Unless I'm misunderstanding, the main argument so far against a more realistic healthbar (though I know there have been suggestions for health bar alternatives that aren't necessarily more realistic) was that players don't like being punished unnecessarily, and that this would make the game harder to play. This is fine, and makes sense.

If you look at movies or TV, though, there are several times that characters get injured and keep fighting. They may have their arm broken or be bleeding or something, but this is generally when they suddenly become determined and triumph somehow, often just by overpowering the pain and fighting through it.

In a game, instead of a health meter, the character could take damage to their limbs, which would make that part of the body weaker, but power up others (You could possibly explain it away as an arenaline rush).

As an example, say you're playing a first person shooter of some sort. As you get hit, you see the usual red marks on the edge of the screen to show you where the attack came from.

If it disables part of your body, though, the entire screen gets tinted red, and time slows down. If your arm was hit, you can actually dodge the bullets that start coming at you (Bullet time's been done before, but as far as I know it wasn't in this way). If your legs were hit, you can only crawl, so you won't be doing any dodging, but the slowed time means you can aim perfectly at the enemies surrounding you, picking them off before they have a chance to fire again. If it's the head or torso, that's much worse, and there's not much of an advantage. Time still slows, but your head'll sway or your vision blur, and your crosshair will be waving around as you fight to stay conscious. There isn't much you can do now but try to escape, and you'd probably have a hard time doing even that. Luckily, the torso is more protected and harder to severely damage, and, well, in most games a headshot would instantly kill you anyway.

In this sort of example, a "realistic" health system becomes a strategy more than a punishment. Maybe you're fighting against some kind of sniper or acrobat, and you can't aim at them. Actually allowing them to shoot you in the leg or arm would slow down time, letting you either quickly aim at them or catch up to them and engage in some sort of (weaker but fast) close-quarters combat. Health systems should be (as people have said here) more for the sake of fun than simulation, but it doesn't take much adaptation to do that.

Though really, for simple platformers and things, I favor something simple. If you think about it, though, we've got a few examples of alternatives to health bars that are simple enough for platformers. Sonic's rings and Mario's powerups have been around for a long time, and are definitely unique, though they are still one-dimensional.

One way you could have it (I dont think anyone has mentioned), is to have the player\hero not hit so often. Being able to survive getting hit hundreds of times is a bit silly. Most heros in literature, movies survive by not getting hit(much).

In the films I have seen the heroes, usually completely outclass the normal henchmen cannon fodder. They are easily swept away in any number. They usually dont sustain any damage in these fights, if they do though its usually just flesh wounds. These flesh wounds which are not enough damage to hinder the heros fighting prowess during the fight they would and could be fatal or a hindrance if not treated after the fight.

The problem comes when they are up against the Uber bosses or Mid bosses. In these fights they do sometimes end up with serious wounds, blades through stomachs, bullets through shoulders etc, these generally do become a hindrance to the fighter but they generally compensate and you know the rest.

So could an aductation of something like this be done. The Hero has wounds or hit detection whatever. When the unlikely circumstance does arrive where he gets hit, then a timer starts, which in the player must decide what to do about them. You could have light wounds, heavy wounds, and certain numbers, certain types, which cause the timer to decrease by certain amounts.

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Original post by Calabi In the films I have seen the heroes, usually completely outclass the normal henchmen cannon fodder. They are easily swept away in any number. They usually dont sustain any damage in these fights, if they do though its usually just flesh wounds. These flesh wounds which are not enough damage to hinder the heros fighting prowess during the fight they would and could be fatal or a hindrance if not treated after the fight.

Storm trooper effect doesn't really work in games becouse even the minor enemies need to have a greater than 0% chance of hitting and then its only a matter of time before the player does get hit. It won't take the player very long figure out that your bending statistics to keep them from being hit and they won't like being killed by a random grunt with a luck hit so a realistic hit rate and unrealistic damage approximation is the standard for gameplay reasons.

In short the problem is your typical action move is far more nonsensical than a health bar at the bottom of the screen.

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Storm trooper effect doesn't really work in games becouse even the minor enemies need to have a greater than 0% chance of hitting and then its only a matter of time before the player does get hit. It won't take the player very long figure out that your bending statistics to keep them from being hit and they won't like being killed by a random grunt with a luck hit so a realistic hit rate and unrealistic damage approximation is the standard for gameplay reasons.

Well theres a question, what is a realistic hit rate? Movies and games both seem to go in opposite directions.

I dont think there is a universal standardised set of statistics which you would be bending from. If you have a certain hit rate in your game, then that would be the standard in that game.

They would never be killed by a lucky hit, a single henchman would not be able to damage the hero, when the hero is surrounded the percentage to hit for each would go up, by a certain amount depending on the heros skill. The hero would have a certain number of individuals he is able to fight. If he fights within that then he will just sustain flesh wounds from the enemy. If he ends up fighting too many enemies then he has possibilities of sustaining heavy wounds.

Flesh wounds would not debilitate the hero, until after a certain amount of time, they would not kill. Heavy wounds would, debilitate, but not by much, the hero would be able to sustain a certain number of heavy wounds before he sustains a fatal wound(he has the skill and foresight to defend his vital organs for a certain amount of time, he is the hero after all). These could have timers and modifiers which increase, decrease in whatever manner.

Actually thinking about this is similar to a health bar, except perhaps a more obvious timer. His death would be at a certain predictable time, except the player wouldnt be able to heal during battle. It would be entirely the players fault if he dies.

It could make for interesting gameplay. The player would have to strategise and respond to battles. He would have to gauge the enemies numbers and strengths, when too wounded or outnumbered he would have to retreat and regroup.

I think there are more options to the 20 demons swarming you problem. Death is tried and true, sure, and some "Diet Death" options have been given (e.g. robots and avatars). They're trying to kill me, so I try to do unto them before they do unto me.

But let's say you're an angel or you've been given priestly protection so they can't kill you, or they don't want to kill you because you're their tie to this world.

Maybe, after "killing" them, they come back through the portal (i.e. respawn) after a certain amount of time, so it's a matter of forcing them all back at once. Or maybe they actively undo the voodoo you do to shoo them away (e.g. it's a puzzle game and they reset parts of the puzzle you've already completed). Basically, make killing them hard even though they can't kill you.

Or award panache points after the level that determine how shiny the star next to your name happens to be. Or have a secondary goal like saving villagers. Make the win less binary. You can't lose, so it's not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.

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Original post by Gorgoo In a game, instead of a health meter, the character could take damage to their limbs, which would make that part of the body weaker, but power up others (You could possibly explain it away as an arenaline rush).

I like the idea of gaining extra strength/abilities when weakened (like FF's 'Limit Breaks'). Though, this would definitely be bad for a multiplayer game, because you would have people shooting their own teammates in order to grant them super powers.

It's also true that you simply can't go through and make games as similar to action movies as possible. In action movies, the hero (generally) does not ever die, and is (usually) saved at the last second by some impossible odds. If you're going to threaten players with death, it has to actually be possible to die.

The fact is, the vast majority of games rely on killing enemies as the core gameplay, and character death is the source of exitement/punishment. You can kill a thousand guards in a thousand ways, but the basic core gameplay will never change (only the way in which you kill, and even that barely ever changes). In games, there are no prisoners, and there's not an option to 'bring him to me alive'.

As far as I can tell, the almighty health bar is as good as we can get, and the best there will ever be is small improvements to things like area-specific hits and such.

I forgot to mention it, but Operation Flashpoint had no health bar. Characters did have some type of vitality, but it wasn't displayed, and damage was realistic enough to make any type of display less than useful. I think the basic concept was that a head shot or chest shot was 95% likely to kill you, that one limb shot would very rarely ever kill you, that two limb shots would likely kill you, and that you were lucky as hell to be living with three or more bullet wounds.

Some other games that also use the regenerating-health/shield-if-you-don't-get-shot-for-10-seconds-or-so approach are Halo and Crysis. In fact, I don't think I've seen any 'health packs' around to chew on in any FPS games lately.

Edit: Ok, I take that back, I think only the shield part regenerates in Halo, whereas you still need to recover your health the old fashioned way... But I can't remember exactly.

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Original post by Humble Hobo I like the idea of gaining extra strength/abilities when weakened (like FF's 'Limit Breaks'). Though, this would definitely be bad for a multiplayer game, because you would have people shooting their own teammates in order to grant them super powers.

That's not necessarily a negative. I regularly play a fantastic spaghetti-western shootout card game called Bang! with my coworkers. I sometimes (rarely, but sometimes) find myself in a situation in which the best strategy is to shoot (and potentially kill) my teammates in order to put our team in a more strategic advantage.

Sure, you have to tread lightly in scenarios like this (because not all players will understand the difference between "necessary" friendly fire and griefing), but boosting your chances of winning by shooting a teammate can potentially be a game-winning advanced strategy.

Is it the usual for players to leave an area to go heal themselves after a fight if they are low anyway? I think a quickly regenerating health bar would only mean removing the annoying need to head back to town for supplies and healing. Its rare that that is the focus of the game play so removing it means no interruption in the focus.