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"If you prick us, do we not take 528 initial damage and an additional 406 damage over the next 30 seconds?"
That's not how that quote goes obviously, but that's about what the concept of "bleeding" amounts to when you look at games. Game characters don't have actual blood, or a systematic need for a circulatory system.
By and large, the ability to live, the life force of a game character relies on the the filling and emptying of a meter, containing the totality of that character's will to live: HP, Hit Points, Life Bars, Stamina, Hearts. At worst, arguably, its a number that the player stays keenly aware of, watching and recalculating like a hawk to maintain one's grasp on this virtually mortal coil. At best, its an abstract and finite limit that responds to damage and healing in contextually appropriate ways. But even then, its still this linear, quantitative meter that rules our decision making at any given moment.
What if we did away with the numbers, in favor of a generally more practical system?
"I walked through fire and didn't get burned...but by the fifth walk in, the elemental damage was way past my fire resistance threshold!"
Hit Points are everywhere, so it a little tricky to cut them out cold turkey, as a cut and dry order of progress. However, there's a certain effect that comes about for games that do not work under a Hit Point system. Consider the fighting genre and two games in particular: SoulCalibur IV and Bushido Blade 2.
Consider all the stuff built around SoulCalibur as a game. By the fourth iteration, there are potentially dozens of item based buffs to augment how your life bar works, from draining energy, regenerating energy, and everything in between. Death is 0, and your objective is protection or creation of that scenario. Numbers.
*Fun Fact: There are no good pictures of Bushido Blade on the internet
Look then to the Bushido Blade series. Hudless, bar-less, devoid of numbers and stat management. You have a sword. Swords cut people. Good cuts kill you. Blocked cuts won't. Life and death is based on this practical situation that keeps you focused on the action proper. Above all else, you need to manage the pure situation, rather than a numerical construct. The result is profoundly different from the fighter standard, and provides, if nothing else, a unique fighting experience.
"That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Unless you're a ghost. Then you're dead."
A significant obstacle to ditching the hit point system, however, will be implementing some logical consequence into the game world, which has the very real potential of not being fun. While I appreciate that Far Cry 2 forces you to do something gruesome and practical to bring yourself back from the brink of death, the act of doing so doesn't necessarily make the experience more fun. But, it doesn't have to wash out that way.
Take the Final Fantasy series. While still making prominent use of number stats in just about everything that happens, there are logical rules at play in the universe the supercede the digits. In general, curing items will have a damaging affect on the undead. Taken to a further logical step, an item that is made to resurrect, will instantly "kill" the undead! Your task of reducing that HP meter becomes a puzzle to be figured, and a thought process that starts to become more important than raw data being rattled out.
inFamous does a great job with these ideas in an HP world. Electricity and water sometimes mix in ways that you'd expect, allowing you to subtly fry a persuing enemy by running through a puddle, for example. What if inFamous worked directly on a principle of electric effects, regardless of a hitpoint/damage concept? Do I really need to increase the "damage" of a lightening effect? Shouldn't a headshot cause major neural breakdown, all the time? Perhaps in a world of powers, the nature of your attack will mean everything, and the raw level value of your unmysterious "Magic Attack Power" will mean nothing.
Admittedly, HP is a tough trope to bust. But going down that road has lead to some of the more memorable concepts and experiences in gaming history. What are you favorite games without HP? Do you think most games could benefit from shifting focus away from giving players that discreet life limit or damage attribute?
Contest:
5:00 PM on 10.03.2009
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But there's also no such thing as invincibility frames or super meters in real life either. It's the usually realism vs. gameplay situation, you got to look at the game as a whole to know what is best for it. The most exciting part of fighting games for me is that ANYTHING could happen, even if you just have barely enough health and the next hit could kill you, you still have a chance to win.
*Obligatory Daigo vs. Justin Wong video link*
I've never played Bushido Blade, so I don't know what that game is like. Perhaps it's just like that sliver of health situation except it's on all the time. But I would imagine that if all the fights were short enough to end in a single hit then they would start to feel trivial at some point. But again, I have never played it, so I wouldn't know.
Also, I think a survival horror game could benefit from a realistic bleed mechanic. If you get cut badly, not only would you have to worry about stopping the bleeding, but enemies could follow your blood trail while your trying to escape. That could be a really good set-up for some nearly hopeless situations.
Surprisingly, a good match of Bushido Blade doesn't feel trivial at all. While a good hit can kill, not all attacks result in good hits. Its possible to score a solid hit on an opponent's arm or leg, crippling that appendage, but not killing. That opponent can still fight, and could very well still win, if they can land a good torso strike. And sometimes, a seemingly good strike may only serve to knockdown or daze an opponent. There's a tension in the fight that's a little more uncertain and strategic than playing Soul Calibur with a sliver of damage.
If you ever get a chance to try it out (especially vs an actual player 2), I highly recommend it!
Dead Space was a good example of this for me. It still obviously had a hit point based damage model under the hood, but since the HUD was built into the character model I never really thought about it in those terms.
Bushido Blade really did a great job of getting rid of hit points in a meaningful way, and I wish more games would try to do that. The problem that I foresee is that it just wouldn't be fun in some game types. Still, I do want to see people try.
I think the first game in which I saw logic being reflected in matters of cause and effect was LittleBigPlanet. But on a more humble attempt, Pokemon Gold Silver did so by adding the atmospheric secondary effects. Like when you use Rain Dance and then Thunder becomes 100% accurate, or how Sunny Day makes SolarBeam released without charging and... a lot of other crap.
Still reality is hard to emulate because there are things that are still not completely covered yet by the thingsscience has not revealed yet.
JK great article!
MAN, YES!
I just found my copy of Bushido Blade 2 and had a good evening of awesome swordplay! Also, I never realized that some of the random ninjas in the later levels of the campaign CARRY GUNS! I was planning a slow approach on a ninja minion, and he shoots me with a single shot pistol!! It was awesome that I hadn't realized that in the 10 years of owning that game. If any fighting series needs a proper revival, that's it!
First off, it tried to introduce motion controls into a PC game environment. In that game, you played as a knight trying to rescue a princess or something like that. Not an original premise, I know... but the originality came from HOW you controlled your knight. The idea behind the game was that you would go through a series of dungeons with populated with all sorts of creatures to be killed. Your mouse controlled your arms and you'd have to actually "swing" your sword in order to incur damage.
The "precision" in control also gave rise to the game's second mechanic, precision targeting. Which meant that you could effectively kill anything with a well placed slice across the neck to lop their head off. Conversely, this meant they could very much do the same shit to you. Not only your head, but your arms, legs, hands, feet, whatever... any extremity of your body was just as easily choppable. In fact, if you were ridiculously bad at the controls, you could pretty much chop your own head off, or your legs or anything of the like.
Though it wasn't that great of a game, I remember it fondly because it was so unique and the combat was terribly tense... knowing that there was no little magical health bar to fill and you had to be quite careful with your extremities, lest you want to try to pass the game with only 1 arm or leg O_o
I'm not entirely on board with your FF example of zombies being damaged by heal. While it's interesting, it's not really much of a puzzle since once you know that, it's just a matter of using the same healing items and spells over and over. Now figuring that out on your own may be very hard unless you “heal” a zombie by mistake (which is how I found out), but ultimately it’s not really much different than using fire against ice enemies or other elemental weaknesses.
As for your Infamous example, there would have to be some kind of limit to head shocks taking out enemies in one hit. Could be fine for regular enemies, but what about the stronger enemies like Conduits? Wouldn't it be too easy if even powerful enemies could be taken down with one head shock? Sure getting blasted by lightning in the face IRL would likely kill you, but IRL it wouldn’t have came from someone’s fingertips.
Ultimately, it comes down to “realism vs. game play” and the context of the game itself. Many platform games and shoot ‘em ups could easily do without HP, but what about games where taking damage is common? It certainly isn’t realistic to be a soldier during WWII that can heal bullet wounds by not getting hurt for a few seconds, but game play wise, it’s done for various reasons.
Still, I suppose it would be nice to see a combat based game be fun and interesting without using HP, no matter how they dress it up.
I think the dressing is a great first step. Computationally (being computers), you generally will need to express the limit of one's bullet reception capacity. Modern Warfare, for example doesn't REALLY have an HP bar, but you get a sense for how much more abuse you can take, using the visual cues.
True enough: the zombie example isn't really a puzzle. I guess its more of a problem or situation with a reasoned solution/response.
Realism usually does go down a road of "not fun", but I think practical solutions go farther in a world without HP. Think of comic books and the battle resolutions that result from comic book fights. There's no "hit points" in comic books, but its inevitable: someone's going to win or lose a fight in some sense, and that generally doesn't result in a hero or villian's death. How does, for example, Ice Man resolve his battles over his 40 years of being a comic book character?
Considering your Conduit questions: I kind of think that would be fair, one shotting a powerful enemy via headshot, if their body works that way. However, Conduits could have a practical reason for being impervious to your shockdamage, considering what their power is. InFamous toyed the tiniest bit with the idea of positive and negative charge. Being unable to effect an appropriately charged enemy would make for an interesting, if possibly frustrating, encounter.
It is, by no real measure, a GOOD game. I'll admit it. The controls are a bit wonky, the use of rappers is more sad than anything else, etc. etc.
But it's still pretty fun, since with wonky controls you kinda have to frantically mash whatever you're trying to do. There's no art in fighting some dude in a bar, and the game actually captures that.
MORE IMPORTANTLY, and THE REASON I BRING THIS UP: it has health bars, but they carry a bit more weight than most do. As you take a beating, you slow down a bit, get a bit weaker. The damages make more sense. A bottle to the face is worth many several more times damage than a punch does. Similarly, you can't jab someone to death, a la Street Fighter. No matter HOW MANY punches you throw, he won't go down without using a super move, a weapon, the environment, or your fighting style's built-in finisher.
Obviously, requiring a heavy-hitting finish was more for showmanship than gameplay, but I think it adds quite a bit.
Thus ends this mini-review, which I just randomly thought of thanks to the fighter talk and Bushido Blade (which I now have to track down and play)
No hate from me: I love busted-fun games, and the Def Jam wrestle-brawlers definitely fit that description! That actually sounds like the type of thing I'd want in place of HP, with those fatigue and finisher mechanics. Good one!
since we are both pre-fapping over the release of WOTS3, this article got me thinking...
Why didn't they use the Bushido Blade Health System. Yes there are instant kills but there is no slowdown in action effectiveness to go along with increasing damage. (as in the aforementioned Def Jam Fight For NY)
Just sayin.
That said, everything in real life could be described in terms of what we call scalars and vectors, or for a quick explanation, numbers and numbers that have directions. I'm not gonna go too deep into it, but I'll say that all HUD have always served me as a tool of viewing the world that was present in the game. I've always seen it as an advantage, for I believe anytime you can interpret real life as numerical data, it makes it easier to compute and work with. As gamers I've always thought of us as an equivilent to some sort of god or deity monitoring and pulling the strings of the universe within the game itself. Such a deity would surely have access to such numerical data.
I think perhaps in a completely different direction than you Tubatic in that I think HP and numerical meters are fine with whoever wants to use them in their game, and that I'd actually rather see such systems be implemented in real life.
over 9000?!!?
It was the only "real" fighting game in all of existence, as far as I am concerned.
Computers also think in terms of objects. For example sword object plus arm object = body object with missing arm. And if you want to get into numbers, I'm sure someone can calculate how much blood sprays out of an artery from a severed arm over a period of time.
I'd like to see FPSes move away from HP, make you a weak little soldier among other weak soldiers prone to getting killed from a single stray bullet. But then again, getting shot once in the belly and spending the rest of the round trying to put those ropey gray coils back in makes for a pretty weak game match.
Its interesting that they didn't, but I wouldn't be surprised if they actually considered it at some point: In Wots2, they incorporated the idea of complete strategic advantage resulting in insta-kills on totally unbalanced minions.
I imagine it was a matter of flow: for better or worse, the death-count for a run through of Bushido Blade can potentially be crazy huge! Couple that with Way of the Samurai's rogue-like death mechanic (You've died, lost your current progress and the stuff you had on you is gone), and the combination of the two would have derailed the fun of that particular style of tension.
That *would* be a pretty sick Hard Mode though!
I suppose it's an HP meter in a sense, but it is diverging from the "classic" Health Bar/Meter system found in the majority of FPS games.
At some point, everything in a game has to come down to numbers, sure. And realism, as a goal for design, can easily result in not-fun situations. Granted and agreed.
But, I believe its completely possible that the Health Bar is one of those taken-for-granted mechanics that we might not actually *need*, from a design perspective. The results of approaching a game without a health bar could take us into exciting gaming territory that we didn't know we wanted.
However, there are ways to not 'feel' like you are just playing in a more 'mathematical' style. Like COD that kinda removed de HP bar.
Or an example I really liked, was MGS3 CURE system, even if it was a little bit basic it added a good idea to make the game more realistic. Leeches sucking you to death xD or how you had to treat gunshot wounds, cuts, burns. It was pretty much selecting stuff from menus, but it gave the game a little realistic feature.
In Dwarf Fortress, rather than having an HP system, every body part is logged separately. In other words, all the major organs and limbs are recorded on each dwarf's stat screen. As wounds are taken, body parts go from white (intact) to grey (light wounds) to brown (heavy wounds) to yellow (broken) to red (mangled) and finally to dark grey (missing entirely). Different styles of weapons deal damage in different ways (blunt weapons tend to break and bruise bones and limbs, piercing weapons have a higher chance of mangling organs from a lucky shot, and bladed weapons can lop off limbs with a well-aimed shot).
It's not perfect, yet, although the developer is working on improving it. Piercing weapons are currently oddly powerful, with weapons like crossbows having a decent chance of piercing both your lungs, your heart, and your brain with a single bolt.it illustrates the points you're making quite well, though.
There's already status effects in Final Fantasy, and the battle where you had to manage those status effects were pretty interesting. What if Body Fatigue, Bleeding, Death and Beat Up were status effects? Beat Up may be a vulnerable state for some attacks, while Body Fatigue could be a different state, with different vulnerabilities. Your healer response is pretty much the same as having low/moderate/extreme HP loss: I've gotta heal that guy.
My favorite example of a non-health bar ridden game right now is UFC Undisputed. Because that game doesn't have any HUD, I feel more focused on the fight. I also like that a well placed(read:lucky) punch can knock somebody out at anytime. It's also great that stamina plays into the chance of a knockout as well.
I've never played Bushido Blade, but from the short explanation it sounds badass!
In other cases, you can switch the HP bar/number with something else (e.g. whether you are Healthy, scratched, wounded, etc), there's always the need for players to want to estimate the number of HP a given entity, whether it's a bar itself or change in capability or imagery. This stays the same whether it's single-pool HP or multi-pool HP.
The same is true for games like Soul Calibur or beat 'em ups. If you get sliced in a vital area with a sharp weapon, you're probably going to die or be put out of commission, at the very least. It would be realistic, but would sometimes lead to quick or anticlimactic fights, I suppose.
One game that tried to do some of this was UFC Undisputed. It tried to at least in the regard that a powerful strike that lands with good timing can end the fight at any juncture, regardless of who was winning or what had happened beforehand. Even in that game, though, we're far, far from realism. You simply aren't going to take 40 straight rights from a powerful puncher cleanly throughout a round and remain standing. Still, the problem remains that if it was totally realistic, fights would just be more frustrating in a lot of ways.
But yeah, health bars are annoying, particularly in fighting games (I know, blasphemy). The main problem is that a very weak attack, if repeated enough times, can cause what would seem to be a superhuman character to be unable to continue. There's no way to equalize, say, me flicking you in the chin with my finger to me punching you hard in the face. Not if you multiplied the flick 1,000 or 1,000,000 times. I agree with Roager that Def Jam: Fight for NY (which was an awesome game!) did this well, because you could chip away at someone with weak attacks, but you had to use the heavy artillery to put someone away for good.
(J)RPGs are the hard one. You bring up a really interesting point about Summons, which are generally larger than life and overpowered against most enemies, and right fully so.
But imagine Kefka, in his magical insanity and wisdom, counters with a Wall spell to Ifrit's fire attack. Perhaps a well planned Haste spell can buff Sephiroth just enough to, reasonably in the context of the fiction, dodge every single attack in the Knights of the Round sequence? The practical counters are already built in the world and are already within our suspension of disbelief for the genre. Why do I need to Scan for Health when I can just figure out weakness and special skills?
Also, Xenogears. A mech vs a humanoid is generally a massacre, and rightfully so. But a mech vs a mech? That's a fair battle.
Tradition is a hard nut to crack. However, I think we're pretty much already there, considering the concepts that are already there can lay the ground work for a change, if a developer wants to go down that road.
Most people think that those lines in martial arts movies like "you always leave an opening on your left side for one third of a second when you attack" are plain cheesy, but in Bushido Blade you actually start to see those little openings, and start to react accordingly. When my brother and I learned the in and outs of our favorite weapons, fights no longer lasted a mere 5 or 6 seconds, and we even had fights that lasted two or three minutes of continuous attacks and parries (?)... when the final blow landed, we both were sweating and screaming at the screen.
I specially recommend the sequel, not only for the extra characters and weapons, but also because they totally removed the "block" button from the original... that's right, on Bushido Blade 2, you actually have to block by doing a counter attack and clashing your sword with the opponent's blade, and if that hit misses by just and inch, you probably won't be able to try a second time.
Sort of like how there's always discussion and argument about the best fighting style, or who would win, "A" or "B"? Be it sharks and giant squids in a fight to the death, or two athletes competing, what will the conversation progress to? "So and so is faster, but the other guy has a stronger punch", but also "Guy A has a win average of % but most of those wins are becasue of X and Y". There's rarely going to be a clean cut answer, there's too many variables. This makes for a complicated, and unfun (for some) experience. They don't want to hear "Well, you probably use this weapon, and I think you swing it this fast, and him here, sometimes". They want to hear "Equip a sword, hit attack, he dies".
Certainly, in one form or another, numbers exist in video games (computer programs) but the question should be how can developers take those and "hide them" from the end user, and in their absence establish a set of rules that the real world can adhere to. Consider stealth games as an example of the rules that I mentioned. In a game like Manhunter (or Splinter Cell, parts of certain Zelda games, etc), there are rules that you must follow in order to stay hidden; keep in the shadows, don't make too much noise, if in light follow a path beyond the periphery of a guard. These are all rules that are based on statistics of what your character is doing. "The db level is in not above the set limit, therefore the noise being made is not heard by a guard who is X feet away.
I have not played this "Bushido Blade" game, however after this article I am going to have to track a copy down. It sounds very intriguing, to say the least.
It seems to be based off the Dungeon and dragon system where you have your hp, and then you are "bleeding out" at 0, and dead at -10. If you could somehow combine that with a system for dealing with hits on certain body parts, all hidden behind a cleverly designed visual cue system, you could finally get rid of the simple HP bar.
Or you could just keep the HP bar, because it actually works. Until games can actually do more than just visual stimulation and make you feel what your character feels, it's going to be hard to convey life draining without a bar or number. Unless you really want every game to be a situation where you either live or die and have no inbetween.
Rather than having a system in which your character's life bar simply hits zero and you die (meaning you can get killed by a jab), Smash Bros. has a damage meter that goes up- and never quite resolves... you always die before the maximum threshold.
What this creates is a game in which you know a lot less about when you're going to die or if the next hit is going to be the one to do you in. On top of that, good players can last longer than inexperienced players by using techniques that prevent them from flying as far off the stage. The game becomes not only about dealing damage and countering, but about recovery.
For a fighting game, I believe that's unprecedented.
And while not being completely free from numbers, it is a step in the right direction- the numbers feel more relative than objective.
I'm also reminded of UFC Undisputed when I read this article--try playing that game and figuring out how the damage system works.
I've just been watching an LP of EarthBound (STILL not released in Europe) and the HP system it has is crazy. If an enemy lands a fatal attack on you, instead of instantly going to zero, your HP bar cycles down to zero, which could take a while. You can use that to your advantage. If you're quick enough, you can eat some food, and gain HP before you die. It's pretty cheap.
@neoREgen
"Rather than having a system in which your character's life bar simply hits zero and you die (meaning you can get killed by a jab)"
You can actually go into "Special Brawl" and have a match like that.
Holy shit! Someone who finally knows about Die by the Sword! It's taken me years since the game came out (and subsequently bombed... Poor game, because I really liked the ideas behind it) to find another soul who knows about it! I was tempted to do a Monthly Musing about it last month, but I never really got around to it...
Anyways, yeah... I think someone should at least try to make a game like that again with today's systems. After all, motion control is now the latest fad and all that. Die by the Sword is PERFECT for motion control... I would go so far as to say it kind of pioneered the idea back in the day, back when there weren't actually that many motion controllers out there. I loved the fact that if you were clumsy enough, you could actually chop your own shield arm off! :p That game required some getting used to... but it rewarded me with someone of the most intense combat I've ever played! Like it has been said before, no HP system or anything of the like... just knowing how to mortally wound (or mutilate) an enemy was the order of the day there... and avoid having that done to you, of course :p