The Future of the Health Bar

[Llil]

I like how Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth does it. When you take damage, it causes different effects and you have to use different healing items to fix them.

Light scratches heal on their own after a while, or you can bandage them to fix them more quickly. Deeper cuts cause you to bleed out if you don't suture them. You can also break bones, and with a broken leg for example, your movement speed drops to a crawl, literally, with two broken legs (and also makes a nasty noise when moving), and fixig them needs splints.

Also, applying the bandages and splints takes time as your character takes out the medkit and starts tying up his wounds, so doing it in the middle of a firefight is usually a really bad idea. It still has the problem that you can make a broken bone basically like new in just a few moments, but it's still better than the instant healing of most games.

Of couse that level of realism doesn't fit every game, but it would be nice to see more games use that type of system. There is a place for more simulation like games, I'm sure.

 

[setting_son]

Operation Flashpoint was probably my favourite attempt at realistic damage. You might die with a single bullet wound but if you didn't die, the affected limb's function would be impaired. Shot in the leg? You start limping. Shot in both legs? You have to crawl. Shot in the arm? Accuracy gets impaired.

Dragon Rising took it a little further - introducing the danger of bleeding out and requiring bandages be applied. I think with a little refinement - maybe morphine to make limb function pain free and thus restore walking speed and accuracy (perhaps at the cost of screen blur, decreased consciousness and occasional vomiting ) it could be as close to realistic as you'll see in a game.

Be a bloody hard game though.

 

[Elementary - Dear Watson]

I thnk we need more heart shaped tatoos on the protagonists breasts that we can look down at to see if we are hurt...

The way I see health bars, to make it more realistic in my mind, is that when the screen blurs, and focuses, that is the adrenaline pumping around the characters body, due to the increased number of near misses he is getting! This represents the probability of being hit! The longer you are in the open, the better chance the enemy has of zeroing in and hitting you! Hiding disrupts their aim, and the adreniline rush decreases allowing you to relax again! You wont get hurt now...

Could something like that be included into the new system?

 

[ComradeJim270]

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

If everyone had that attitude, we wouldn't even have these video games we're talking about, because video games would have stagnated many years ago. There's nothing wrong with trying to make improvements, and this is an area where many see room for improvement, even if you do not.

*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.

STALKER kind of leans in this direction, particular on higher difficulties. You die very easily and it's quite possible to bleed out. It can lead to a great deal of quickloading, but some people don't mind that. Rainbow Six (the early ones, before they tried to be like every other shooter on the market) went even further, with the player characters going down after in as few as one hit, and often performing poorly if for the rest of the mission if they were shot and survived. If they were incapacitated, they'd be unavailable for several missions (and you would often really miss having use of their talents). If they died, the only way to get them back was to start the mission over again and do a better job. Some people liked this challenge.

That's what most health bars are - a representation of your character's ability to not get hit[/b], 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.

That's not a bad rationalization of what's going on, but it's a bit hard for me to think that way when what I'm seeing on screen appears more like the Wolverine explanation. I'd love to see a game that genuinely uses the "health" system in this manner. I bet there aleady is one, I just haven't played it.

 

[Jandau]

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.

STALKER kind of leans in this direction, particular on higher difficulties. You die very easily and it's quite possible to bleed out. It can lead to a great deal of quickloading, but some people don't mind that. Rainbow Six (the early ones, before they tried to be like every other shooter on the market) went even further, with the player characters going down after in as few as one hit, and often performing poorly if for the rest of the mission if they were shot and survived. If they were incapacitated, they'd be unavailable for several missions (and you would often really miss having use of their talents). If they died, the only way to get them back was to start the mission over again and do a better job. Some people liked this challenge.

That's what most health bars are - a representation of your character's ability to not get hit[/b], 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.

That's not a bad rationalization of what's going on, but it's a bit hard for me to think that way when what I'm seeing on screen appears more like the Wolverine explanation. I'd love to see a game that genuinely uses the "health" system in this manner. I bet there aleady is one, I just haven't played it.

STALKER still lets you magically return to "zero" injury status. If it didn't the first time you got severely injured would pretty much put you out of action for weeks even if you survived. It has slightly more realistic mechanics, but it's still a magic refillable health bar. As for the early Rainbow Six games, I adressed that as well. These are the games where one single character isn't inherently tied into the story, his presence isn't needed. So he can get killed off or put out of action for a long time and you just take over another disposable character. Yes, you do suffer here, you lose a member's skills for a time, but it's not a permanent thing. The wounded recover and new recruits can be brought up to speed. Also see the early X-COM games.

As for the rationalization that I used, that IS the rationalization in most such situations, especially with regenerating health. Unless you require it to be spelled out as such in big bold letters during the tutorial, that's pretty much how it works. It fits in perfectly with most games and makes more sense than "I'm Wolverine!" (Unless it's a game about Wolverine, of course). This can be in combination with some Deus Ex Machina healing method (Magic, Technology, etc.).

In general, this falls under what is called Willing Suspension of Disbelief. We, as people experienceing a medium (be it games, books, movies) agree not to demand explanations for every little thing as long as nothing too preposterous happens which would shatter our suspension of disbelief (though this is often individual, some people can take more, some less) and that we will fill in some of the blanks ourselves without it being spelled out for us.

So, you have the "Everyone is Wolverine" explanation and the "Health is a general representation of a character's ability to stay alive" explanation. Both fit just as well in the game. I'd say you'd be intentionally trying to make yourself enjoy a game less if you picked the Wolverine option here...

 

[Vault Citizen]

You want realism in Street Fighter? *raised eyebrow*

 

[])rStrangelove]

I really like the blood-impaired eye effect as a health replacement, i only wish it wouldnt be self-healing and look like someone sprayed jam all over you.

 

[Kingjackl]

I like the idea of not having a health meter but instead having a 'luck-meter'. The idea is that every attack that would have hit you instead misses, but takes away a portion of your luck. Obviously it would function exactly the same as a normal health meter, with the anmount of luck lost being proportionate to the attack (you couldn't survive a blast from a guided missile for any less than a full luck bar, for instance). And once your luck bar is depleted, the next attack that hits you, no matter how minor, will kill you.

Maybe the luck could regenerate overtime (makes more sense than health regenerating overtime) and can be augmented by eating four-leaf clovers and rabbits feet. Or something like that. What was I talking about?

 

[General Twinkletoes]

Dont fix what aint broke, it works fine as is.

 

[trouble_gum]

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

If everyone had that attitude, we wouldn't even have these video games we're talking about, because video games would have stagnated many years ago. There's nothing wrong with trying to make improvements, and this is an area where many see room for improvement, even if you do not.

No, they really wouldn't have. Demonstrably so, as pointed out in the OP, the health bar has been with us since 1984 without being removed or improved upon and I don't see that the games industry has become stagnated because of this. We've had 15 years of Nintendo recycling Mario and Zelda, but I'm pretty sure the blame for that doesn't belong with the lone health bar mechanic. Or is the existence of the health bar holding back some sort of magical world of ponies and innovation in gaming?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it does not mean - if it can be improved, ignore it. It does not mean, let's never try and change this. It means: this thing works perfectly well, don't try to remove/replace it for the sake of it. And that's what this ultimately boils down to; the OP's main reason for disliking the health bar appears to be that it detracts from immersion. This is cosmetic change, not genuine improvement or innovation.

Is the released-in-2000, amazing PC game you allude to Deus Ex? The health system there has a whole bunch of green health bars. One for every limb, the head and torso. The abdomen is bizarrely absent. You'd think that stomach wounds would count for something, wouldn't you? That's 6 health bars. Your ACW game example has 4. Is having more of something a genuine improvement? These are cosmetic alterations to the health bar, not replacements of it. Giving the PC a health bar for each finger and toe is not improving on the health bar system, it's just adding more of them. Even those games wherein, if your health bar reaches X point, you cease to regenerate it, you still have a health bar.

Now, you can talk about how S.T.A.L.K.E.R has bleeding mechanics, bandages and a very squishy PC all you like. None of those are improvements on the health bar that the game still has. Nor does it take away from the fact that this is a game in which you can heal AK-74 wounds by munching on a slightly irradiated baguette. If a visible health bar is immersion breaking, then what's that?

Bleeding, heavy breathing, blurred vision, limping, healing only in certain locations or with certain character augmentations, games with very high Bullet Deadliness Quotients...none of them actually improve on the health bar. They're not changing the health bar, they're changing whether or not damage has an impact on the PC beyond "oh, my health bar has gone down." Limping when you get shot in the leg, losing health from bleeding, not regenerating stamina as quickly if you've taken a knife wound to the chest are ultimately just status effects, not improvements on the health bar. It's all about how taking damage in the game effects your PC. But that's not an improvement on the health bar as a visual measure of how near-death you are(n't), it's an improvement on how drawing nearer to death impacts on your PC's ability to function in the game world.

 

[Grouchy Imp_v1legacy]

Health bars and regenerating health are merely systems. Systems that work, mark you. As for a 'realistic' approach to health? Wouldn't work, plain and simple. Because let's say we go for realism - you pay £45 for a game and install it on your machine. You load up the first level, and promptly get shot. Now because we're aiming for realism here your character dies immediately, and then the game self-deletes itself from your hard drive because letting you have a second life is unrealistic.

Yes I know I'm exaggerating here but my point is that health systems can never be realistic, so why complain about them not being so?

 

[Kahunaburger]

I like the idea of not having a health meter but instead having a 'luck-meter'. The idea is that every attack that would have hit you instead misses, but takes away a portion of your luck. Obviously it would function exactly the same as a normal health meter, with the anmount of luck lost being proportionate to the attack (you couldn't survive a blast from a guided missile for any less than a full luck bar, for instance). And once your luck bar is depleted, the next attack that hits you, no matter how minor, will kill you.

I like this, because mechanically luck can work more or less how the devs want it to without being incredibly silly. The one issue IMO is that certain things can't be handwaved quite as easily - it's one thing to be like "this guy shot at you from 100 meters and the bullet whizzed by your head" and it's an entirely different thing to say "well, this truck hit you but luckily you didn't get hurt somehow."

Although a "realistic" health situation might work very well if done intelligently. Fights would be high-stakes. It would also generate difficulty from how unforgiving it is vs. its ability to flood you with armies of trash mobs, which is a huge plus in my book.

EDIT: And it is done intelligently with several tactical FPS games. No reason that can't be applied to other genres as well.

 

[z121231211]

The problem is that, realistically, it's pretty much one shot and you're out. Whether that be because you're dead or because you're so critically injured that crawling the whole rest of the game just wouldn't be fun.

It's really all about fun, injuries would just slow the entire game down. The game would pretty much have to be centered around the health system just to be interesting. Though I think it'd work extremely well in a slow-paced zombie game.

Also, our minds are pretty good at simplifying things. Have you ever really cared about all the reasons you're tired? Your brain pretty much assesses everything and then just tells you "You could probably keep focus for an hour at most" which is pretty much a one-dimensional qualifier for how tired you are, aka healthbar.

 

[Felstaff]

Rather than bemoaning the health bar as unrealistic--after all, many facets of gaming are unrealistic, as they'd be boring if they mirrored real life--but many games are trying to increase the realism element (improved graphics, emphasis towards realistic physics in-game, dynamic NPC dialogue to reflect real-world 'human' reactions, varied personalities in NPCs, etc.), and the health bar has remained a perfunctory element of gaming, even in the games that strive for better simulation of your character.

I'm just wondering on how that element of gaming will evolve as the gaming industry develops.

Take fighters, for instance; no matter how much they dress up the graphics, physics, visual and physical realism and physics-defying jiggleability (hello, Dead or Alive), the aim is still to replace that yellow bar above your opponent's head with a red one, until your opponent falls over. It's so simplistic as to be primitive. Kick to the head = yellow bar decreases, elbow to the nuts = yellow bar decreases, full-on body slam to hard concrete = yellow bar decreases. There's massive scope for improvement of this simple mechanic. Is your opponent right-handed? Then why shouldn't a well-aimed blow to their right arm decrease its efficiency, forcing your foe to switch to his or her weaker arm? Are they fast? Then a blow to the head (concussion) should slow their reactions and decrease their accuracy.

The key point I'm making is that your character is as strong/fast/able as they are until the moment of death/KO, when they drop. My guy on 1hp, having been pummelled to bits is every bit as capable of continuing as my opponent, who may not have even been touched.

Evolving this 'dynamic' element to player health would radically change the mechanics of the game, which I think is exciting. It's a new direction in which to go. I'm not requesting the death knell for health bars - it's the foundation of PvP after all: your actions transform into mathematical operations which are represented visually by your player's health bar. It's a fair system which favours more skilled players. But imagine if your skill was measured on your accuracy of hitting your opponent which hinders their abilities to hit you back, rather than depleting them of their number before your number is depleted. Yes, we've got headshots which take off a greater percentage of the health bar than a torso-hit in most games, and for shooting games where players are human/squishy lifeforms, a health bar seems to be the status quo for the time being, as bullets kill, so games where you get shot repeatedly will never quite have the realism that wouldn't warrant a standard health-bar. But for non-shooter combat games, like fighting/swordplay/lightsabre/non-missile-based combat, where you wield more elegant weapons from a more civilised age, suddenly the skill switches from "taking numbers off of your opponent until their number is zero and they die/fall over" to actually skill-based combat, where a well-aimed blow to a highly specific part of their body could mean the difference between victory and defeat. In its current state, this would be highly exploitable, but why just accept the standard mathematical algorithm with "that's just the way it's always been, why bother changing?", when there could be a lively debate on the possibility of future health-measurement? I think manoeuvring away from the standard model of health being "a number that you want to keep above zero" would create a new style of game; a new direction for the industry as a whole to strive towards.

Spoiler: Slightly NSFW (contains 1998-era boobs), but one of the more interesting health bars I've seen, from Jurassic Park: Trespasser

 

[RagTagBand]

The health bar has not changed in almost 2 decades because it is not broken, it is not only "not broken" but it's pretty much at its pique.

You, yes YOU, have a "Health bar" - There is a certain amount of physical punishment you can take before you lose conscious and/or lose your life, you also have a "Maximum" vitality your body can achieve - This, necessarily, means your vitality can be reduced to a bar. Every persons is different, immense amounts of data would be needed to apply a numerical value to the bar (or how it would operate) but the core Idea is right there. Health bars -are- realistic.

Games are simplistic representations of real life, and thus the "Game" health bar is far simpler, and by this merit game health bars are not realistic...but neither are games. Period. The health system used in games is but one system that is nothing like it is in real life.

Game characters can sprint, indefinitely, given a few seconds of rest for every 10 seconds of running. Try that, tell me how you feel after an hour. Fuck, in most games characters never even walk.

Food? Toilets? absent if not absurdly "Unrealistic". Ever see a game character with an allergy? A cold? Speaking about colds, what about the cold, characters don't shiver, succumb to the effects of sub zero temperatures or become sluggish due to increased heat. Why doesn't my video characters feet hurt? He's carrying around all kinds of heavy gear and never sits.

I could go on and on and on and on listing "Unrealistic" things in games that people are fine to let slip by, but it seems that "Health" is something that people get ridiculously caught up on.

A games primary purpose is to be fun and realism is often an antithesis to fun. If you want realism, what you want is a simulator; Please stop demanding that Games be more like simulators. Especially if that would ruin the purpose of it being a Game.

 

[Random berk]

I think Yahtzee talked about this before, and I think its the best option- keep the green bar, but instead of having it represent the characters health, have it represent his sheer dumb luck. Whenever you take a bullet, the bar drops a bit, and the trajectory of the bullet is subtly altered, so that it just skims by you, with no more than a high pitched whine. The character could react to this, cursing as he instinctively ducks his head, and becoming more and more panicked as more bullets pass by. The luck bar regenerates slowly if you can take cover, but if it runs out then you are left unprotected until you take cover. If your luck bar runs out and you take a bullet, then it does what you would expect a real bullet to do- blow a ragged, bloody hole throuh your character and make him hit the deck, where he will either roll around in agony til a teammate helps him, or just die, depending on where he was shot.

 

[Dastardly]

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

We have to get to the bottom of exactly what the health bar is trying to imitate (and what it's trying to avoid).

First, what we want to avoid: We don't want a "realistic" system in that a single gunshot wound either kills or incapacitates you. So much about control schemes and world layout in games would make such an unforgiving system frustrating -- you try to dodge, but a chair blocks your path like a wall, boom dead. So we want a system that allows us to have a few mistakes before we're toast.

We also want to avoid needlessly abstract systems. Trying to judge solely by how "red" the screen is, for instance. It's still just a number, but now one that your player can't see. In real life, we would have other senses to tell us how we're feeling, but not in a game. Our eyes are basically it, so that information needs to get to the eyes in a way that doesn't take away from in-the-moment gameplay. Numbers are convenient for that, as are meters.

I like to think we also want to avoid the "pinprick of death," in which we run around with one hit point after taking fifteen rockets, but then we bump into a candle and die.

Second, what we want to imitate: We want to create the impression that each mistake brings us closer to death. We want to imitate the body's self-assessment mechanism -- you can basically tell, at any given moment, how you "feel" and whether your capable of running, jumping, continuing to breath, etc...

We also want our health meter not just to indicate how close we are to taking fatal damage, but our capacity for avoiding further damage. Your hit points don't just measure how much more punishment you can take, but we also use the old-school RPG meaning: When you take 10 hit points of damage, it might be that the bullet didn't really hit, but that the effort you had to put forth avoiding it made it just that much harder to avoid the next. (At 0 HP, you can't avoid it anymore, and that next bullet actually hits and kills you.) So the HP bar is two bars in one -- your ability to sustain damage and your capacity for avoiding it.

Combining the two is a necessary evil most of the time, because it avoids bogging the game down with tons and tons of calculations, turning an RPG into an Excel spreadsheet.

____

Looking at all of this, I don't feel like the problem is health meters. We need some on-screen measure of how we're "feeling," because we can't feel it (yet). I think the problem is that how our character moves and acts doesn't reflect how the meter says we feel. We want animated analogues to the injuries we've sustained -- but that brings us back to separate "health meters" for each limb/body area, which you've already said you don't like.

I think you're closing off the wrong solutions, because you've identified the wrong problem. The biggest problem of "realism" with all of this isn't how we measure health and injuries, but rather how we heal them.

Fix the healing system, and you fix the health system. You don't want to have to wait three months to recover from a gunshot in your game, but you shouldn't be able to pop some steroids and ignore the arrow in your forehead, either. Having a more diverse, robust healing system can make different injuries feel... well... different. Here are my preferences:

1. All true "heals" should be heal-over-time. And the time should be effected by the severity of your injuries, not just the quality of the supplies. Meaning if you're next to dead, you heal more slowly than if you're near tip-top shape.

2. Bigger injuries should cause additional damage-over-time unless you apply some kind of "stop" to the wound. A quick bandage to stop the bleeding, for instance, won't heal you, but it'll stop you from losing more health.

3. Any chemicals that provide an instant boost should be portrayed as masking the injuries. Maybe you can shrug off a few more attacks for a little while, but you're not actually "healthier." And when the effect wears off, you're as bad (or worse) than you started.

4. Perhaps different types of wounds could require different healing supplies. If it's a burn, you don't need stitches. If it's a knife wound, you can't just apply antibacterial cream. This run the risk of breaking the flow of gameplay, though. Use with caution.

 

[Kopikatsu]

In Alone in the Dark, you could look down at your body to see how/where you were injured and use bandages/splints/etc to patch yourself up.

Metal Gear Solid 3 did something similar.

 

[Phlakes]

I think Yahtzee talked about this before, and I think its the best option- keep the green bar, but instead of having it represent the characters health, have it represent his sheer dumb luck. Whenever you take a bullet, the bar drops a bit, and the trajectory of the bullet is subtly altered, so that it just skims by you, with no more than a high pitched whine. The character could react to this, cursing as he instinctively ducks his head, and becoming more and more panicked as more bullets pass by. The luck bar regenerates slowly if you can take cover, but if it runs out then you are left unprotected until you take cover. If your luck bar runs out and you take a bullet, then it does what you would expect a real bullet to do- blow a ragged, bloody hole throuh your character and make him hit the deck, where he will either roll around in agony til a teammate helps him, or just die, depending on where he was shot.

And for melee combat, something like stamina instead of health would work the same way. Landing a "hit" is really just breaking the opponent's guard a bit, until they're weak enough that you can really do some damage.