Before I begin, has anyone tried to unlock that very funny card board scene of a soldier shooting at your card board box?
I'm aware it's not quite the same thing but I was using it to illustrate my point that I simply can't get behind any game design element which hides vital information from the player without a good reason. I don't think any of the reasons brought up in the thread are good enough to justify filter+decal over a health bar, regeneration or no. If I can't convince anybody else to share this belief, that's fine.
Ignoring my opinions on the filter*, its' existence is seemingly very deliberate in <a> being a bad thing so don't go getting hurt and expecting no consequences before you hit 0, <b> Immersion, <c> A good substitute for a Health Bar or equivalent and <d> the Pseudo realism Kojima aimed for this MG game.
These are probably the goals of having the filter on in the first place, as well as the level of opacity, and would lose it's luster if you don't appreciate any of the above 4 reasons.
Not a disagreement exactly but a summary as to why it's there IMO.
*Fuck the Bone pressing on your brain excuse for a visual handicap.
Not helped by the aforementioned RNG-based 'serious injury' system
..............
I didn't know that this is a thing.
You're right, the old-school Ration system wouldn't be the best fit for V either. I say it's still better than the CoD system but that's beside the point.
I believe an iteration on the Snake Eater system would have been best, honestly. Naked Snake had regenerating health that only refilled up to his stamina level, which he had to replenish by hunting and eating animals. MGS3 was quasi-open-world and highly incentivized First Blood-ing your way through the jungle and planning your next move, hunting enough supplies to keep yourself fed as you did so. MGSV has a very large open world in which basically nothing happens, and animals exist solely to be Fultoned for an egregiously minor GMP and Heroism bonus. MGS3 had standard healing also, but of course Life Medicine was hideously rare.
So an iteration would balance that out a bit. Set Venom Snake's regeneration quicker than MGS3's but slower than MGSV's. Finding a place to rest and hide after a pitched skirmish both allows the enemy to lose sight of you and lets you get your head back in the game. And since maximum regeneration is determined by stamina level, it means that excessively prolonged firefights will slowly grind down your resources unless you do something drastic to even the odds - these's some kind of system already in place where every Serious Injury you take reduces your maximum health but taking a Serious Injury instead of flat-out dying is RNG anyway and it would basically never come up in casual play ever. This rewards the stealthier, 'take your time and explore' side of things, and really wouldn't be a problem until about midgame because soldiers take forever to scale up in difficulty. (They then get to 'fuck yourself' levels but that's beside the point.) It'd make bringing those damn Capture Cages along useful for something other than achievement hunting too. Hell you could bullshit up some Bionic Arm upgrade to make eating the shit outta some animals give a little bit of health back as well as stamina.
So for the people who want to go in guns blazing, you let them bring Life Medicine or Rations or Nanomachine Heroin or whatever the fuck. If they're equipped in your item window they're auto-used when you 'die' and you're back in the fight. You have a limited supply, so if you run out and everybody isn't dead yet then you have to call in more of course, but I still think that's superior to CoD regen. The flow of battle becomes Fight, Fight, Fight, Fight, Stop instead of Fight, Stop, Fight, Stop, Fight. If you use the Life Medicine/Nanomachine Heroin justification you can even limit the player's supply so as not to let them facetank literally everything as Miller goes "Boss I'm sorry but I need this GMP to make burgers for Code Talker".
I like this a lot in all honesty.
The problem would be that I think that... well.... it's a problem of supply drops breaking a lot of stuff. Like D horse, there's no point in using Capture Cages since you can air drop anything you'll want, rendering food a trivial and annoying process to go through, if you go through it at all since you can just get on a chopter and reset everything.
As to the flow of battle, I don't actually feel that a ration/nanomachine thing would improve the gameplay. At my admittedly low skill level, all a ration would do is allow me to face tank stuff and it feels cheasy to do so. As is Simply moving around a container to get better line of sight refills my health and I have enough decoys, C4,magazines, Quiet, D Dog, Smoke Grenades that I'm never hemmed in for so long that I can't regen health as I moved to a better firing spot.
<<<Though that's an interesting point to consider is that quite a number of people don't use their items or tools as often as we should be. Prior to that revelation, a ration or extended health/health regen item would be useful. But now since we paid for our tools using them willy nilly seems to make combat and health regen a bit too easy.>>>
That said I do like the principle of an item that allows for a FIght-Fight-Fight-Fight style of battle. Personally I think that if that's the case, we should have had 4 Suits along with the reduced Health Regeneration across the board.
2 for battle, 2 for stealth.
Relevant for this topic, one suit (Battle Dress) is a damage mitigator of some description. Maybe enemies will have artificially worse aim, maybe it's just straight up damage reduction, But in essence it allows you to Tank a crazy amount of burst damage With that kind of function You can do more with less time sitting out of a battle while your health regen (if you didn't end the battle before health becomes a proble).
The second suit (Battle Suit) is one that boost the Health Regeneration to crazy high levels. Taking up half your items and tools slot, and requiring capsules similar to teh parasite suit, this is the one that so long as you can stop being fired upon for even a couple of seconds (such as say hiding while reloading), you'll get back to full health. It won't help if you get shotgunned and sniped at the same time, but it does mean that you can have a runnign fight for as long as the capsule has enough charges and duration left. Even Better, it's easy to justify that these capsules are too complicated to be replaced in the field, so there's no point in refilling them through supply drops. Incentivising a higher paced fight.
Granted this would require that the enemies be more effective in general if you go full combat mode in order to keep the risk high enough to matter, along with possibly fielding Grenade lauchers and rocketeers for the AOE so you can't just avoid damage like crazy, but I think it would be fun at the least.
