The Future of the Health Bar

[Felstaff]

If there's one thing in games where realism takes a rest, it's your player's health. I've never really been a fan of the health bar, regenerating invisi-shields, or improbably-placed medipacks lying around small villages in Northern France in 1944 that you have to walk over to activate (suddenly: gunshot wounds have healed!).

For me, it's a minor niggle that has the capability of wrenching me out of immersion, much like a hint of Edith Piaf can kick me out of a dream. When I stub my toe, or bang my head, or walk straight into a crotch-high metal post in the middle of the street, I don't think "shit, just lost 8% of my overall health, better walk over a conveniently lying medipack to heal instantly", I think "ouch, my toe/head/unmentionables" and the healing process can take minutes, or even days.

Lots of games have tackled replacing the health bar, as, when you're playing an immersive game, a big green/red block of health taking up one corner of your field of vision can be completely distracting, and games where an HUD is not feasible, like Resident Evil, the makers often come up with alternatives, such as replacing your deteriorating health with increased limping, and Far Cry 2 distorts your view as you succumb to malaria.

The problem is, with body-part specific technology being rather popular in games, ever since Soldier of Fortune, I've always wondered when, if, or how they would do away with the primitive health bar entirely.

It's amazing how this simple visual representation of a number has barely evolved when all other facets of gaming have.

It's been in use since 1984 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Buster], fergoodness'sake! With the Skyrimmic focus on Total Immersion Gameplay in your AAA games nowadays, it seems strange how your health is still represented by a single number, and moves in a rather linear fashion (number goes down when "getting shot", and up when "eating cake")

The problem I see with games that try to replace the health bar with visual clues--take Resident Evil, for example--is that, say you're having your leg munched by a carefree zombie (the ones with no cares are the ones you have to watch out for), the now-injured character will walk away from the fracas clutching his or her tummy.

You just had your leg munched, dammit. If you had a tummy ache in the first place, you shouldn't have taken on an army of the undead. I don't know how many times I have to tell you this.

Even with the current crop of Bethesda games, where you can have various limbs crippled and such, impairing your ability with those limbs (crippled right arm, your firing accuracy has dropped by 84.3%! Crippled leg, your movement is slowed by 75.05%! Crippled crotch, your chance of fatherhood has decreased by 91.8%!), it's still basically a health bar but apportioned to various parts, rather than the whole, of your body.

Essentially, your health is still represented by a number. And this number is visually represented by a green bar. Which is a bit old hat, don't you think?

So, how could this be changed or evolve as the new generation of games gets slewed upon us? How can you show a visual representation of damage or injury to your player character which a.) accurately reflects real-life injury/pain, b.) impairs your player character in such a way as to be representative of how they'd respond to injury in the real world, and c.) takes more than a green bottle of health potion/medipack with a big red + on them to restore your wounds?

It's tricky, but really, the health bar is an ancient way to represent player health, and something should really begin to take its place. Fighting games are the worst offenders; that yellow bar at the top of the screen which slowly turns red (or quickly in my experience - I'm crap at Street Fighter) is not very realistic when it comes to being knocked out. I've somehow survived an onslaught of fifty Hadouken fireballs smacking me squarely in the chest, and I look pretty good for it, too, but one final kick to the shins is enough to send me soaring back through the air as if launched from a cannon.

I'm just saying bodypart-specific manoeuvres to slowly weaken and tire the limbs, combined with fatigue which slows your overall movement and reactions, would be a far more realistic representation of fighting prowess, rather than a big old block of yellow being chipped away at the top of the screen.

Come on guys, surely we've moved on from this?​

Problems with not having the health bar, however, would dog FPS games, where you rarely see your body, and thus would not be able to see whereabouts on your person you would be injured.

So, does anyone have any good ideas on how to replace the health bar with a more realistic approach to player health/status?

 

[Neekoolawous]

They tried to establish realism through eliminating the health bar, but this led to regenerating health and an even greater leap in the wrong direction.

 

[skywolfblue]

a.) accurately reflects real-life injury/pain

b.) impairs your player character in such a way as to be representative of how they'd respond to injury in the real world, and

c.) takes more than a green bottle of health potion/medipack with a big red + on them to restore your wounds?

It's a game, I don't want it to simulate real pain. I don't want to have MY toe stubbed every time my game character trips, I don't want MY tummy feeling like it's been sawed to bits. And if it "accurately reflected real life" then your character would have to spend 4 days in surgery after every fight. NOT FUN.

 

[hazabaza1]

I still like the healthbar. Keep it as it is.

 

[Iori Branford]

Even with the current crop of Bethesda games, where you can have various limbs crippled and such, impairing your ability with those limbs (crippled right arm, your firing accuracy has dropped by 84.3%! Crippled leg, your movement is slowed by 75.05%! Crippled crotch, your chance of fatherhood has decreased by 91.8%!), it's still basically a health bar but apportioned to various parts, rather than the whole, of your body.

Essentially, your health is still represented by a number. And this number is visually represented by a green bar. Which is a bit old hat, don't you think?

I can't think what more a game could realistically do. If you're asking for perfectly accurate in-world representations of health, that will add tons more animation work without actually informing the player any more than numbers and gauges do.

So, how could this be changed or evolve as the new generation of games gets slewed upon us? How can you show a visual representation of damage or injury to your player character which a.) accurately reflects real-life injury/pain, b.) impairs your player character in such a way as to be representative of how they'd respond to injury in the real world, and c.) takes more than a green bottle of health potion/medipack with a big red + on them to restore your wounds?

Jagged Alliance 2 nailed it. A character's health goes down from weapon hits and from the resulting bleeding; a medic's bandages will stop bleeding, but the medic has to doctor the character over some days for full healing (lucky you can control the flow of time outside of combat). There's also energy or stamina that is lost on any attack, or from just running around too long, slowing down the character all around; rehydrating will replenish energy to a point but only sleep will recharge it fully. Finally there is location damage causing temporary stat loss; this also takes days of doctor treatment to fix.
In the early Rainbow Sixes, a character loses speed and accuracy when wounded, and a character who somehow survives a lead takedown must sit out the next mission or two to recover.

 

[ShindoL Shill]

so basically, your ideal FPS would be one where you can't just heal and you need to locate the wounds, bandage it and wait a few months.

join the army.

 

[Twilight_guy]

The health bar is a key component of games. Its a raw numeric number that represents how close you are to losing. All you can do is make more bars, like one for each limb, and have dead limbs or crippled or something like that. You can't replace it. The game will always it have it int he background as surly as it uses a set number to say how much damage bullets do or your z location in space. You can disguise it to better and better extents but all this will do is either transition your bar from "crap 1 hp" to "crap worse animation" to "crap almost all my blips are gone". One key elements is that the player must see this number and know how close he is to losing and that means there will always be a "meter" visible to the player in some form. If you try to make it more realistic by making it for example a relative number or a fuzzy number then all you do is piss off the player who can no longer tell how close to dead he is. You can make it so shots to the foot so nothing since even if your foot is full of holes you won't die but all that does is introduce a change to damage scoring mechanics, not to health (and also makes an exploit since player will attempt to channel all damage through their foot now). The only game where no meter of any kind works in in games where you take one hit and die. Mario didn't need a meter when he started because he had one HP. His meter was totally full or he was dead. The health bar hasn't ever changed because it can't change. It's always going to be there in some form. Having a game without it is taking away the players eyes into how close he is to losing. There must always be some form of meter the question you want to ask is what is the best way to disguise it, to put a mask on it to make things more "immersive". I don't know. Honestly I don't really care since there are so many other elements to clean up in games first this kind of fall to the bottom of the list. I think games that hide the HUD, like Dead Space, do a good job of hiding the health bar naturally and games were anims change give a more immersing representation where you kind of can tell without having to look at it. Hell Infamous had a good system where your bar was how much jam and monochrome you were seeing and that was pretty good, but they were just masks that moved the meter about and made it something besides a bar, not a replacement of the bar.

 

[Joccaren]

What, pray tell, would you replace it with?
And how would you stop people from jumping into the source code and looking at the actual health bars there, as you cannot remove health bars entirely. They will be in the code in one shape or form, just disguised.
If realism with injuries is what you are after, every time you die in a game, you now have to start completely over. Every time you finish a fight with an injury anywhere, you have to spend between a day and 6 months in hospital to heal up - in real time (For extra realism).
The health bar works not because it strives for realism, but because it accurately tells the player how they are doing, and how conservative they need to be from now on with their health. Take that out, and players will complain like they did with the lack of a breath bar in Skyrim. It doesn't make the game more fun, it just adds a 'Great, now how can I calculate my health/breath through experimentation, then use that knowledge to imagine the effect of a health bar in game'. It adds a lot of extra steps and solves nothing.
Even then, you'd need a lot of coding to get it to be anywhere near real life. The human body isn't simple, and a wound anywhere has the potential to kill. All you'd end up doing is having a health bar that is hidden with calculations run each second for various odds of various things happening, and various calculations to determine how the individual health bars of your body affect your speed and your overall health bar, and stamina bar, and accuracy and everything else.
There is no way to remove a health bar, you can only hide it. Why do games still use them? Because what else are they going to use? And if they have to use a health bar, why make it hard to tell what it says? It just annoys people. Some games have hardcore modes, for those who don't like to see their health bar, but there is still that health bar working. It would be the same thing in any scenario if you try to remove the health bar. It can't be done, it can only be reshaped and transformed out of a bar into something else. Due to the nature of coding however, it will always be dependent on the same numbers as the health bar was.

 

[Zack Alklazaris]

Why stop at the health bar? Lets not have lives! Permadeath in video games. As in once you die, your saved game files are erased and you need to start from scratch. I've seen a couple games do it.

 

[White_Lama]

I'd like it more if we kept the healthbar, but at least fixed it so that when in need of healing/healthpacks we get to choose and see which of our bodyparts is the most blasted to pieces (á la Fallout) and specifically treat that wound, preferably with some sort of cutscene (which could be turned off in options, for people complaining) which could or could not be done in combat.

Either way, I like to keep the healthbar and throw away the games where getting shot to the chest and then running away for a few seconds heal you.

Then it's more realistic walking over a green box getting full health.

 

[ComradeJim270]

There was a game waaay back in 2000 that had neither a simple health bar, nor health regeneration (well, you COULD get health regeneration, but it was a sort of special ability). Instead, damage was applied to specific bodyparts, causing specific effects. You could heal with medical supplies, which you could take with you, or by interacting with certain robots. This was a very, very good game, and if you played PC games at the time you know damn well what game I'm talking about, and I imagine that like me, you don't understand why 11 years later, you've yet to play another game that has used a similar system (maybe there's been one, but I haven't seen it).

 

[ChupathingyX]

So what's your answer?

After taking damage in a game like CoD do we sit back, get a medic to give us some morphine, bandage the wound, take us to a hospital and then we stay there and heal for months?

Then after a couple of months have passed we are then inserted back to where we left off where the enemy has been patiently awaiting our arrival?

-----------------

I don't really have any problems with the health bar or regenerating health or hearts or whatever. If it's appropriate for the game then it is fine.

Personally my favourite examples would be Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, Far Cry 2 and Resistance: Fall of Man which all combine health bars (and med-kits) and regenerating health.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Jagged Alliance 2 nailed it. A character's health goes down from weapon hits and from the resulting bleeding; a medic's bandages will stop bleeding, but the medic has to doctor the character over some days for full healing (lucky you can control the flow of time outside of combat). There's also energy or stamina that is lost on any attack, or from just running around too long, slowing down the character all around; rehydrating will replenish energy to a point but only sleep will recharge it fully. Finally there is location damage causing temporary stat loss; this also takes days of doctor treatment to fix.
In the early Rainbow Sixes, a character loses speed and accuracy when wounded, and a character who somehow survives a lead takedown must sit out the next mission or two to recover.

Sitting around for days waiting for a character to heal? No thanks. It's a game, I don't want it to be realistic.

I think we're going back towards health bars after a brief period without them. In the batman series, Arkham Asylum ditched them and Arkham City brought it back.

 

[ComradeJim270]

Once, I did a user review for a crappy American Civil War game on this website, just for shits and giggles. Ultimately, there were three good things I had to say about it:

1. Stabbing people with bayonets is awesome
2. It's set in a historical war that took place prior to 1939, which is refreshing
3. The health system was the best I'd seen in a while, despite the rest of the game being pretty crappy (except the the parts where you bayonet people).

What it did was that you effetively had four regenerating health "bars" (they were stars, but whatever). So long as it wasn't completely empty, it would regenerate, but when one was depleted, it would stay that way until you could heal yourself. This was awesome, because it didn't require constant scrounging for medical supplies, but it also didn't mean you could just go behind a wall for a few seconds and magically be all better.

Truth be told, it's arguably more realistic. Adrenaline, courage and pure dumb luck mean that a soldier can potentially take an injury and continue to fight for a time, but ultimately, if you're wounded in combat medical attention will be a neccessity. Of course given the game's setting, it would be even more realistic if each level ended with your limbs getting sawed off.

 

[trouble_gum]

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Health is represented as a number, just like everything else in videogames. Even all of those games who've dallied with blurry screens, laboured breathing, limping character animations and blood on your clothes are still 'secretly' measuring a number somewhere to determine when these things appear. Sure, the green bar may be unrealistic, unimmersive and virtually unchanged over the last twenty years but this is, in the main, because it functions perfectly well for those games which employ it.

So long as healing in a game remains unrealistic (and honestly, who wants to see RPGs, FPS or any game move towards a realism model for the taking and healing of damage in them?), the representations of your character's health will be, too. Even in those games where they've done away with the health bar they retain non-realistic healing methods (Metro 2033, Call of Cthulhu: DCoTE, etc., etc.,). Even when a game tries to provide realistic healing methodologies; bandages, bleeding damage, syringes of morphine, FO:NV's hardcore mode forcing you to use a doctor's bag or actually visit a doctor to cure crippled limbs, the ways in which these are employed is unrealistic.

Removing the health bar and replacing it with fancy animations telling the player which bit of their character hurts doesn't make a significant enough addition to gameplay to make it a really worthwhile change. Now, there are some aspects that'd be nice to see amended / added to. In most fantasy RPGs, there are monsters who carry diseases. And when you get bitten by them and fail your Constitution check you contract disease X and a little message will flash up and tell you "You have contracted blah!" I think a nice touch would be to do away with this and simply give you a set of symptoms rather than you having the ability to insta-diagnose upon injury that you have Rockjoint. Or Licky End. Or whatever. Having to go off and find an healer to diagnose your disease before applying the appropriate cure would be neat touch of added immersion without massively inconveniencing the player. You could learn to recognise the symptoms and apply the appropriate cures from experience. And disease in RPGs would become less of a case of "Welp, time to find a shrine, then."

 

[Jandau]

*snip*

The thing is, if the protagonist is human, realistic damage would suck. Seriously, stop and think about it - consider the situations most characters find themselves in. A zombie munching on your leg would likely require days if not weeks of hospital care to fix. A gunshot wound, even with a fairly low caliber in a non-vital area might still kill you through internal bleeding. Our bodies are pretty fragile, at least in the context of the usual video game scenarios. If an accurate and realistic damage model were to implemented, it would only lead to rampant quicksave/quickload spamming.

There needs to be a mechanic that allows for a margin of error. That's what lifebars are. When I'm playing Gears of War and Fenix is getting shot up, I don't see that as him taking bullets in the face and then healing in a few seconds, I see it as his luck slowly running out as he's out in the open field of fire, with bullets coming closer, grazing off his armor, until that one actually hits him solidly and drops him down.

That's what most health bars are - a representation of your character's ability to not get hit, be it luck, skill, fate, armor or whatever; or at least to take the hits as glancing blows, minor scrapes and scratches, again through skill, armor, luck or whatever. This is also why I'm not opposed to regenerating health - it's not that you have Wolverine-like healing powers, but when you take cover you stop testing your luck, the enemies might stop focusing fire on you so much, you're not pushing fate so hard anymore.

I can see a game with realistic injury mechanics and no "Deus Ex Machina" solution to rapid healing, like Nanobots or Magic or whatever, but such a game would still need a way to allow the player a margin of error. And when that margin runs out you may as well just have the player's avatar die. Nobody will take that bullet to the shoulder with all the corresponding drawbacks and have it stay with them for the rest of the game, they'll just reload and try again until they make it through unhurt.

Getting hurt is NOT fun. And it's not something you can wave off. Especially serious injury that characters in gaming scenarios face on a regular basis. Realism would only detract from the game here.

The one exception I can think of is in cases where the character you play is disposable. In that situation, you can afford to have him permanently incapacitated by realistic injury, since you just jump to the next one. Examples would be multiplayer shooter games, where when you die, you just "respawn" as another soldier. It could also work in single player games, by making you the directing force behind a number of entities that aren't inherently important themselves.

But for general single protagonist games or games focused on a small number of core characters, life bars of some kind are mandatory, or at least some mechanic that lets them circumvent regular injury.

 

[ComradeJim270]

Jagged Alliance 2 nailed it. A character's health goes down from weapon hits and from the resulting bleeding; a medic's bandages will stop bleeding, but the medic has to doctor the character over some days for full healing (lucky you can control the flow of time outside of combat). There's also energy or stamina that is lost on any attack, or from just running around too long, slowing down the character all around; rehydrating will replenish energy to a point but only sleep will recharge it fully. Finally there is location damage causing temporary stat loss; this also takes days of doctor treatment to fix.
In the early Rainbow Sixes, a character loses speed and accuracy when wounded, and a character who somehow survives a lead takedown must sit out the next mission or two to recover.

Sitting around for days waiting for a character to heal? No thanks. It's a game, I don't want it to be realistic.

I think we're going back towards health bars after a brief period without them. In the batman series, Arkham Asylum ditched them and Arkham City brought it back.

The games mentioned there include one that isn't even a shooter, and another that's a brutally realistic squad-based shooter where it's possible for one of your characters (including the one you're playing at that moment) to die PERMANENTLY from a single bullet. They're not for everyone, but some people REALLY like that stuff. When Rainbow Six ditched the tactical gameplay and realism I was no longer able to enjoy the series and I really wish someone would make more games like that.

 

[Sectan]

I got nothing. I like the hybrid. Healthpacks/very slow regenerating health that caps at a certain point so you don't get out of a fight with 1 health and get stuck there. Mix in a little of the original Ghost Recon's limb damage. Still remember to this day having one of my snipers getting hit and being so proud of my 10 year old self for getting him out in one piece. Ahhh memories!