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Original post by Kest 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

The problem with this is that sometime you should just let the player restart and put any mistakes behind them. Otherwise you can run into a few gameplay problems,

1: The game gets harder the more you lose when it should be the other way around.

2: Delayed punishment, especially for more linear games it can cause the game to be unplayable hard near the end of the game becouse of a mistake they made near the beginning.

3: Balancing it so that the player can recover from multiple mistakes while being challenging even if they don't make as many.

In your OP (and later) you stated that the health bar is too simplistic. As a game designer what would you recommend doing to change it?

Better yet, as a player, what kind of system would you like to see to replace it, and in what genre of gaming would you do this in?

You also stated that you don't see how someone who's on 1/1000 health can do the same damage they could when on say 950/1000 health.

From a designer's perspective you have to consider this: How do you degrade the players abilities as his health declines in an manner that he doesn't decide to just kill himself or restart/reload the game because he can no longer continue effectively on the level/zone he's in?

From the player's perspective - do you really want to be at 20% health and feeble as a kitten being rolled over by targets you were destroying with impunity earlier?

Most guides to game development states you have to have a balance between realism and fun. You can make the most realistic game out and it not be fun, which means few people are going to want to play it or from a fiscal point of view - buy it. Balance is the key.

Is there a better solution? There's been alternatives in newer games to remove the health bar and use on screen cues as to your apparent health status, but I don't know of a single game out that degrades your abilities as your health declines. Back to the original R6 games, if you took a shot in the legs you would limp or walk slower, but you could still pull the trigger just fine, and they still killed as effectively.

Summary - It's a design problem: Fun vs realism. Make the game fun first, then worry about realism. There's a reason why Sims aren't the hot ticket sellers they used to be.

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Original post by AnatonFrom a designer's perspective you have to consider this: How do you degrade the players abilities as his health declines in an manner that he doesn't decide to just kill himself or restart/reload the game because he can no longer continue effectively on the level/zone he's in? From the player's perspective - do you really want to be at 20% health and feeble as a kitten being rolled over by targets you were destroying with impunity earlier?

The player would feel no need to do either if they could heal after the fight and already reloads if they die before they finish the fight. Its only the lack of a way to recover that would encourage that.

I wouldnt mind if i could heal, as I said its the recovery that makes it still playable. In addition it would make the players health more of a focus. You would pay attention to being a little injured after a fight. Currently its only obsessives that bother to heal after every little scratch.

I'm not saying its necessarily great design, I couldnt know, but its not as bad as all that.



...Also, as for a different system, the biggest thing I think would be to have an internal system and to use visual cues to let the player know their status rather than bars. The internal systems could be the standard or could be vastly different, the big thing is to make the player aware of their condition.

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Original post by Kaze 1: The game gets harder the more you lose when it should be the other way around.

It doesn't necessarily mean more challenging gameplay. If thought out, you can just cause it to slow down progression. This would be pretty easy with a non-linear game, since the player is in control of his own advancement.

In any case, we are most likely talking about an RPG. If the player doesn't restart or game-over on death, his skills are going to keep climbing through his continuous efforts, rather than only through his final successful break from a meaningless loop. That means zero wasted gameplay.

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2: Delayed punishment, especially for more linear games it can cause the game to be unplayable hard near the end of the game becouse of a mistake they made near the beginning.

Some damage-fearing-incentive concepts would obviously work better for a non-linear game than a linear game. But there are plenty of other ways to make a player fear damage that won't increase the challenge of the game. Many of which I probably haven't even considered.

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3: Balancing it so that the player can recover from multiple mistakes while being challenging even if they don't make as many.

A well balanced RPG should become easier as you play better. Give the player a choice to use his more impressive skills to do something that bad players won't want to touch. Or if he wants to use his superior abilities to keep trashing the weaker enemies, that's fine too.

How would those things change, Kest, if the game was linear? (and yes, i have been thinking in terms of RPGs with this post)
How linear is linear?

Would, say, Dioblo2 count as linear or non-? You can save and re-enter the game to respawn enemies and there are a few side quests that can be done anytime but the over all progression is linear, though you can also go back to completed areas if you wanted to.

Games like Oblivion are obviously nonlinear. How would a completely linear game be affected though?

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Original post by JasRonq How would those things change, Kest, if the game was linear? (and yes, i have been thinking in terms of RPGs with this post) How linear is linear?

In a linear game, it would be like being tied to a truck that doesn't stop or slow down, and each time you fail to jump over an obstacle, your legs wear down. Eventually, you'll just be dragging behind it on your face with little chance of recovering.

As the player loses money or items because of damage taken in a linear game, the result is less and less to spend or use on everything else. The more badly he plays the game, the more pathetic his character or equipment becomes, and the more difficult future missions get, causing him to play even worse, scaling the problem up as he plays.

In a non-linear game, the player can choose to not even attempt a next-level mission when he does poorly on previous missions. If he's doing badly, he can just pace himself and improve his skill by competing on lower skill areas for whatever length of time he chooses. The game only becomes more difficult when the player causes it to, by venturing into dangerous areas.

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Would, say, Dioblo2 count as linear or non-? You can save and re-enter the game to respawn enemies and there are a few side quests that can be done anytime but the over all progression is linear, though you can also go back to completed areas if you wanted to.

Diablo 2 is non-linear. The ability to advance to newer and more difficult areas doesn't mean linear gameplay. The inability to choose your own destination is linear gameplay. Still, Diablo 2 does a good job of feeling linear, because of the game and level design.

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Original post by JasRonq 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?

That is what player death is in most games, you just moved the minimum health from 0 to 1.

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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.

Right, the killing part is fun, the death part (usually) isn't. I'm not saying I have an answer to that one (player death is still the only one that makes sense to me in that scenario, I can't think of another equally intense source of danger), I just thought it would be an interesting extension to the "health bar" brainstorming exercise to explore what happened if we removed it completely.


By the way, every time I open this thread I see "Aah, the Heath Bar. How do we love thee" and I think "Yeah, I like Heath Bars alot. They're delicious. Now I want candy." Then I realize it says "Health" and I am sad.

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Original post by JBourrie Quote: Original post by JasRonq 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? That is what player death is in most games, you just moved the minimum health from 0 to 1.

JasRonq: For the record, that wasn't what I meant. I meant to prevent any type of restart or reload events. The player would not be able to die. Or become unconscious, or be transported, or whatever. He would suck up the damage with a new type of system that allows him to pay or compensate for it later.

There are also methods to keep some suspense that surrounds death. Imagine controlling a robot that has an expensive core. You can take cheap damage until your armor is blasted to pieces, but then your core is exposed. Once your core is damaged by 25%, it can never recover above 75% again. And once it drops to 50%, it can never be repaired above that again, and so on. This would essentially give the player 4 lives. Each one would sustain the freak-out period that occurs when armor is destroyed. Once a core is completely destroyed, he may lose the mission and/or the bot, but he lives on with all of whatever skills he may have earned. It may even be possible to let him keep playing with a destroyed core at a low performance capacity. Perhaps he can spend a massive load of cash somewhere near his current location to buy a new core. Or he may be able to switch control over to a less effective enemy bot in the area.

Your mention of robots just sparked an idea. What if your player in a fantasy setting explored the world through astral projections that acted just like a character normally would, an avatar of an avatar so to speak. In such a situation the death of the projection means the need to create a new one but not the death of the actual player, though the death of the projection can have some sort of effect on the player that needs to be recovered from as well. This would mean that there is no wasted game play on death as you are not reloading a save and is more under the designers control and so game flow can be kept instead of outright interrupted by a "please select your last save" screen. It would still play a lot like a normal death mechanic though.

I've been implementing something very similar into my game with neural interface robots. The player can step into an interface chair within his safehouse, and play the game normally from the perspective of a bot. The bot has his voice output, so everyone in the game world knows who it is, and can deal with him normally in most situations.

Playing as a bot removes the ability to gain physical attributes, but mental skills increase normally, and physical attributes can be increased via upgrade parts. Using the interface chair, the player can also hack from one enemy bot to another, or even plug into a facility terminal and travel their network to distant bots, without ever worrying about being in any danger. With the chair, it should be possible to play the game without having any permanent physical body. Well, other than the one in the chair. But if your current bot is destroyed while you're in control of it, you lose the connection to the area. So it's pretty much like death.