DevBlog - Damage And Healing in LitR v6

In FPS games, free health regen is a fairly standard thing, it makes up for the fact that with hitscan weapons there's no dodging incoming projectiles, and it evens out the difficulty curve- you don't get weird spikes because the player randomly has low health. Fallout 4 implements this through food. Because food is everywhere and effectively limitless, you're unlikely to ever be at less than full health for a given encounter.

Obviously in LitR the primary healing mod is Stimpacked. Which gets around unlimited health regen from food by introducing thresholds. You get more health upfront, but if you loose a segment you can't regen is without using a stimpak or seeing a doctor. This is a fairly common system in FPS games that want to emphasize resource management a bit more. Free regen, but only up to a threshold. Fallout 4 also introduces Rads, which mean that in-game, you're often ignoring that top segment, and spending most of your time in the bottom 2. Which, believe it or not, is by design. This is system is designed to work alongside an alternate death mod, in the current release it's Skk Player Undeath, which penalizes the player 25% of their total caps on death (by default in LitR, although this is configurable) and respawns them at a nearby settlement instead of just reloading your last save. This gives the player a choice- do you choose to heal up to full and have the extra safety buffer, or do you save the caps but have a higher risk of dying and loosing them anyway?

Damage levels are set by default at 1.3:1, which is pretty close to "normal" mode. This, along with the extra health from Stimpacked, is designed to shift combat more into a strategic, long term resource management challenge, rather than a short term tactical one the way vanilla survival is. In terms of resource management, more player health and less incoming damage actually leads to more difficulty in the long term, because it gives you time to consume resources to heal or run away, instead of just reloading your last save.

If you're interested in this topic, I'd suggest having a watch of this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AEKbBF3URE

It covers this in a bit more general detail from a game design perspective, and informed a lot of my thinking on the topic.