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.

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.)

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.