was thinking recently how I would not have minded if the game had more 'flavor' pickups that don't do anything major, to add more variety in that sense and even tie into theme/aesthetics. (Amusing thought is that light-amp goggles would be way more commonly used if they had no effect at all.)

 

- Picked up an SSG butt
- Picked up a copy of Maximum Doom
- Picked up a chainsaw

 

Maybe someone else could invent those...

[Maribo]

4 minutes ago, baja blast rd. said:

[snip]

Don't forget that you can stack 50 of them on top of each other, for the all-important 20 second long yellow tinted screen flashbang.

[Nefelibeta]

I actually wish there is a way to modify items to make them have no effect at all so I can use them as some sort of mapping gimmicks... Like currency or collectables that act like keys when you have enough of them. wwEU's method costs you a blue key. :/

[Deadwing]

They are really important to tell players that they haven't gone into a particular important place >.<

 

I find them really useful to help the player to navigate into the map easier

[Individualised]

To expand on an earlier reply, they were originally the "artefacts" as seen in the Doom Bible, of which there were 4 types. They were removed very late in development, and 2 of the artefact things were replaced with the health and armour bonuses. You can see that in the November 1993 prototype (in the "A visit to id Software" video), they were already in the middle of transitioning; they still have the artefact sprites and pickup messages but act as health/armour bonuses, and the lives system was already removed but Doomguy's face is still offset to fit a non-existant lives counter.

 

The "items" counter in the intermission screen is also a leftover from the artefacts, they were supposed to count the artefacts only but when they were removed, instead of removing the items counter too they just made it so that it counts certain items that can be picked up regardless of the player's state.

[Xyzzу]

1 hour ago, baja blast rd. said:

Maybe someone else could invent those...

Spoiler

 

Really, it's hurting my soul that this isn't out faster both because of my procrastination and real life.

[Scypek2]

1 hour ago, baja blast rd. said:

Was thinking recently how I would not have minded if the game had more 'flavor' pickups that don't do anything major, to add more variety in that sense and even tie into theme/aesthetics.

 

One thing I've considered implementing with dehacked but never found a good opportunity is several visual variations of items with the same effect - basically the opposite of Batman Doom's slot machines. Could also combine it with stacking to create a +1 health soda, +2 health donuts and a +5 health burger.

[Havok]

2 hours ago, Nefelibeta said:

I actually wish there is a way to modify items to make them have no effect at all so I can use them as some sort of mapping gimmicks... Like currency or collectables that act like keys when you have enough of them. wwEU's method costs you a blue key. :/

 

What do you mean by "wwEU"?

 

Does anybody know what items count as items with regards to 100% items collected on the end of level stats? I know there's the health potion and armor bonus but what other items?

[Nefelibeta]

1 hour ago, Xyzzy01 said:

stuff

quick please tell me that's STELLA1.wad

 

1 minute ago, Havok said:

 

What do you mean by "wwEU"?

Wormwood: Expanded Universe  A boom mapset made by Ribbiks and GrainOfSalt.

[Xyzzу]

3 minutes ago, Nefelibeta said:

quick please tell me that's STELLA1.wad

Spoiler

It's STELLA3.WAD, currently.

 

[Havok]

2 hours ago, baja blast rd. said:

Also they play some sort-of-gameplay roles that aren't related to balance, like subtly signaling 'you can get up to this area' (useful for some types of secrets) or reinforcing exploration by giving you light rewards for looking around corners or nudging you to move in one direction or helping you keep track of where you've been. They can be used as McGuffins.

I assume a McGuffin is what you said earlier in that paragraph?

[baja blast rd.]

No for example Sunlust 05 has you pick up armor bonuses as pseudo-keys which contribute to mandatory progression. There are maps that use bonuses to trigger fights. 

[RonnieJamesDiner]

33 minutes ago, Havok said:

Does anybody know what items count as items with regards to 100% items collected on the end of level stats? I know there's the health potion and armor bonus but what other items?

 

Health/armor bonus, soulsphere, megasphere, berserk, invulnerability, blur sphere, computer map, and light amps.

[wallabra]

3 hours ago, baja blast rd. said:

They might not look like much but they can add up if the map uses them often (example Arrival).

 

Someone's been frequenting decino's channel lately :v

 

3 hours ago, Maribo said:

Don't forget that you can stack 50 of them on top of each other, for the all-important 20 second long yellow tinted screen flashbang.

 

Someone should deliberately use the yellow tint as an effect or handicap in a map! Like when trudging through a "toxic maze" (in which you can't stay for longer than 20 seconds anyway).

[Kinsie]

They're breadcrumbs to lead/lure you places.

[Gifty]

5 minutes ago, Kinsie said:

They're breadcrumbs to lead/lure you places.

 

This is what I use them for as a mapper. They're visually pleasing candy to get players to go where you want them to

[DNSKILL5]

They’re better than no health or armor points at all. Plus, if enough of them are around it would be tactically smarter to collect them instead of the other health and armor items and save the other items for when you truly need them. 

[Dweller Dark]

I believe that the health and armor pickups have slightly more usefulness at lower health, where even just a little bit helps. Not as useful as stimpacks, medkits, and powerups, though.

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

Not sure about the health vials but helmets? People love fancy hats! Look at TF2 among other things.

[kexen]

Strange that nobody's mentioned these items can break the 100 standard health/armor limit. Grabbing a lot of them when you're at 100/100 is incredibly useful.

 

Could the games use a "bigger" version of these items (say, a medkit that can break 100), though? Certainly. The Adventures of Square has such items, it's nice.

[Individualised]

The Jaguar port and most (all?) of its derivatives, including Doom 64, increase the health and armor bonuses from +1% to +2%, even when not playing on skill level 1. But seeing as they also removed a lot of them from the maps, it was probably done as a trade-off for performance reasons.

[Lucius Wooding]

I'll add myself to the list of people who like to drop them in stacks of 5 and 25 in my maps. It's too bloody annoying to space large amounts of them evenly without asymmetry and in an aesthetically pleasing manner. I also generally don't use medikits, preferring to place stimpacks in a spread out manner to facilitate the player making best use of their resources. 5 stims is strictly better than 2 medikits since you have a better ability to heal close to full (IE enough to survive a max revenant missile or archie zap) without wasting any. For a player with full health, the bonuses are always a nice find and unlikely to be saved once they've been found. 

 

I like using them in secrets or non secret hidden areas to provide a nice reward instead of a berserk or soulsphere. It encourages exploration (even if the player isn't an item% memer) without giving out megaspheres like candy and spoiling the danger element of the map. It also means making a run through a dangerous area to gear up isn't accomplished by grabbing one megasphere; you need to skillfully clear the items that are a bit more spread out in the midst of the crossfire. I also liked to use them, not for breadcrumbs, but to point out some useful safe spaces with useful cover or accessible ledges.

 

I also used them to accomplish a design goal in one of my maps.

Spoiler

I had a large main area with a fair amount of hurtfloors as well as heavy hitting enemies such as revenants, archviles, and a cyberdemon. In other words, you take more than one or two hits and you're toast. However there was plenty of recovery around in the form of stimpacks as long as you were willing to traverse the area for them. The caveat was that the mega health and armor tended to be a lot harder to hold on to as a result; the hurtfloors would chip away your health and any bad hit would likely put you in danger of being one shotted afterwards. So you need freedom of movement to easily avoid the cyber and revenant rockets, but the hurtfloors would generally punish you unless you stayed near the outer walls (where cyber splash damage was always a threat). The archies were there to deny large areas until you take them out, but obviously you're being chased by scary projectiles all the time. So the health and armor bonuses rewarded the player by giving them the ability to keep their megaarmor and get a decent stack of health after topping off with stimpacks. They could take some necessary damage from dodging or sniping the archies but shrug it off easily. If the player avoided damage and made good use of the bonuses, they could keep a health stack through most of the map that could survive a couple hits. Otherwise, they'd usually have minimal (and mostly green) armor and 100% health, making them very squishy in the context of the enemies they were up against. It rewarded thrifty use of resources much more than plopping down megaspheres between certain points, since there were many fights that gave the player the chance to backtrack before triggering them.

 

This was done with 300+ enemies total but only a couple soulspheres, 1 megaarmor, and 1 megasphere. However there must have been at least 500 health and armor bonuses combined, and it wouldn't have been nearly as interesting or challenging to use single powerups in their place. Forcing the player to frantically traverse the dangerous areas (or clear them first) to get everything and spreading the goodies out makes for more of a risk reward scenario. Plus there were a number of big fights where the player could replenish a fair bit of health by backtracking or exploring where they might be reluctant to take something like a soulsphere. It couldn't be done the same without health and armor bonuses.

 

[Maximum Matt]

11 hours ago, baja blast rd. said:

Picked up a copy of Maximum Doom

Say what?

[LadyMistDragon]

Lots of them can add up. They also have a way of encouraging exploration if they are placed in certain locations on top of crates or platforms and things like that. I think the latter was their purpose in the original games, although again, it was probably part of increasing your score originally like Chaotic Reverie said.

[Helm]

I would make the case that especially the health potion is a very important item in doom. Aside from everything mentioned about signposting progress or a secret or 'you can, and should get here... if you like' playfulness let's not forget the obvious: the health potion looks like a blue flask. It feels nice to place on a table or whatever for doomguy to drink. You often see rooms in doom wads where the potions are placed in the space to connote food, consumables, coffee, so on. Many, many sector water coolers with these around them. They are used to theme and explain spaces. It's an many-purpose stand-in for what would otherwise be spelled out diegetic elements that over the decades have become very granular and realistic in more modern games.

Although it only takes a few more thing and texture variants to go from a health potion in a corner of a square startan room to a fully propped convenience store a la duke3d, doom is cool because a blue potion sums up a whole host of concepts and protozoic fps/immersive ideas in a single semi-useless item. Mappers, over 30 years have picked up on the fascinating uselessness of it and recognise the player has that pacman limbic thing: if something can be gobbled up, it must be gobbled up.

As to why it gives 1 health and not 5? They are meant to be placed in clusters and lines, to encourage movement vectors, like in an arcade game, like the many Romero made before ID. It is more satisfying to eat 10 health potions in a row than to swallow one stimpack. Think in any doom map if there's redundant keys lying around, like 5 of them in a pile. Do you gobble all of them up, or discreetly pick up one of them?

[baja blast rd.]

I always loved this in Echelon. 

 

 

It is uncommon but bonuses can be a monster pickup while still scaling well to larger groups of enemies.

 

1 hour ago, Helm said:

Think in any doom map if there's redundant keys lying around, like 5 of them in a pile. Do you gobble all of them up, or discreetly pick up one of them?

 

Spoiler

 

I have a soft spot for that.

 

 

 

[Dreamskull]

They suck so you need a lot of them to get benefit. Its more annoying than anything, but they can stack above health/armor limit.

 

In that sense you can control exact pathways the player travels by trailing them along a path you want traveled; ya know, indication.