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Aah, the Health Bar. How do we love thee?

Started by JasRonq Mar 10, 2008 at 7:47 AM 48 replies 9.8k views

Original Post

Mar 10, 2008 at 7:47 AM

A warning, this may get long winded, but there is a point in here. *** Aah, the Health Bar. How do we love thee? Not much really, at least me, the rest of the game world has relied on their love of the Health bar and its siblings the Mana bar and the Fatigue bar where appropriate since I was born at least. The mana bar has in some cases seen replacement with other resource systems for balancing magic use but I have never seen such with the health bar. If you can die and its not in one hit special case traps, there is a health bar telling you just how close you are to death. First a few of the wondrous benefits of such a simple mechanic. Its simple, thats the biggest, and easiest to see. You know when you hit 0 you are dead. Its easy to measure, its easy to understand, and its easy to manipulate. Damage is just a number subtracted from your total and when its gone, you are gone. We can do better. There are problems with a healthbar. First, we can do better than showing our health as a simple number in combo with some special modifiers such as paralyzed, afraid, bleeding to death, confused, asleep, drunk, or stupid. Also, since when can a person fight their best when they are nearly dead? 1/1000 health but I can still smack you down in my least breath with just as much force as when I ran in the room? I don't buy it. We can do better than a simple bar reflecting your health. Our ability to do actions within any game that keeps track of our health and allows death should be affected by the status of our health. We need more than just those modifiers that get tacked on because 98/100 health is just too simple to reflect how incredibly drunk I am. There are significant balance issues involved here though that I recognize and more I probably haven't thought of, for instance: If we keep a health bar but say that your actions are as effective as your % of total health, then first blood in most fights will win. They had the ability to land a hit and were awarded advantage for the hit and will use the advantage to land another furthering the lead. Such an issue can be turned into an interesting balance mechanic in some games with some opposing forces to radically swing the balance when you are the underdog, but such gameplay will not work in every game and so there needs to be a different way to reflect that you are not at your best when you are hurt but not kill you for it. Aside from the above paragraph about a balance issue which could be a post of its own, my point here is this: the health bar is too simple to reflect something that should and could be far more complex, interesting and fun in a game.

Mar 10, 2008 at 8:58 AM

Hm. I think the complexity of the health system is a good measure of the complexity of the complete system.

Let me elaborate a bit:
I think you can split the parts of the game engine into two parts, basic parts and - words leave me here - implied parts.
A basic part is completely defined by the designer, whereas an implied part is defined by the designer and the basic parts.

Taking health as an example: Health is just a number. Health = 0 means death. This design decision dictates that damage is a simple number, too (granted, a simple number that might result from a complicated process). However, deciding that health is tracked by limbs implies that damage must be tracked by limbs as well.

Furthermore, one can conclude that the complexity of an implied part is at least as big as the complexity of the basic parts it is derived from.

Thus, I think it boils down to the question of the audience of a game.

I think the health system is one of those basic systems in pretty much every game.
Thus, a simple health system is acceptable if you want some simple game (for example, some platformer that just wants to say: misjump 3 times and you die.),
however, a more complicated health system implies that a lot more things grow more complicated (but: complicated might mean interesting. I always found the health system in Deus Ex fun. If that turret mowed your legs away, you dropped down and could move very slow only.)

JasRonq

Mar 10, 2008 at 9:04 AM

i liked that as well, hit 0 on the torso or head and you die, limbs though blow away and you are disabled in someway till you can repair your body. Still though, a few bullets to the knee does nothing till the whole leg tears away? Its a start, but not enough thought went into a more complex solution i think. Is there perhaps a way to break out of using a single number for health and its reduction to 0 equaling death of what it represents? Perhaps someway of tracking constant damage and its effects with someway to balance it to avoid the issue I spoke of in the first post?

shurcool

Mar 10, 2008 at 9:37 AM

The question is, are you trying to accurately simulate reality? Or to have a fun-to-play game? In reality, one bullet hit is probably enough to either kill you, or severely incapacitate you. In most (but not all) games, this would not be an acceptable gameplay dynamic. It wouldn't make for a fun game.

Is it a combination of the two, to have a game that's more realistic?

To be honest, I'd give this thread more credit if it were posted a few years ago. Because recently there were quite a few games out that did not have a health bar, but rather a system where if you took too much damage in too short a period of time, you would die. Otherwise your health would always recover.

To name a few, Call of Duty 4, Portal, Prince of Persia come to mind.

And it seems to be a growing trend.

P.S. The health-bar simplistic health system is something people have been complaining about every now and then for at least the last 10 years. I'm sure if you search, you'll find a similar post like this, saying it's too unrealistic that if I get shot in my legs, I can still run as fast, etc. for each previous year since 2000. No offense, but I don't see good advice or solution to this so-called problem offered here, other than starting a discussion about it.

GavRobbs

Mar 10, 2008 at 9:52 AM

In response with your issue to the health bar, I've have to say the same thing as the others, your complaint is sorta dated. You see, lots of games To name a few,

Quote:
Call of Duty 4, Portal, Prince of Persia come to mind.

not to mention Gears of War.

But sometimes, its better when its simpler. Think about it. Quake, Half Life, Halo, Doom. Do we really want to RPGize all these FPS games by the addition of different statuses? I mean, if you get hit with laughing gas of course you'll laugh, but whats the sense of a Gordon Freeman without a right leg because it got bitten off by a headcrab.

In long and in short, leave it for the RPGs.

Sorry if that sounded messed up, I just woke up.

Benjamin Heath

Mar 11, 2008 at 1:04 AM

Breaking a health bar apart into more than one dimension to tell me the same thing but try to be more realistic does not interest me. That, my friend, is not necessary.

Providing a health bar is providing me with a one-dimensional gauge that shows how dead or alive I am. This, I need to know.

More dimensions have been added: lives, energy tanks, jars with fairies in them, jars with red juice in them, continues, mana, fatigue, your weapon's charge, all your ammo, a berserk charge that fills up when you get hit and lets you unleash a special attack when it's full, and on and on and on.

Those other dimensions, however, are justified. Those are things that I need to know, and with one look, I can read how my character is doing. If I'm playing an action game or an adventure-RPG, then I do not want to look at how thirsty I am, how hungry I am, if I have to poop or not, if my elbow kinda hurts after I banged it on that door back at the castle before I left, if my eyes are a little itchy today, or if I'm just having an off day because I didn't get enough sleep last night.

I, personally, myself, don't like those things in a game. That, to me, seems like less of a fun and focused game design, and more like a long, rambling game experiment.

KISS.

Benjamin Heath

Mar 11, 2008 at 1:16 AM

That said, you don't even have to use a health bar. You could very well have a game that's fun and have only your character's physical appearance as an indicator of status. Most other dimensions that you're using could be tucked underneith.

Trapper Zoid

Mar 11, 2008 at 1:58 AM

The metrics you use to measure health fully depend on where on the line between abstract and realism your game lies on.

Your ideas sound like that lie heavily on the realistic simulation approach - and that's fine for some games. Personally, I'm much more into abstraction - if I were to design an action game, it's most likely use a system similar to the hearts in Zelda; it's a very simple metric that's easy to understand.

As you pointed out in your OP, the problem with going too realistic is you start entering issues of balancing realism with fun. It can be bad enough to have one-hit kills in realistic FPS games, but it's worse if you have crippling effects that don't kill you but put you in a position where you can no longer effectively play the game.

An example I read was in Blood 2's deathmatch mode. In development, Monolith implemented limb damage, including the ability to blow limbs clean off. However, they later removed it when they found it failed the "jerk test". One of their testers had sadistic tendencies in playtesting, and his usual strategy was to reenact the Black Knight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: he'd remove all his opponent's limbs, and then just leave them there. Not fun for the poor amputee.

Another example I remember was in Aces of the Pacific. Usually the game gave you autopilot mode to speed up the flights from your carrier to the target. But autopilot was disabled if your plane took a moderate amount of damage. What this meant in gameplay was that if your plane had moderate damage at the end of a mission but was still airborne it was still effectively game over, as there was no way I was going to reenact the four hours plus it would have taken to fly in realtime all the way back to my ship. Especially if there was a fair chance I wouldn't make it or wouldn't be able to land the thing with that much damage. In that case, the fact that it was a simulator was the only justification for including that sort of feature.

In designing games, you've got to choose the abstractions you make on your activity to emphasis the bits you want the most. If you want a gritty realistic sim then by all means complicate the health, but realise that you can't get an arcadey shooter style game that way.

JasRonq

Mar 11, 2008 at 7:19 AM

My frustration isnt really that its unrealistic, its that its simplistic and uninteresting. There is, to me at least, only one fun factor in a health bar, and thats the tension of being close to the bottom. There is room for so much more fun and interest in a health system. The player should have a reason to care if they take damage, more than just being a little closer to death. It should do *something* to not be at full health. Right now, you take damage and nothing happens. Nothing. You stand and fight and get a bit tense over how close you are getting, but nothing actually happens to the character, then boom, you are face down drowning in your own blood. This rubs me the wrong way on the realism side of things too, but I have no aim to sack fun in favor of realism, I just think that you can add a bit of both at the same time in this case.

In all honesty, I am a poor SOB and play only the games I trust to be great and that will last me a long time, I buy rarely and with care. And I dont often have the time to sink into playing a lot of games even when I have to money to buy more. The last 3 games I bought (or were given cus I asked for them) were WOW, Halo 3, and Oblivion. I only got a 360 a couple months ago. Anyway, my point here, sorry if the topic is dated, but not everyone has played all the recent games or is aware of all the new gameplay out there designers have come up with. Thats one reason I like this place, I can come in with a question and there are all sorts of people who know far more that I do across the gamut from old atari guys to professional designers (and I guess often both at the same time).

I've been thinking about the mention of a health system that is based on death if taking too much damage in a short time but otherwise recovering, I think that is an interesting system I might work from (highly unrealistic, but at least more active and interesting than the simple health bar). What are some other health systems used (or am I going to have to go look up all these titles you've all mentioned?)

PS. in D2 I loved my werewolf character who had far too little health to fight by any right, but wen I got his rage and fury attack 9whatever ti was called) where he leeched health and attacked super fast, it was exhilarating, my health shooting down with every hit and bouncing back up with mine. A single pause in my attacks meant death.

Nefarious Monkey

Mar 11, 2008 at 7:20 PM

Quote:
Original post by Trapper Zoid

An example I read was in Blood 2's deathmatch mode. In development, Monolith implemented limb damage, including the ability to blow limbs clean off. However, they later removed it when they found it failed the "jerk test". One of their testers had sadistic tendencies in playtesting, and his usual strategy was to reenact the Black Knight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: he'd remove all his opponent's limbs, and then just leave them there. Not fun for the poor amputee.

ROTFL!! That is sooo awesome. haha, I am so adding that feature to my next game.

JBourrie

Mar 11, 2008 at 7:53 PM

I think the more important question: is player "death" an interesting enough mechanic to warrant redesigning the health bar? Or should we just throw out the whole concept of "punishment through repetition" that player death invokes?

Iron Chef Carnage

Mar 11, 2008 at 11:40 PM

Game elements don't all have to be simulation. I don't want to have cars crash realistically in Halo, and I don't want realistic physics in Smash Brothers and I don't want wound modelling in my hack&slash game. I want a numerical value that I can counter with red potions to stay alive and active. A broken arm is all well and good in Oregon Trail (Why isn't there an MMO of that, anyway?) but I don't want my guy in COD4 to pull his hamstring and not be able to sidestep. I've got enough to worry about.

JasRonq

Mar 12, 2008 at 7:31 AM

Quote:
Original post by JBourrie
I think the more important question: is player "death" an interesting enough mechanic to warrant redesigning the health bar? Or should we just throw out the whole concept of "punishment through repetition" that player death invokes?

It also, along with help from the usual save when you want saving system invokes the save-before-hard-parts behavior creating more repetition. In Oblivion I save before pickpocketing and reload, the limit to what I cant take isn't my skill, its my patients reloading saves. In a similar way people save before hard fights. That is in large part the save system making that possible, but its also the difficulty and health system making in necessary.

What would be a better form of player punishment for failure to kill the badguys?
"20 demons just swarmed you and you fight hard but to no avail." - what is the alternative to death?

Also, I am liking the health system of death if there is too much damage in a short time, but I think there needs to a reward or punishment for finishing a group of baddies without taking much damage. In most games, thats more health for the next fight, if it recovers very quickly then it never matters if you just barely get through the fight or if you are really good. I don't want to extend the recovery time for my game at least because I think that the system could yield really fast passed intense gameplay (though forcing a breather after a fight with a health recovery time might be needed). What ways could be used to reward the player for killing enemies without taking a lot of damage?

Kest

Mar 12, 2008 at 10:49 AM

My project has a pretty complex damage system, but still displays character vitality via a simple health value. Each body part has a mortality assigned to it, then damage on that part is scaled by its mortality and subtracted from the character's total vitality. Here's a screenshot of the complicated mess that's usually hidden from the player. It will likely be possible to view this information in detail with a medkit display or character status screen, but the gameplay screen will only display a single vitality.

In response to the issue about characters being disabled without dying, there's an easy solution to it. Disabled characters should be treated as though they are dead. Or at least incapacitated. If a character loses all of his limbs, he's finished. Most of my AI characters are finished if they just lose one limb. Zombies are a bit more resilient, though.

Stangler

Mar 12, 2008 at 11:25 AM

I don't think the problem here is the health bar but the need to have more things happening besides the health bar. Having severe hits that automatically debuff are fine. They can work like a second hit that is less likely to hit, or a just a traditional proc.

Or something like Mass Effect where you have debuffs put on you when you are close to death.

If you start making every hit result in a physical impact then you may want to use a system like Halo where the player has shields and then health. The shields could also be called endurance or mana in a fantasy setting. The idea here is that the player can use their endurance to defend themselves but once that is low they will get physically hit by an attack which leads to health loss and physical harm(debuff).

There could also be a balance system or initiative system that opens up a player to being physically hit.

Nairb

Mar 12, 2008 at 12:28 PM

Other health systems of note:

Smash Brothers. You don't have a 'health', per se. You have a percentage, and the higher that gets, the more impact attacks have on you. Thus, if you're at a low percent, you are barely stunned by attacks, but at high percents, you're knocked clear off the board. Some characters (Lucario) become stronger as their percentage increases.

Eternal Darkness. As your sanity meter decreases, things start to get pretty creepy. Stay 'insane' long enough, and your character starts dying.

Lost Odyssey. Your immortals will regenerate after being dead for a few turns, making health not such a big deal. However, once your entire team goes down, it's over.

Final Fantasy 7. Not really a novel health system, but brought in a concept of gaining rewards as you lose health in the form of limit breaks. Devil May Cry 2 had something similar (a special Devil Trigger activated when your health got low).

Gears of War. Already mentioned, I believe - if you are not killed in a short span of time, your health regenerates. A few games have a similar 'shield' system, where the shield regenerates and must be depleted before you take damage.

I very much don't like the idea of losing capabilities as my health decreases, since that reduces the possibility of me, well, regaining the health or surviving with low health.

As for health being a simple success metric with no real impact on the gameplay, I'm fine with this. It works in a lot of games. I know that X enemy is going to do Y to my health if he hits me with that giant ax, and that's reason enough to move out of the way. I don't need to lose a leg to know that perhaps standing still was a mistake, and if that happens I'm now frustrated because, well, I might as well be dead. As for reflecting that you're not at your best when hurt, I think simply being 'stunned' does enough. It sets the enemy up to do more, but there's still the possibility of me making it away or blocking before the enemy can pull off 2 * Y damage.

JBourrie

Mar 12, 2008 at 3:35 PM

Quote:
Original post by JasRonq
What would be a better form of player punishment for failure to kill the badguys?
"20 demons just swarmed you and you fight hard but to no avail." - what is the alternative to death?

If "20 demons just swarmed you" is a gameplay mechanic, player death is the best option we've come up with yet.

Then again, enough games have done the "20 demons just swarmed you" scenario... why not try something new? Hunting games have done a great job of modifying their scenario so that player death is no longer necessary... if you mess it up, you just don't get that kill.

Kest

Mar 12, 2008 at 4:26 PM

What exactly is the purpose of player death for gameplay? It's mostly an incentive to play more skillfully, and to avoid careless decisions. Once players become skilled at a game, death can become pretty rare. Once it rarely happens, it becomes more of an annoying accident trap than an incentive. A reason to give up, rather than to play better.

There are other ways to incite an immortal player to be careful. Such as the need to protect someone other than himself. Or having to pay money to repair body damage. Or losing partial abilities because of damage and requiring time or a resource to regenerate.

Just comment out the player character event that occurs between 1HP and 0HP and see what happens.

JasRonq

Mar 12, 2008 at 9:33 PM

Quote:
Original post by JBourrie
Quote:
Original post by JasRonq
What would be a better form of player punishment for failure to kill the badguys?
"20 demons just swarmed you and you fight hard but to no avail." - what is the alternative to death?

If "20 demons just swarmed you" is a gameplay mechanic, player death is the best option we've come up with yet.

Then again, enough games have done the "20 demons just swarmed you" scenario... why not try something new? Hunting games have done a great job of modifying their scenario so that player death is no longer necessary... if you mess it up, you just don't get that kill.

Doing something new is all well and good, but the rampant bloodbath of demon killing and the subsequent swarming by 20 of them when the player runs too far in is a provenly enjoyable gameplay focus, well, the killing part, not always the death.

JasRonq

Mar 12, 2008 at 9:43 PM

How would a mechanism that saved the player from death at the 1hp mark by transporting him to the last safe zone affect gameplay and the players feel of the game? What would be an appropriate cost to the player to recover from such a state?

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