Replacement for hit points and game overs?

What aspects of hit-points and multiple lives do you find un-fun, rather than merely unrealistic?

I think finding a difference here is really how complicated you want to get to replace the hit points and lives system, for example you could do body parts, if an arm gets hit you lose function until you find a medic to fix you up, same goes for other parts except the head would be death. Like I said it really depends on how in depth you want to build the system, obviously you want it to seem less complicated to the player, but under the hood can be rather complex. If this is a future based game you could just do shields and when those are gone you get a few hits and your dead, just a few ideas you could think about. Of course you could do a random way of figuring where the your body was hit, like if whatever algorithm you figure decided that an artirary was hit you would have more of a count down left before you bleed to death, or you stopped the bleeding, again you could make it where if the artirary was in the leg you would walk slower as well making things a lot harder, but you would have to find a happy medium for realism and fun.

in "Hitler's Must Die", when you die you're just sent to the next level without your weapons. Exploration and finding new weapons being one of the main mechanics.

About ¾ of commercial games nowadays use a "checkpoint" system. When you die, you are not "game over" but you restart at the last safe place you've been. Of course if you game is a single player game, and you plan to make your character kill a lot of enemies, you HAVE to give a least an advantage to the player. Most third and first person games released this year tends to use the "regeneration" system, which kill you it you receive 3-4 bullets in a row, but if you receive only 1-2 bullets and hide for a while, you will return to "max hp". This is highly unrealistic, gives the impression to be a super-solder, but it made it's proof that it's fun to play.

wicked357 have the best solution for realism; disable body parts until you are completely dead. Unfortunately, this require a complex damage programming system and don't resolve the problem that you need to be stronger than your enemies.

If your game is "heavily centered around combat", I don't think you can do much more than the already existing health mechanics seen in the past years or else it might simply get boring to play.

I'm not sure if this helps, but I enjoy games where you are on an equal footing against ai, but when you die you become an allied ai. A flash game called Baronis (iirc) is the only example of this that springs to mind.

I have been thinking about this particular subject quite a lot
lately too.

One of my ideas was to not have the player die but instead just pass out
due to pain. Enemies might then take him into custody or something,
which would create some interesting situations having to make your
way out again.

The Legend of Zelda OOT did it in the Gerudo fortress.
If I remember correctly it was also done in splinter cell chaos theory.

You wouldn't want that to happen to often of course, because after a while
it would probably just get annoying.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be that the enemies take the player with
them. If they're not interested they could just as well leave him so he'd
wake up after a certain while.

Or they could dump your body anywhere. For instance, in rival territory where neither you nor your enemy are welcome... so that the rival territory can take care of the handiwork. This could create situations in the game where those in the rival territory did what your enemy didn't expect and actually help you out or something...

I liked Prince of Persia's system -- basically, if you mess up, you just start over from where you just were. I'm sure it bothers some people who into "punishment," but I think it should be seamless. The point is to have fun, not be frustrated.

I enjoy the odd game where there's a unique solution to health, instead of the typical respawn at last checkpoint with no consequences, but what makes a lot of games addicting IS the challenge of not dying.

I liked the system in Diablo II where when you die, you respawn in town without any of your equipment. When you made it back to your dead body, you recovered your equipment. There were only 5 towns throughout the game and they were separated by a LONG way by foot with lots of monsters, but there were waypoints that could teleport you close to where your body was IF you discovered them. Not only that, but there was also a penalty towards experience and gold when you died.

I'm not saying to replicate their system, but completely eliminating a health gauge and dying in a COMBAT game??

A lot of newer FPS's don't use hitpoints, they just have your health magically regenerate after a short while (ala shields in Halo).

No matter what, I think you're going to have to have some sort of point/percentage system behind the scenes, it's just up to you how to hide it creatively.

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A lot of newer FPS's don't use hitpoints, they just have your health magically regenerate after a short while (ala shields in Halo).

I personally hate this. It takes all the fun out of the game, and leads to bad design.
I prefer games where you die and have to do the mission over from the start.
Those games tend to have better level designs. Why? because if you have to run the mission again, you design a grueling mission that eats away the player's resources. If you can just sit back and wait for more health, it leads to designing Call Of Duty 2 like maps where you repeat a cycle of inch forward, die, then reload now that you know where the enemy is.

System Shock 2 had a neat system where you could activate checkpoints, but it cost your nanites (money) to respawn. (iirc you also spawned at half life).

Left 4 Dead has a nice set of mechanics, where you have HP, but can get incaped twice, then die. If you die, you respawn in a room, and someone else has to save you. If you are in realism you don't respawn, and you have to rely on the defib unit to resurrect a player.

Dead Space had a really fun HP system for the enemy. The hitpoints of a creature were hidden behind a combination of stats. The largest of these was the fact that the traditional "head shot" was replaced with creature specific weakpoint limbs that you had to cut off. Cutting off limbs did the most damage of any attack to the creature. Cutting off limbs reduced its mobility. BUT cutting off limbs also changed the mode of attack and movement for the creature, posing new challenges.

Some games, though showing HP on a scale of 1-100, treat it more like liters of blood. Injuries sap your blood, many types of wounds cause you to slowly bleed out.

Dwarf Fortress has a psychotically complex system that involves being able to injure almost every major limb, organ, and bone individually. On top of that, each character appears to have a set amount of blood they can bleed out between full heal cycles. Combine that with the fact that different types of injuries can only be healed up so much, so a severed arm is just gone. And said severed arm means that the dwarf can't use a weapon/shield with that arm anymore.
(remember losing is fun!*)

*If you can't tell, I agree. I'd rather have something I have to figure out to succeed, than a game that head-shots you, expecting that you quick-saved. Too many games go for completion now, instead of having the old-school 3 continues. And you had to get better at the game or you wouldn't progress enough to get to the point where it would hand you an extra life or two to keep going.

In Rainbow Six (I don't remember the version that I used to play), the game was a squad based FPS. An example of a LAN game could be 4 players are in a team of 8 SWAT guys (4 AI controlled characters), when a player died, he would take control of one of the remaining AI. So normally everyone would have 2 lives, but a bad player could go through the 4 AI like butter.
I don't remember if there were shields or hit point or whatever, but death was not equal to game over, at least one team member needed to complete the mission. It was a good mechanic.

Hit points were invented (probably for some Gary Gygax game in the late 1960s or early 1970s) as an abstraction from reality for making the game mechanics easy and maintainable, and making the game fun. They are deliberately not realistic, because reality is not fun.

Reality is like this: You walk down a dark alley. Some totally stoned crackhead comes out of the dark and guns you down. You spend the next 3-5 minutes in agony while you bleed to death. That's game over for you, forever.

This is not precisely what people would perceive as "fun", nor does it lend for prolonged gameplay. What you would like to do in a game would be pull out the crowbar and give that guy a good fonging, regardless of the 3 or 4 bullets in your stomach. After that, you click on your medpack, and you're ready for the next fight. Oh, and of course, you'd be singing "Ho Ho Ho, now I have a gun".

I do agree that hit points have their annoying downsides too. That guy has 1 HP left, and still beats the shit out of you. Oh wait, now he suddenly dropped dead!
Hit point systems usually don't address this problem, since doing so would mean a positive feedback loop. The first one to score a hit will very likely win the fight. But alas, that too is reality.
A good compromise would probably be to introduce some gentle but increasing ability degradation if hit points are under 1/3 or such.

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Original post by samoth I do agree that hit points have their annoying downsides too. That guy has 1 HP left, and still beats the shit out of you. Oh wait, now he suddenly dropped dead! Hit point systems usually don't address this problem, since doing so would mean a positive feedback loop. The first one to score a hit will very likely win the fight. But alas, that too is reality. A good compromise would probably be to introduce some gentle but increasing ability degradation if hit points are under 1/3 or such.

D&D 4e addressed this problem with the bloodied feature. When you are below half HP, you are bloodied. Some abilities only work when you or your target is bloodied. Some monsters get an extra damage dice against bloodied targets, dragonborns get a +1 to attack when bloodied, etc. There may not be ability degradation, but being bloodied almost always makes you a vulnerable target, putting you at a disadvantage.

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Original post by JamesPenny I'm not sure if this helps, but I enjoy games where you are on an equal footing against ai, but when you die you become an allied ai. A flash game called Baronis (iirc) is the only example of this that springs to mind.

Almost all squad-based combat games (the Tom Clancy series comes to mind) allow you to transfer control to an AI ally when you die.

What happens if all the characters in the squad die?

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Original post by 3DModelerMan What happens if all the characters in the squad die?

Then the mission has failed. Of course, Clancy games tend to have many other failure conditions as well, such as the terrorists heard your gunfire, and decided to execute the hostages early...

My favorite was Ghost Recon.
Single Player:
You have a squad, which you rally before the mission from a bigger "group". (There is a max number of selectable members). (they are individual "persons" with names)
You control one of the members, the others are controlled by AI, but you can switch whenever you want.

You could command the other members by addressing them one-by-on, or by subgroup (that you make during the rally mode, "alpha/bravo/charlie/etc."), and send them to points on the map.

I cannot recall the damage system, but I remember that a team member can be killed one shot, or could be just wounded, that meant it moved much slower (with a factor about 1/3!).

Killed members were killed completely, so you cannot select them in the rally mode any more. Wounded soldiers stayed wounded too, slowly regaining there hp from mission to mission. You have soldiers with special skills, so if you loose all your snipers for example, then you won't have any snipers.

Game/level over if all the squad members die, or mission objectives are failed.

It was a very hard game.

A few posts have been mentioning the Rainbow 6 feature where you change to an AI. Maybe you could make a certain ammount of hit-points, and make them damage you realisticaly compared to the weapon being used. Like sword would be one, two shot kill at tops, ETC.
Make it so you have a full group of people. Like 5 maybe. (but you'd be able to chose a better number by comparing it to how easily you'd die with a realistic damage system) And then, when one falls another takes his/her place. This way the player has lives, but it has none of that unrealistic ressurection stuff.