Prez wrote on Nov 7, 2012, 17:16:

Simply put, regenerating health undermines the significance of getting hit. You can essentially get hit an infinite number of times.You just have to make sure you have sufficient breaksbetween hits.

I'm still failing to see how that in practice is any different from health packs. You use the same strategy in Doom - take hits, health drains, run and hide. The only difference is that in Doom, you had to tiptoe around until you found a health pack or backtrack to one you found previously but didn't need at the time. The end result was the same, regenning health just gets it done faster. With health packs you can get into a situation where you have too little health to realistically finish the level and have used all of the health packs available meaning you entered what is essentially a fail state and you have to reload a previous save. Again, to my mind regenning health just speeds up the process.

I don't really care which one is used as long as the gameplay is designed well for the health mechanic the developers chose to use. There are different level design considerations with each one.

Quicksaves do far more to destroy tension than a properly implemented checkpoint system and they have been a mainstay of PC gaming for over two decades.