You sound as if you never play these games. Although that's probably true with you.
Please don't try to talk trash. It makes you look silly when your insults have no basis in reality.
Any one playing lots of CoD4 on high difficulty levels is used to the screen being red the whole time.
I beat CoD4 on Veteran. The reason why you're constantly on the brink of death is because the enemies respawn endlessly and throw grenades every second with pinpoint accuracy. That isn't well-crafted challenge, that's just cheap.
Anyone playing lots of Halo online is used to the constant beeping of death being imminent and frantically trying to find a calm place to stop it, usually ending up dead long before it comes.
How is this different from any other multiplayer shooter? If anything, it's easier because you can always regenerate your health by avoiding combat for a few seconds. In Quake, if you get hit, you won't heal up until you find a health kit. In OFP, if you get kit, you're basically dead.
It's very simple, really. Take a shooter with finite health and replace that with regenerating health. In which cases would that lead to a more intense and challenging experience? It definitely didn't with CoD2&4, Wolfenstein, R6: Vegas, CoJ: BiB, Far Cry 2, Crysis or any other shooter whose predecessors used a finite health system.
I definitely understand what you're driving at but unless you're playing a simulation such as ARMA, OpFlashpoint etc it just doesn't matter as long as the developer has polished the game enough to make one feel that death is a constant and real threat.
The only way to make death a constant threat with regenerating health is to make the game terribly unbalanced against you. Enemies that can kill you in one or two hits, respawning enemies, enemies with 100% accuracy, etc. They have to add these things in order to offset the inherent cheapness of regenerating health. I'd much rather a game have finite health and use less contrived ways of making the game challenging.
This comment was edited on Oct 18, 2009, 23:50.