Are Health Bars Making Games Worse? | Design Delve
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ต.ค. 2024
- This episode of Design Delve is brought to you by Death Trick Double Blind, out March 14th on Steam and Nintendo Switch. store.steampow...
In this episode of Design Delve, J & Ludo ask the question, are health bars strictly needed?
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I already watched the old version. What in it was wrong?
Happy Employee Appreciation day Ludo!
@@OrangeDog20I think they took on some feedback about the thumbnail. A couple of comments pointed out the red bar at the bottom of the thumbnail made it easy to mistake for a video you've already watched.
If you look at the new thumbnail, the bar is now at the top.
@@BardianAngel ah, ironic, as now it's a video I have watched that looks like I haven't
The example that comes to mind for me is Cuphead: during the boss battle there is no health bar, and that's good because it's more important for the player to focus on dodging the bullet hells and reading the boss's telegraphs and patterns. But when you do die, the Game Over screen shows you the boss's secret healthbar, and now you have just enough information on how close/far you are from victory (or even just from the next phase of the battle) and how much you're improving with subsequent runthroughs.
(And then there's that damn robot.)
See I love this as one of the big reasons I love Health bars is it lets me know when I die (was I even close?)
Saving that information for the game over screen helps reduce distractions but doesn't leave you blind between attempts.
This is a good way to compromise.
Cuphead is also good in that the boss fight changes as the health goes down so there's some sense of progression
Also worth mentioning is that the bosses did convey some amount of diegetic info by showing damage or difference during their phase changes. You could generally tell if you were close to the end of the fight by how beat up or desperate the boss looked.
On top of this, since the player will generally be dealing nearly constant damage to the boss, the progress bar can give the player a vague sense of the boss’s health *in the moment* along the lines of “Alright, it’s been X amount of time, so they should be entering the next phase right about now.”
While that is great for the bosses, J's point also applied during the Run n Gun stages. Though most of the enemies there died from one hit, some of the ones who didn't sent mixed signals. I can't count how many times I died because a projectile or enemy looked destructible and yet isn't.
One aspect you didn't address is the use of healthbars as signposting. In a game with some open world aspects, if you run up to a boss and hit it with your +1 Twig of wisdom and it takes off a tiny sliver of health, it lets you know: "Hey, I shouldn't be here yet. Why don't I try that other path towards the Sword of a Thousand Truths, and come back with that weapon."
Sure, but then you have people like me, who learned that sometimes the only way forward is to get good, and therefore keep at it until the boss has been cleared.
That can still be handled diegetically. The boss could shrug it off, they could make a noise which indicates no effect, or they could simply kill you instantly. With enough diegetic information a health bar shouldn't be necessary, it's just that health bars are much easier to do.
Yes but like he mentioned in the video diegetic signals aren't free and will take resources away from other aspects of the game. In an open world game would you rather have boss fights without HP bars or hours of extra content in the world?
@@disky01 Not always. Tactics RPGs and the like can often really require precise actions like "Okay the boss is probably going to hit for 50 HP and everyone on my team aside from one is above 50. I better heal them".
No amount of diegetic information will be that precise.
@@disky01While I appreciate a good diagetic "no damage" sound effect it really should be for literally 0 otherwise it might convey the wrong information to the player as the player might think "Oh I need a key item" instead of "Oh me or my weapons are too weak."
Also as someone who has played more Kingdom Hearts 3 Critical mode, I'd be weary of letting things one hit KO your player without recourse, Taking you from healthy down to one foot in the grave in one hit should already be more than most players need to realize that they're not prepared yet.
I just absolutely adore the feedback you get from Monster Hunter Bosses. There is no greater feeling than landing a big, charged attack and it breaks a part, cuts a tail or even knocks it over. It just makes it so worth it.
And the way the monsters' behaviors change as you back them into a corner is just as good as the part breaks. Limping away to catch their breath is obvious, but once you hunt a species enough, you start to notice how certain attacks slow down or become visibly more cumbersome. "Seeing" the invisible health bar becomes part of the challenge.
Then you fight something that only gets angrier when you corner it and the whole feeling flips. Folks in-universe fear Deviljho for a reason.
Dropping a tear; that's when you've really done it.
Even something small like in the older games, the size of the blood splatter was an indicator of how much damage you were doing. Now that there are damage numbers this doesn’t really matter, but back then landing a good hit and seeing a huge blood splatter was super satisfying, and let you know that you were targeting a good spot.
Yeah same. As soon as he asked "What about the boss's health bar?" I immediately thought of MH. It's a masterclass of making you feel both weak and powerful in the same fight and constantly throughout the game.
What you're after then is immersion.
Parts in MH have much lower health bars than the monsters themselves, and what you're referring to is having a stagger bar in general get filled/ flinch animations as visual feedback for fighting.
The actual health bar feedback in (newer) MH games is when the monster starts to limp away, but this means it's low enough to capture and end the fight there. Many of the end-game monsters have an Enrage and don't even give this feedback, so you may accidentally kill them.
A side note is the stamina bar that a (lower rank) monster may use up and then have weaker versions of the same attacks, trying to flee to a spot to regain stamina, and again the Enrage system overrides torpor.
In both of these cases, the map icon for the monster is a visual giveaway to these states, so it's not completely hidden from the player.
I really like how healthbars were used as a way to communicate time-stress in MGS4. Snake going through the microwave room and watching his health slowly deplete was so incredibly stressful
Having "bosses" with health bars that then die in one hit can be quite funny if used properly, i.e. once per game. See Rick the Door Technician in Jedi Survivor. I literally laughed out loud when I turned that corner, got attacked by Rick, and killed him in one hit.
Also What's-his-name, that Mad Scientist who was a Handsome Jack fanboi in Borderlands 2 DLC, that moment was pretty good. heh
Yeah, health bars can definitely be good intentional jokes too, though I think you're probably limited it to only "gettin away" with that joke twice per a game lest you start sending the wrong signals.
It was hilarious in Guild Wars 2 when they re-released season one for this reason. Previously you only had a "re-encounter" with this one weapon scientist who comes and fights you a round after you break his toys. In the re-released story he still comes out to fight....but promptly gets killed instead.
Spiderman 2
@@LacklusterThoughts This is the correct answer.
Regarding boss health bars, one thing I noticed is that the old Zelda games' bosses don't have health bars, but the bosses in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom do. For overworld bosses, it does allow the player to see that they are fighting an overworld boss and not a regular enemy, but there are other indicators that work just as well. For Dungeon Bosses, the health bars really tell the player nothing that the old Zelda games' bosses didn't already convey to the player. It's really only for the final bosses: Calamity Ganon and Demon King Ganondorf, that the health bars provide info that couldn't be conveyed otherwise:
With Calamity Ganon, it is a cathartic experience to see the Divine Beasts remove most of Calamity Ganon's health before the battle truly starts, both for story reasons and as a reward for the player going out of their way to do the main story. For Tears of the Kingdom, seeing Ganondorf's health bar go off the side of the screen tells the player that they are in for a big fight.
What's important to note is that most of the earlier Zelda games don't have health bars, but also don't need them because they're so segmented into phases: "do x three times until next phase is triggered, repeat until boss is dead."
Botw and Tears don't have phases for overworld bosses and tend to have suuuuper large health pools in the early game, where phases dictate a major change in how you handle the fight.
Wind Waker had health bars for bosses, but it was only shown through an item you needed to find first.
One of the reasons is that you had a lot less options back in the old Zelda games on HOW to damage enemies, so doing the mental math on what weapons to use and how much damage they did. Typically you would hit an enemy 4 times, then upgrade your sword and see that it dies in 2 hits, so you could calculate that a sword is twice as effective. The units of damage were generally kept low. Unlike now where a +13 weapon and a +15 weapon doesn't really have much of a noticeable difference, so it becomes much harder to mentally calculate that difference.
@@Dragonsamuariand tbf, the health bars on the bosses barely made a difference in WW
The TOTK example just makes me think of fighting Sephiroth in the first Kingdom Hearts 1 when he showed up with colors of extra health bars that hadn't even been *seen* in the game up to that point.
Sorry for the reupload, had to make a very quick fix! Enjoy!
Hey! I was watching that!
"Swipe"@@anarchodin
The description mentioned "Unpacked" right now.
Love how even at the highest level there’s still the “Everything good? Cool, upload. Shit that wasn’t right!” moment 😂
Video was so good it bears rewatching! Quality video!
Preface: I tend to play platformers (usually exploration-heavy ones), shooting games (shmups), and first-person shooters, with a few turn-based RPGs.
I absolutely hate it when boss encounters have no actual display of how much health the enemy has remaining. To me, it feels less tense and more frustratingly vague, as it feels like it muddies if I'm actually meaningfully damaging the enemy and makes it much harder to gauge how effective my strategy actually is against the enemy or if I'm making progress against it. The only time where this doesn't bother me is when boss enemies take a consistent amount of damage to defeat across an entire game, like how the Eggmobile takes 8 hits in almost every encounter with Eggman in the classic Sonic games. This doesn't necessarily mean that a UI health bar is strictly required. Health bars are my preferred method of representing boss health, but I'm also accepting of other ways of displaying how damaged a boss enemy is - such as how boss enemies in the Metroid series will often change color or change sprites to show damage, or how bosses in Sunset Riders start flashing red with the flash getting faster as their health depletes.
As for player health indicators: I hate the "Bloody Screen! So Real" method of displaying health that FPS games were obsessed with during the seventh generation, for similar reasons of not feeling tense so much as frustrating from how vague it makes it to tell how much health I actually have. My immersion in a game is not so fragile that a red bar at the bottom-left of the screen would irrevocably shatter it into its component quarks - if anything, "Bloody Screen! So Real" feels more immersion-breaking than just having a health bar. To a lesser extent I also find myself uncomfortable with the kind of obfuscation the video described as "gradient health", as it makes it harder to gauge how damaging an enemy's attacks are.
This isn't strictly a health bar related thing and is more of a tangent because I wanted to praise something I like, but one UI element appreciate in games is when combat resources are displayed next to the player character when they're actively using them. The go-to example for me is Einhänder, where your equipped weapon's current ammo count is displayed above your ship when firing it.
I think health bars on bosses specifically can help draw attention to the significance of the moment and really set the stage for a larger-than-life fight that the player is walking into. In Metroid Prime 1 all the significant bosses are the only creatures with displayed health bars, highlighting them as milestones for the player's progress. While in Tears of the Kingdom one particularly hard boss has a health bar that "breaks the rules" and extends far past the normal display after it appears, then goes on to manipulate your health bar by damaging your max HP directly. Using health bars in this way can help communicate stakes in some games where dialog is not particularly present, but make it still feel rather natural to the player themselves.
Indeed. However, there are other ways to indicate to a player that a particular enemy is a significant boss: boss cutscenes are a good example of another method; one that, if I remember correctly, the Metroid Prime Trilogy uses.
The pre-BOTW Zelda games, for another example, don't use health bars; bosses usually were indicated through a brief cutscene that includes the boss' name. Incidentally, BOTW and TOTK still use boss cutscenes for every boss that isn't an overworld boss.
Wrath of Asura was bloody brilliant it how it handled things. Instead of a health bar during boss fights, Asura rage meter just keeps increasing until you trigger the QTEs. This way fights never stop or are interrupted abruptly, because phase transitions are controlled by the player. The boss fights are also never anti-climatic, as the action always escalates and ends on a scripted attack sequence and final blow.
MG Revengence also gets mock a lot for the use of QTE. But if you think about it, you're also executing attacks and actions that are effectively impossible to replicate with a free aiming system. It also hides stiff animations that stand out in more free form combat.
In fairness, the HUD in Prime 1 is diagetic by the fundamental design of the game, and can be explained in-universe as Samus realizing the stakes and having her suit analyze the creature in question. Whereas it makes sense for her to NOT spend the extra effort on this analysis during minor battles with rank-and-file enemies that she can relatively easily dispatch with just a few missiles.
That TotK example is a neat fourth-wall break, I've always found amusement in games that play with you in that way.
I feel like this discussion focusing so much on soulslikes (Hollow Knight incl.) ignores the whole genres that exist that just dont use health bars. Platformers, shooters, and horror games are all genres that put a lot of focus on their boss fights, and which rarely give any NPC's a visible health display, and their near-total absence makes the discussion feel incomplete.
Approaching this from a perspective of "what happens if we get rid of health bars" implies that experimentation of that field hasn't already happen a lot, and I think this would be better served by just a "let's talk about health bars" style of discussion, rather than implicitly assigning value to their existence.
Yeah, I was surprised not to hear Doom mentioned, as they do diegetic indicators very well.
I have to agree with you there, they use dark souls as a design study a bit too much. Gotta cast a wider net, show things from more genres
But games that dont use health bars are designed around that concept. So its talking about the reasons why the games chose to use healthbars. And how similar games chose not to do that. And why they chose to do that and how it changes thing.
A game like resident evil chooses to not give health bars because it detracts from the horror elements of the game.
I think the modern Deus Ex games didn't use healthbars if I remember right. Shooters usually don't do that outside of exceptions such as Doom and Ultrakill.
@madmanwithaplan1826
Yeah, and as a discussion, talking about games from only one genre in the subject of "why healthbars matter" feels like sidestepping the point altogether. If this was "Do action games need health bars?" the script would barely need to change, and I feel that's limiting the topic so far that it becomes near-worthless.
There's so little of this video that talks about the minutiae or specifics of where different types of games will or won't use health bars, and mostly just examples from specific games that are positive or negative
I like having the health bars when there's some tactical reason to have them. If a boss has more than one phase, then I may want to do different things as I get closer to the change point. I think Slay The Spire's blob boss is a really good example of this, since you want to use your heaviest hits as close as you can to when it splits.
On the other hand, I love how Cuphead doesn't provide the information, but let's you know how far you were after you die. That kind of lets you get an intuitive feel for the boss and their habits, which is nice, but also gives you the info about how much damage you were actually doing.
Good point. No one ever wants to waste a “super move” when the boss’ sectioned off health bar is close to depleting. Because unfortunately that excess damage doesn’t carry over into the next phase, it’s just ignored. Which brings up another problem of holding off on using mechanics because the game is segmented so much (and you might get in the zone of regular attacks) that it makes it harder to justify using. At that point the mechanic becomes barely used (as in less than every time it’s filled) that it might as well not exist. Building up those moves and using is supposed to be cathartic and a reward. Instead it becomes a game of “no, now isn’t the right time to use it- aaaand now I don’t need it”. And then it’ll feel even worse if it disappears overtime. Because you may have gotten it at an in opportune time.
Phases are neat, but I also hate how they’re implemented. Not just with a segmented health bar, but because it brings the game to a halt. Sometimes it’s necessary because how you play changes or to emphasize a drastic change in battle. But oftentimes it feels like you get into a flow, only to be cut-off right as you’re feeling good and then forced to start again. Repeating until all segmented health bars are depleted.
ff14's players and boss health bar is really important to the gameplay loop. Because in end game content, healers will need to plan out their resources in order to heal the entire party and accurate information is needed for them to do so. While the boss has a dps check, where the boss will do its mechanics in order and at the end, they will 'enrage' and wipe the party if you couldnt kill it before then. The health bar then serve as a 'progress bar' for the party to know how far they have made it and on rare occasion, if they should make sacrificial plays in order to save the rest of the party so they may finish off the boss.
One particular fight I had that I still remember was a savage fight (E8S) where the boss's health is at the final few percent but the enrage is getting casted. It took me and my friend a couple of weeks of practice to get to that point. And as we see the boss gets to the final 1%, then 0.9, then 0.8; while the enrage cast is going off, and the screen is turning black from a party wipe. And we cleared it, we fucking made it.
Ah, P8S, the legendary meme of the SE playtesters saying it was ready and the 6.21 coming out with them apologizing for making it too hard for the majority of raiding statics.
@@GayBearBro2 oh I was talking about the eden one (AKA light rampant sound effect.mp3), not P8S. But yeah P8S was so bad cuz you literally COULD not do it with a comp that just have lower DPS like WAR PLD MNK RPR BRD RDM because they just couldnt do the DPS check.
And the dev came out to say, 'yeah our dev team got too good at the mechanic with the higher dps party comp sorry bout that.'
@@Ragetiger1 oh us players wont forget, and definitely not SE. In the last 2 Ultimate fights they made LB into actual mechanics that you have to actively plan out and use in order to clear. There are also some tank LBs here and there as well that were used as mechanics and its really fun.
Speaking of things behind the hood, I think it's Resident Evil 4 where the last round of a magazine always did critical damage. So that "one last shot" would almost always pay off.
I think there's more than one game that has the last bullet before reload do critical damage under the hood. Just like there's more than one game where the last portion of the health-bar represents half the total hp. There's also several games where the enemy always misses their first attack so that the player knows they are being ambushed before there's a chance of them losing the game.
@@Sylfa Well duh. I was just giving the most well known example. RE4 went a long time with this mechanic unnoticed. A dev had to mention it.
personally as a player, i want healthbars, specifically for a player...i hate the "red/grey screen effect" which can mean anything form "slight breeze will end you/I can still tank a rocket"...for bosses, diagetic health can work, but often, id prefer healthbar, or at least see damage numbers(monster hunter fortunately allows those)...hard to know if a build works better than the last one without seeing some feedback...same with scoreboards in mp games, they are a great tool to see if im improving, since just watching gameplay it can be hard to measure....Darktide for example does not have any scoreboards, and it made fine tuning builds a nightmare for me
Personally, I've gotten frustrated and quit every game I've played that lacked boss health bars.
I am also someone who dislikes long boss fights if they're not multi-stage.
Yeah, the bloody screen so real shit is so annoying. If I'm low on health having parts of the screen obscured isn't helping me stay alive. It'd be better if there was just a bright red outline or something since that's equally obvious.
5:00 - I consider this a plus for health bars. Getting people overconfident, making them greedy, inviting suicidal tactics, all that is something that should be done, and knowing it was just 1% away from a kill makes the failure more emotional. On the other side, when the extra push does work, you get a great feeling of a finisher move without having to actually code in finishing moves.
The one thing I’ve hated for a while is action games without healthbars that instead use some huge visual. Uncharted (where I love the series) is one of the worst at this, the screen starts going black and white making the enemies harder to see and causing a bit of a death spiral
I feel like Titanfall 2 has the exact opposite of this issue, and generally the right way to do it in my opinion. You take some damage, you get a bit of an orange outline. You take a hell of a lot of damage, the screen starts going monochrome, but the image clarity remains and enemies retain their colour, glowing bright orange against the greys of the world. This high contrast makes it so should you have the skill to pull it off, you can quickly snap to the bright orange thing that's hurting you and kill them first, or at least take them with you.
I will always remember that in Kingdom Hearts, Sephiroth has so much health that it goes beyond what the boss health bar can display, so you need to hit him for a while before it actually starts to go down.
Brawlers would just color code the life bar. The further away from red the color it, the more times you had to beat down stacks of the health bar to kill them. Pretty sure Lost Ark used this method as well.
Technically, rock titan also has this, but he's so much of a pushover that it doesn't matter.
Kingdom hearts had like 5 colors of life bar. Sephiroth had the final color though, Ultraviolet.
A case of health bar vs no health bar that I found very interesting was palying Baldur's Gate 3 (compared to playing DnD 5e). In BG3 you see not only health bars, but exact numerical values, which when paired with the relatively low numbers of 5e makes it very easy to calculate your chances of killing an enemy with any given attack. That made every attack into a completely calculated tactical choice, obviously enhancing the tactical element of combat, but it also takes away some of the tension that you get in the tabletop version, and it made the feel bad moments of rolling minimal damage even worse, when you know you only needed 1 damage more to knock them out.
Hopefully Larian will include an option to turn off visible health bars in a later patch. Don’t need to get rid of them entirely; some people may want that tactical advantage.
The inverse of this is the project moon games, where health bars easily reach into the thousands even mid game, but give you more information than most other games normally do, down to the exact stats of their stagger, speed, and passive moveset the round they are about to activate, and *before you even do anything*. Despite all this they *still* end up having a reputation of some of the hardest, most rage inducing games you can play, because the game is designed down to the lore knowing that you are an unstoppable entity with the capability of reversing time.
Ruina and Limbus have absolutely massive highs and lows, but theres a reason why the joke is "people cant read". As long as you actually take the time to look at an enemies gimmick, you have all the information needed to win, even if it takes a little luck, and squeezzing out a win even when 5 out of the 6 team members were grinded into a fine red mist and the last man standing has a boundary of death and a dream.
Realistically- if we were to rely solely on diagetic signifiers, then we would need significantly elevated design in numerous other spaces. For example- in many games- attacks feel floaty and disconnected. In those games then only way to know that your character can even interact with the environment, is via health bars. It doesn't matter to just know that your attacks are doing damage (diagetic signifiers of how much damage you've done as discussed), but signifiers that you've hit or missed the opponent.
I am playing through Dynasty Warriors 8 rn- and find they lack in appropriate signifiers when you're hitting an enemy (most specifically enemy commanders). There is a sound made when hitting an enemy- but you are constantly surrounded by enemies- so you are always hearing the sound. If they added a different sound effect to show that you've made contact with the commander enemy, that would help. Right now the only way to know you're hitting the enemy commander is their health bar going down- or them flying in the air if you've staggered them.
Also, diegetic indicators are almost always harder to understand, especially for new players.
An enemy has visible scratches and bleed marks on it-how much damage is that? If you’ve played a lot of the game then you’ll know but new players won’t.
@elliotreed6313 the more I think about it (this one really stuck into my mind...) the more I disagree with a fundamental premise in the video.
He says that a function of healthbars is to give a sense of tension as health bars go down, creating immersion... and that immersion is necessarily broken when you die. It's that last assertation I disagree with. Immersion isn't *necessarily* broken as you die.
Look at all of soulsborne, where your death is a mechanic. Look at Resident Evil 7 in the beginning (sorta spoilers). Look at Hades. Yes, death removes the tension from the moment- causing a 'reset' for the player, but I would argue that the death mechanic in these games *increases* immersion. And the health bars do too. You step into a room and hear that thundering music and see this huge health bar filling up... you know shit is getting real.
And the thing is- if he is wrong (or at least not entirely correct) on the assumption about death and health bars with immersion- then his follow ups don't necessarily make sense either. While I agree diagetics are vital (i want to SEE the enemies getting hit, when I hit them), and I agree many games fail at this, I don't think its the fault of health bars. It's the fault of lazy developers not wanting to animate every enemy getting hit from various angles and what it would look like.
I remember playing Kingdom Hearts as a child and getting stuck on the boss of Deep Jungle for days. Every time I fought it I wouldn't make any progress, and I couldn't figure out why.
Then I took a look at a strategy guide and learned about the "Scan" ability, which allows the player to see enemy and boss health bars.
Once I finally equipped "Scan" I beat the boss first try.
Honestly the Clayton + Chameleon fight was the one that made me fall in love with KH. It's just a really cool fight, with enough context that the invisibility gimmick didn't feel unfair. Deciding to prioritize Clayton or the Chameleon was also very fun.
Also the close zoom in on Clayton's shotgun to draw attention to the fact it doesn't have a trigger will never not be hilarious.
Is that Scan ability really in the game?
@@zerotofifty Yeah, the ability to see health bars was an unlock. A pretty early one mind you, but an unlock nonetheless.
@@webbowser8834 God, I need to sleep. I somehow read that as Hollow Knight.
Health bars are essential for certain genres. Like you stated for tactical games like fire emblem, you have to have them to be able to build your tactics. It's also vital in things like creature collector games where you need to bring the health down on a creature (weakening it) before you try to capture it but without outright taking it out. But like you said, if you do take out health bars you HAVE to have some other way to give that info to your players. It's cool when you pull it off well, like with Monster Hunter, and you learn to read how the monster is acting.
Yeah, meanwhile I can see how the non-diagetic signs can also hurt the climax of finishing a boss... In several JRPGs, the game simply won't tell you how much HP the enemies have (bosses included) and you're left wondering if your next strike will end the boss or if you're even hurting it that much at all. After striking again and again and again the boss simply disappears with a canned animation and it's like "...yay?".
Just as a note, there are monster collectors that don't use health bars. Ooblets uses winning dance battles against wild ooblets to get seeds in combination with its farming aspects to grow new ooblets.
I'm sure that there's a really gritty game somewhere in using a more dwarf fortress like combat system too. Where damage to individual parts of the body affect your combat ability. As specific as like brused left thumb. Heck there's probably even a cool mechanic if disecting enemies to learn more about what makes them tick. Of course, this would all likely be done in text description form to avoid scope creep for the art team but you could make it much more usable than df if combat this way was your main mechanic.
@@solsystem1342 Yeah, i played Ooblets for a while, so i know what you are talking about. But you could argue that the bar you're filling up with your dance moves is like a health bar, but like, in reverse because your filling it? Either way, you have a non diagetic hud display that tells you how close you and your opponent is to winning the battle.
@@solsystem1342 Side-note, as much as dwarf fortress was about how extremely complex and detailed their simulation was it kind of broke apart when you then realise that turkey's feed themselves on insects even if you put them inside stone room with polished floors and walls.
One of my favorite twists on a boss health bar in games? Sephiroth, the Platinum Match in Kingdom Hearts 1. All other bosses have up to five health bars, each in descending colors (purple, pink, orange, yellow, and green). Sephiroth has SIX, but his sixth is invisible, and so for the first stage of the fight, you don't even see him taking damage. This is a great way to help instill fear into the player more than any other boss.
I personally hate any health system that messes with my ability to see the game. Red pulsing, colors fading, etc. That system is usually enough reason for me to put down a game, even if I like it otherwise. Also if it messes with the games sound, like slowly getting tinnitus or muffled sound. I think I've seen that before too. Both of those just pull me out of the game and I'm forced to be both less immersed and more aware things are going badly.
Yeah... I find that a lot of things put in to be "more immersive" have exactly the opposite effect. They're some mix of klunky, unclear and either too or insufficiently obvious, and thus give me that "I'm fighting the game more than the enemies" feeling.
@@Daemonworks Pretty much. I'd understand it if it were a full dive VR game or something. But when it's on a screen it just makes the game look bad. Especially when you suck at games like I do. It becomes this semi permanent visual filter.
@@dojelnotmyrealname4018 I would go further to say, numbers are immersive for many people, especially neurodivergent people. Many of us think in numbers and percentages for a lot of things. If someone asks me how I feel, I sometimes respond with an emotion and a percentage to say how much I feel that thing.
My "favorite" example of this is NieR Automata, where the low-health beep and the black-and-white screen prevent you from seeing or hearing the signals that enemy robots make when they're about to attack.
@@Terchuy Yeah, that one got annoying enough that I sometimes turned on its assisted battle mode where it just dodges for you.
To be perfectly honest without boss health bars in elden ring I would give up. In any souls like game they provide a source of encouragement and a way to gauge where you're at. Uneasy way to see if I'm ready for this or if I'm just kidding myself
I would agree! It's like exercising - if I'm told to squat as long as I can, I'm going to probably crash after 45 seconds, because I feel like I'm at my limit. But if I'm told to squat for 2 minutes, I can do it, because despite feeling like I'm at my limit, I can see the end within reach if I just hold out a bit more. Having that tangible goal is what gets you to push through.
I think an example of a diagetic health bar not working is the old Game Grumps fight against the flower boss in Battle Kid. If Arin had known he was just a few hits from victory towards the end, he may've kept going. But instead, without clarity on how many color phases the flower had, they weren't a useful indicator of how much was left, so he bailed.
That's not to say this video is wrong - diagetic health bars can absolutely work, and the best choice is going to be heavily dependent on the feel of an individual game. But using souls likes as a prime example throughout this vid felt off to me. I would *never* have beaten DS 1, let alone any of the sequels, if I didn't have tangible proof that I could take on the bosses. Even the hyper tanky health bars like Midir were useful in managing my own health refills. I don't think any diagetic changes to their fighting speed/style/visuals would have been sufficient in those games.
I'm working on a game called Half-Sword and we have Zero healthbars. We spent an absurd amount of time on different diegetic indicators of enemy and player health status with everything from broken limbs to how much they're bleeding and the sounds they make when injured... There's a lot that goes into it and it's given us an appreciation for how much work goes into these kinds of systems and why a lot of them just go for a healthbar over purely diegetic signifiers.
medieval armored fighting game? TAKE MY MONEY!
Yeah, this is definitely one of those "it depends" game elements, though some genres more or less mandate it like most fighting games or RPGs. I also think health bars can be used quite effectively as intentional jokes at times as long as the game limits it to one or two bosses. I still chuckle thinking about the Mysterio fight referenced, which ties into his "generally a weakling who uses illusions" aspect, and a mod like _Mega Man 4: Minus Infinity_ where one of the Wily bosses has a *really* big health bar that's simultaneously not quite as big as it seems.
I loved the reference to the insta-depleting health bar of Mysterio from Spiderman 2 on PS2
I think diegetic signifiers are vastly superior, but you're absolutely right, creating animations or even entire animation sets for every type of animation rig is a big addition to the workload
One under appreciated part of boss health bars is how it gives an excuse to label the boss. Giving the bosses names do so much, for lore, flavor and how we talk about them. You can do the Zelda standby with cinematic intro animation and title card, but like diegetic health animations, it's extra work. Plus that moment of entering a room and the health bar appears is often enough introduction to get the adrenaline pumping.
One thought for how to still get that moment, as well as the tension of a low health signal without the health bar is just have the name appear. Then, like a health gradient, have the name change color when the boss is close to death. So it starts white and stays that way for much of the fight, maybe turning more grey as their heath goes down. Then, when they are near critical, it turns red, signalling the fight is almost done. For added flare, when the boss dies, you can have the name turn black and evaporate. Again, won't work for every game, but it seems like a good compromise.
The best healthbar usage was for me Ganondorf's fight in TotK. That moment of "Oh look his health bar is getting bigger...Okay it can stop now....OKAY IT CAN STOP GETTING BIGGER NOW...OH MY GOD IT FINALLY STOPPED!" What a story telling moment. You thought Ganondorf was strong but his healthbar grows, and his attacks SHRINK YOUR HEALTHBAR! Talk about semidiagetic actions. We are shown how powerful he is, and the fight was made even more epic because of the information nintendo gives us...
Yeah. That is one of the best uses of health bars I've seen in a good while
in my opinion the question of "do we need health bars" is one of those things you question and then realize "oh yeah no there's a really good reason why everyone automatically goes to health bars"
there are absolutely situations where you'd skimp on the health bar but they are far and away the exception and are usually more a special thing you are going to have to explicitely design around.
I think diegetic signifiers work but only if there are enough of them. It's fine for an enemy to only have 2-3 health states if it only takes 3-5 hits to kill. (Deadspace enemies are a great example of this.) But for boss fights that take 20+ minutes, a standard three-phase progression just isn't enough information by itself. Without a sense of progress, each phase change comes suddenly and anticlimactically. "Am I even hurting this thing?" is, IMO, not a fun question to be asking as a player.
That lack of information feels even worse when you die, because you have no idea how will you did. Did you almost have it and just need to try a little harder? Or had you barely scratched it and need to go progress in the game somewhere else?
That said, a giant slow-draining health bar doesn't necessarily feel great either. So the trick, I think, is to provide enough information that the player still feels a continuous sense of progress. Sometimes that means health bars, sometimes it means something else.
MH gives you damage numbers these days in the standard 3 colour variety. Grey low damage, white normal damage, orange weak point/crit damage.
There's also plenty of feedback if your hitting something too hard for your weapon to get through.
But yeah, it absolutely depends on the kind of game you're making. I feel a boss in general should generally last a certain amount of time. Enough to feel like you overcame the odds. A too-short boss fight can leave the player wanting more, like they just bullied something barely strong enough to fight back. But too long and it feels like you're either ineffective, or being expected to play perfectly in order to survive.
Been playing Metroid Fusion again recently and as much as I love that game, I kinda wish bosses had asbout 25% more HP. I always feel like they're over before I can really get into them.
Another good diagetic way to show health (when done right) is boss phases. Furi would be a good example of this. The game has health bars, and clear indicators of phases, but you can really feel the bosses getting weaker and more desperate. The hand ramps this up to 11 with one phase being a pure gauntlet of parries while invincible that get slower as the phase progresses, until his invincibility finally ends, and a single hit knocks him into the next phase
I may be alone in this opinion, but I *despise* gradient health and other types of rubber-banding. It's dishonest towards the player and diminishes their experience of skill mastery. Imagine you think you know how much health you have left and you're carefully weighing the risks of pushing onward- how many of what kind of hits you can take and which hits you absolutely need to avoid. Then an enemy surprises you with a hit that _should_ kill you but it doesn't. All of your supposed knowledge of the game, and the planning you just did, is called into question. And once the player knows the game is outright lying to them- be it about health, enemy spawns, racing game speed- the feeling of achievement in accomplishing anything in that game is tainted. Did you _really_ improve enough to beat that boss, or did the game pull its punches on you? Even if it didn't, now that you know it's possible that it did you have to think about it regardless.
As someone who never lets an opportunity to mention CrossCode pass me by, I must talk about some of the ways they use boss health bars for dramatic effect. So, the boss health bars are segmented so that you can see when a boss will transition into a different phase and how many phases they have. Most bosses have about three at most.
Without spoiling too much, there is a hopeless boss fight with someone way out of your league. The first thing you see is that their health bar is segmented into 16 phases, which helps reinforce the impossible situation you’re in. They also make a show of dodging everything you throw at them at first, telling you that when you hit them later, it's only because they let you hit them.
Later in the game, there is a boss that seems to take normal amounts of damage, and the attack number indicators (a little ↑ next to the damage numbers) tell you that you’re doing everything right, you hit the weak point and all that. But their health bar is not moving, unflinching. Before this they are hyped up as “the nigh impossible boss”, and seeing you do tens of thousands of damage points with the health bar not even registering it really sells it. It perfectly uses the expected HUD elements to convey the situation, in this case, that you need to take a different approach to the boss.
On a side note, they are technically invincible to most of your attacks on a standard playthrough, not because the devs did anything special to make it invincible but because the boss has 160 quintillion HP, that’s 1.6 × 10^20, and most damage you will be able to deal gets rounded down to 0 because of floating point errors (All numbers in the game are floating point numbers because the game is written in JS before BigInts were a thing for that language without external libraries). You would have to do 35k damage in one hit for it to register any damage.
Not like it matters, even if it registered your damage, you would have long died of old age before being able to defeat it without the gimmick.
I have been playing The Messenger. They use the "boss starts blinking under x% heath" method, in adition to sometimes showing the boss tired or bruised. For some bosses, it's ok. But not for the Demon General. That boss is a known issue in the game, but for me the worst part was not knowing how close I was to killing him. For those difficult bosses, where the game starts testing how good you are with the 35 different mechanics they have, having the information to check if your new strat is actually pushing you further or hampering you is kinda required. The lack of "you are actually getting closer" information pushed me soooo close to quitting the game, only after I checked the wiki and started manually counting hits did I realize that I was about 90% there, and that it was worth pushing through. Not including boss healthbars is IMHO one of the worst decisions a game can make, because that information is key _specially_ in action games where you have to think on your feet to defeat the bosses.
I don't think Ludo has ever been this unhelpful xD
Ludo is the best doggo and I will hear no arguments to the contrary!
2:36 I’m going to have to dispute the “undisputed positive” bit there. I absolutely LOATHE winning battles by the skin of my teeth, as I assume it means that I haven’t actually mastered some skill that the developer is going to assume I can use at will on a regular basis for the rest of the game.
A solid point there.
I find only just winning when I've dropped the ball a bit near the beginning but managed to pull back feels awesome, but only just winning when I've been bringing my A-game from the get-go feels like the game is being picky.
It can go either way. I've recently started playing Dark Souls with the intent to actually beat it this time. Furthest I ever got was the bonfire at the bottom of Blight Town.
I recently beat Ornstein and Smough. It took everything I had. I ran out of estus on the Super Smough part and was doing okay...until I took a hit I shouldn't have. I was down to a tiny amount of health and he had 2/3 of his HP left. Figured that was it.
But I did it. I focussed more than before, I dodged attacks I'd often mis-timed, and I took that last 2/3 without taking a single hit. That's the kind of experience that sticks with you.
And then came the fear of "Oh heck, how do I now survive getting to the next bonfire?" Which was quickly resolved by me falling off the elevator in that area and dying.
Why do you assume that? Do you have any examples of games you've played where that's the case?
Aren't boss battles supposed to feel difficult? If you prance out of them with 100% health, either the fight is designed to be all-or-nothing, or you weren't challenged.
@@DFGdanger I don’t have any examples that come to mind, but I do know this: I have never, EVER felt any “sense of accomplishment” from a narrow victory over a boss. It means I only won because I got lucky, and it’s an undeniable indication that I’m not really skilled at the game, because skilled players don’t win “by the skin of their teeth.”
@@kwakerjak that does still feel a bit like a confidence issue. You won. By luck or no, you won.
Recently I played through Death's Door and I really liked the way the enemies crack and glow with red light as you deal out the punishment.
It did spur me on as, to a more passive eye, I had no idea how many hits I needed to deal out to succeed - so it kept me on pace whereas I find I get complacent in, like, the last ¼ of an enemies health bar as I'm focusing more on the health bar than the fight.
Death's Door kept me focused on the fight because it was in the fight
I will never pass up an opportunity to mention Pizza Tower.
Every stage is split into 2 phases: (1) Exploration, and (2) Escape.
In exploration, you learn the layout of the level, the enemy types, any unique gimmicks, and clear the path for the next phase. There is no health, or even a failure state. It's all preparation for the escape.
Once you chose to activate the escape sequence, tension ratchets into overdrive. The music swells to maximum stress, the screen quakes, warning lights appear, enemies spawn in your way, and a timer rises from the bottom telling you: "this is how long you have to live. Get out!" Running back, you recognize all the spots you had lazily walked around while you sprint by @ Mach 3. You don't have time for that kiddie shit no more.
If you had health which could be lost during exploration, you would be wary of taking on things that were too difficult, leaving behind lots of treasures and enemies, making the ending clunky, unsatisfying, way less tense, and all around frustrating rather than challenging. Likewise, if there were health during the escape on top of the timer, you would lose the feeling of "I can come back from this." Rather than *fuck up 3 times and keep running* it's *I fucked up 3 times. Welp.*
Anytime there is a boss fight, there should be both a way to see how effective your attacks are and that you are making progress. Especially in games where different types of attacks are more/less effective than others against that particular boss. Then players can experiment to figure out if something other than their "regular" would be a better choice.
But without any feedback, you'll end up with players banging their head against a brick wall because they don't know if a better solution exists.
I'm so used to having health bars, then I played Bloodstained recently and the lack of health bars in boss fights was so frustrating, not knowing whether I'd done any more than scratch the thing, thinking maybe the game wants me to come back to it later. I remember thinking even a relatively simple diagetic effect, like the boss having a few visible wounds, would have made a big difference there. Overall though, going entirely from personal preferences, I like my health bars, I've never had a negative experience with them
This episode is especially thought provoking. I'm a DnD DM and we use Roll20. Roll20 has a ton if optional "health bar" options, from being only visible to the DM to whether you can see the numbers or not. For a long time, I settled on visible health bar, but no number indicators, but there have been times in which I've said, "I can't do that because they'll see the health bar." Let alone the idea of weaving in diegetic aspects to a bosses strategy makes for a far more immersive experience. It might make for a bit more planning time, but I think I'm going to try some new ideas I learned on Design Delve.
When you described essentially lying healthbars that are non-linear as a good thing I died a little inside.
I think it depends. Sometimes it might be a good thing. I guess… I haven’t thought about health bars across game genres that much.
What I’m sure of is that sometimes a game lying to you is perfectly fine, games lie to us all the time in the smoke and mirrors kinda way. Graphical tricks like, no-ray tracing lighting. Spatial effects like impossible geometries, infinite corridors that actually teleport you back every couple meters etc.
@@fipachu none of that was an example of how a game lying about your healthbar is a good thing.
This discussion is a thing in Dungeons & Dragons and other narrative TTRPGs; how does the dungeon/game master communicate to the players that the bad guy is hurt? If there is no narrative description of him being hurt, the fight falls very flat, feels monotone, and it's a surprise to all when he goes down. But if there's description of him clutching is gut after taking a big hit, or cursing while casting spells, spitting blood, or emphasizing that his swings are more brash and desperate, it communicates to the players how things are going. To put all of that into a video game, however, would be a massive undertaking.
I agree with some of these points but when it comes to RPGs with lots of numbers, health bars become mandatory because there is a limit to the amount of information you can clearly display with diegetic elements. You can easily distinguish how many hits away from death Mario is at any point because he functionally has a maximum of 3 "health points" but if he could have up to fifty, you couldn't represent that with various transformations.
Same thing with an RPG boss with 20k HP, how are you supposed to convey that number ? Sure, you could have him appear hurt witha different model and animations once he reaches some percentage of health but, not only is it a massive amount of extra work for the modeling team, it will always lack clarity. Even if you made a boss with 10 different steps of "hurt" that changes apperance every 10% HP lost, how is the player supposed to notice and interpret all the changes to the model as the fight goes on ?
And this information truly is essential as a player. For instance, you show footage from Yhorm in DS3, without the health bar a new player would start hacking at his legs without realizing this is not the intended method to beat him and have a very bad time until they figure out they're doing something worng, if they ever do. On the other hand, a look at the unmoving health bar after even a single hit will clearly inform most players that they're doing something wrong.
And you can still surprise the player even when health bars are involved. The surprise extra phase of bosses like Friede in DS3 or the Guardian Ape in Sekiro are great examples of that.
As for MH, I will say something controversial about it, but I'm convinced the game would be better with enemy health visible. This will never happen because it's written in the identity of the franchise and fans would go ballistic if they changed it and I'm fine with that, but still... And that is despite the fact that, as you point out, the game goes to great length to alleviate the frustration caused by this lack of information, but that's only trying to solve a problem the game itself created.
One game that I was honestly kind of shocked to not see given so much as a nod for this one was Cuphead. I don't think I've seen any game since try to replicate what it does with it's boss health bars (by all means correct me if I'm wrong there). For those that are unaware, boss battles are more-or-less the core of Cuphead's gameplay loop. While fighting them, the boss' health is almost entirely hidden. Now the reason for this becomes fairly obvious as you play the game. Given the game's both impressive and unyielding commitment to beautifully emulating 1930s animation, it comes as no surprise that the bosses are the main attraction. Each and every one of them is a feast for the eyes, bursting at the seams with wacky animations both immaculate and ingenious. Adding a health bar to that would have been distracting from what the devs worked so hard on. Instead, whenever the player dies (which happens a LOT for most new players) the Retry/Quit menu shows exactly how close the player was to victory, which one could think of as an inverted boss health bar. Not knowing until then keeps the player's adrenaline high as they frantically try to deal damage while avoiding the damage pouring out of the boss and makes the feeling of both triumph and relief hit that much harder when you finally pull out a win. And given that these boss fights, while unapologetically difficult, don't usually last more than 5 minutes and can be reloaded very quickly, actually seeing how close you were each time you fail is more encouragement from the game than punishment. It provides the feedback on your success AFTER your failure in a way that no other game I can think of does.
I agree, I think the way Cuphead handled health bars is really well done. The only aspect I’m a bit iffy about is when some bosses weirdly stop taking damage during certain times even though they flash when you shoot at them. Examples include Hilda Berg during her freakout animation before the final phase (though you can still build up your EX meter) and Ribby and Croaks right before they turn into a slot machine. You can see this with the health bar mod on pc.
I don’t really like this because you can waste a Super and think you damaged the boss when you actually didn’t. Imo if the boss isn’t taking damage, the game should communicate that to the player by the boss not flashing white.
> logarithmic healthbar not only obscures information, but intentionally misleads the player
> "undisputed positive"
In Shadow of the Colossus, you're climbing or hopping onto their fur in search a weak point, the bar fades in once you've made your first strike. A small player health circle doubles as an attack strength indicator. Finding multiple functions for one GUI cleans things up nicely.
Wind Waker Darknuts are my favorite diegetic armor falling off style tracking it was satisfying tearing them down and knowing when I could finally damage them.
A notable boss fight element that can show health is music. Changing tempo, key, or instrument can alter the mood and tension. Having the boss change colour over time might be a more developer friendly diagetic indicator, though some consumers might call it lazy.
For a single player action experience, a tug-of-war health meter might be a novel way of providing the tension these games want. Both player and boss health are side by side and push back and forth based on relative percent health. If both player and boss are full health, the line is gonna be smack in the middle. Boss deals 50% of player health in one attack? That bar is now 75% boss red to 25% player green. Having the bar get more player focused as the boss loses health would feel more like overcoming the challenge. Imagine having a relative 2% health bar and managing to push it all the way back. It would feel really good.
What happens when you mute the music
This is a niche situation and should happen even less these days, but what about if a boss is bugged? This happened to me while playing through Darksiders warmastered and its apparently know as a pretty common glitch with the spider boss.
It was a really awesome boss but my perception of it is weird now. On my first time through I fought it for 20 mins straight and saw no change, turns out it was bugged and never took damage. After looking it up and understanding I reloaded and fought it again, made it to the second phase in about a minutes time and it was dead in 3 mins. So now I don't know if it was actually a good boss at all.
I love the diegetic signifiers in Helldivers 2. You have a healthbar, but while enemies decidedly *don't*, you can still asses their health pretty well, even down to the lowest level enemies. Small bots can have an arm or leg blown off by a well-laced shot (if they don't die outright), larger bots can actually be made basically harmless by intentionally targeting their arms to take away their weapons. Mid-sized bugs can have their legs blown off to make them unable to reach you for their (near-universally) melee range attacks. Larger bugs can have parts of their armor blown off to signify that a weak spot has been revealed, while larger bots will often start spewing sparks and flames out of rents in their armor when their they're close to death.
Whenever I see a video that references Dead Space, I remember how briliiantly designed that game is. I could never beat it because it made me an anxious mess, but man I loved so many elements of the design of that game. The creature limbs, the health on Isaac's back, and the "map" just to name a few.
If you want to really understand the impact health bars have on how the player approaches combat, think of the first time you fight a boss that gets more than one but you don't know that yet.
Fucking Hades got me with this
I like the idea of introducing phases to a bossfight instead of a healthbar. You can tell when the health is low when certain attacks keep getting used or maybe the boss starts prioritizing evasion over dealing damage
You solidly addressed one of my biggest concerns with diegetic health indicators for bosses, but the other big one is they can be missed. If your diegetic indicator is too slight vague it may be misinterpreted or missed entirely.
For example, when I played Dark Sector there was a boss where the objective was to stun the boss with a special attack then run behind and take control of it as a vehicle. The game has hardly any UI, opting almost entirely diegetic indicators. In this case, the boss starts smoking when it has taken enough damage, but the boss doesn't actually have health in this case. You can't destroy it, so the smoke that is created and the stumbling effects all lead the player to thinking they are doing damage and just need to keep at it. It is also the third major boss, and in fact the second time you have fought a boss that looks just like this one, both other bosses being big damage sponges that you just kinda had to beat on until they went down.
Basically, UI indicators use symbology the player is already familiar with to communicate, so you have to be careful with diegetic information that you teach the language to the player, and that it is clear.
The God of War 2018 GDC design talk mentioned how they added health bars as part of going from a far-away camera to an over-the-shoulder camera. Enemy health bars here help the player keep track of the enemy’s status if they aren’t on camera for a bit, and also encourage the player to focus down individual enemies.
So sideways related, and something I think you hinted at in the video but didn't touch on is that it takes real estate away from the visuals of the game. I recently started another playthrough of BG3 because I'm sad and gay, and I decided to mod it this time.
One of the mods I added had a side effect I didn't realize until I launched the game. It made the onscreen UI elements hover-over-toggle, I decided to leave it as it didn't impact gameplay all that much and what I found was there was so much of the game I visually missed. Removing the elements until I needed them added a sense of scope to the map. Sure all I had to do was walk up or down to see those elements in the normal game window, but visually all together it gave a sense of scope and grandeur to the overall game map. It also gave me a greater sense of adventure, there were less reminders that I was in a game and not in the story. Of course that was broken up when I had to use abilities on the bar to play the game, but I hold on to the feeling I got when I was encourage to actually look at the edges of the map, because there wasn't something covering it up.
That's not to say I would prefer the default game to be like that, but the fact someone moded this into the game, something a player felt would improve the experience enough to spend the time changing the game code, says a lot.
P.s. It would be interesting to hear you talk about the place of modding in the larger game community, and when and why a game should encourage/discourage modding. Like why some games ban and actively punish modding, or why some games seemingly design their game for their community to mod the game to make it interesting. Or like the case when the Valheim devs had to discourage people making and charging for mods for their game, but supported free mods.
I love Design Delve. I don't know if this is entirely a Second Wind thing (i.e. whether a similar segment under a different name existed at The Escapist), but I'm really enjoying this content.
I can’t believe I missed that this came out. I love Design Delve. I think it just got lost amongst the notifications for all of the livestreams that I don’t have time to watch. There are so many livestreams.
It is worth noting that the gradient healthbar can be misleading if used incorrectly. The Guilty Gear series has a mechanic called Guts which functions in this way and many players find issue with it due to how much fighting games rely on transparency in their mechanics. Seeing that your opponent is at 20% HP and failing to finish them off with a BNB that deals 35% just doesn't feel good.
One important thing to game feel that health bars can help with is the feeling that your attacks are doing something. For the most part in a shooter if you hit something with bullets there'll usually be some sorta blood splatter, hit indicators, enemy flinching, etc. However in Helldivers when playing with some beam/energy weapons I often had times when I was wondering "Am I doing anything?" The enemies dont really flinch from the damage and there isn't much of a hit indicator aside from just seeing the beam hitting the enemy. While having a health bar for every enemy would be a nightmare, for weapons like a beam seeing a health bar draining helps with understanding how much damage your actually doing.
You say 'tension,' I hear 'frustration.' The pitfall I feel too many devs fall into is trying overoy hard to manipulate player behavior rather than just provide the tools/guidance needed to play the damn game and letting success or faliure stem from that. If I lose because I'm spending time watching Maliketh's health bar rather than his spine-bending spinning Naruto polymorphic combos, then that's on me. Let me fucking fail, please and thank you.
Conversely, give me the information I need, even if it's a toggle somewhere in options. There are very few times when I don't want to know things. How much HP? How long does this debuff last? What even does the debuff do? Are my attacks even doing damage? What are hotdogs?
I love it when you can see bits being torn off. I think a good midpoint is MechWarrior games. There are scanners to give general health of parts for you and your targets, but you also can see when you cleave off entire chunks from mechs.
A health bar hitting zero is just a failure state.
If you wanted to do it differently, for a number of games you might be able to implement a number of hits system, but at the end of the day it would still be analogous to using a health bar. It survived because it's useful, historical, and simple.
Honestly i wish more games used more health bars. I think, unless your game is a boss rush game like Monster Hunter, than every boss, and mini-boss, should have a health bar.
I wonder if it has been done or would be effective to give a boss a reverse-gradient health bar. One that only ticks down slightly early in the fight to show how strong the boss is and direct more focus to learning the boss' patterns than looking at the HP bar, but as the player gets further into the fight the boss' health is removed ever so slightly faster to give a greater weight to the player's learning and progress
Elden Ring’s Crystalians are like this. At first you do chip damage but get them down to 80%ish and they collapse, and then take much more damage.
Toriel technically has this in Undertale. Though the purpose is to trick the player into killing her by accident, not to make the player feel powerful.
A better idea than a gradient in that case would be to just do more damage with a higher combo tied to the boss.
If you know the pattern and are dodging it, the reward is going to the next phase or defeating it faster.
Actually now that I think about it, project zomboid does something similar. After 3 hits on a zombie, the damage you deal to it starts going up.
@@dorongrossman-naples9207 In Undertale they're the same thing.
I can't remember the name of the game but way back in the c64 days I played an RPG that had no health bars
All the damage was localized. As arms and legs look damage your abilities were degraded in movement and combat respectively
Damage to your head degraded all your abilities
If a part of your body was destroyed, you couldn't use it at all anymore and if it was a vital part like your head or your chest, you were dead
I found myself paying a lot more attention to the specific armor pieces I was wearing. I remember at one point one of my guys had a helmet on that had a great buff on it. But poor protection. He kept getting hit in the head and killed and I had to reload.
I eventually dumped the Cool magical helmet for one that could protect his head
I haven't really seen any other game who's tried to do this.
Must have been a dungeon crawler. I've seen one hand that had this type of system - it was a roguelike, a traditional one, where you could target enemy limbs or the head, and they could do the same. Since this was a roguelike, losing a limb would pretty much kill your run. It wasn't one of the popular ones so I don't even remember anything else about the game.
I suspect dwarf fortress might have this too though.
@@memetic_hazard
I've got a box down in my basement that has old c64 games in it and I keep meaning to go through it and find that game so I can remember the name of it.
I might even try playing it again. I've never seen the game quite like it. But thank you for your feedback
My favourite example of diogetic health bars is in the underrated ps2 series, The Getaway. In it (and the sequel, Black Monday), if your character takes damage, he will begin to limp slightly, mild blood spatter will remain on his shirt where he was shot, his aim will be slightly wonky, and he cannot run as fast. This worsens at near-death to barely being able to hobble around and having a severe limp, with completely blood-soaked clothes.
In order to recover your health, you must remove yourself from combat and find a wall or a door to lean against. Your character will pant heavily for a few moments, the blood will vanish, and after a bit you'll be able to walk around normally again and your aim will steady.
I remember thinking this was really cool when I played these games as a teen and I've yet to see this done in the same way since. I know Killzone, CoD etc have the whole get to cover to recover mechanic baked into them but it doesn't feel as good due to the 1st person viewpoint, imo. It feels unnatural instead of like you're trying to actually help yourself.
Death's Door did the diagetic route. Enemies with significant health pools (bosses and minibosses) show red cracks as their hp dwindles. The closer to death, the more "fractured" their appearance before they are slain and the red souls are collected. It acts like milestones to compare previous attempts and keeps you tense as you dont know if the enemy can "hold on" (fracture further) or if it's on the verge of death
I really think this is another great aspect of Cuphead where the boss's phases are a great mixture of knowing when you are close to beating them without having to see how much or how little damage your attacks do.
Don’t know if you mention it, but Doom Eternal (along with Helldivers 2) has a pretty unique approach to enemy health bars. The system where shots blow off pieces of the demon’s flesh not only makes the shooting more satisfying, but gives a good visual cue to how much health a demon has without needing a health bar.
From a player perspective, I don't think I've ever played a game where I thought bosses not having a health bar would be an improvement. Diegetic clues that the boss is dying are also great (and are used in conjunction with health bars in a lot of action games), but anytime I've had to fight a boss that doesn't have a health bar(especially if it's challenging and requires multiple attempts) I've just found myself frustrated by the lack of information.
Damage in most games is variable, and without a health bar you can't check compare what strategies are more effective against a boss. Does the boss take more damage from this weapon or that weapon? If so, by how much? You diegetically show a boss getting weaker, but you can't really diegetically compare something like DPS. DPS isn't something that's important in all games, but if it's anything where I can customize my build or use a variety of weapons, then as a player I think having the information is important enough to sacrifice "immersion" and just have a health bar on enemies.
I did get fed up with the trope of health bar gets down to half way and the boss changes
It's better than the boss changing at zero health.
Health bars are good - when they're honest on both the player and the enemy. If they're doing crap like "gradient health", then they're worse than useless since the damage you're taking and receiving has no relation to what you're actually doing. At that point, you might as well just go all the way to that incredibly stupid and useless vignetting of the screen (with or without "blood") that seems so popular these days.
@4:20 - No, removing health bars doesn't create "tension". All it does is create frustration and a sense of "Why bother?".
One diegetic system I would like to see is not just a visual clue that your character or the enemy character is being hurt by an attack, but where the character becomes "physically" changed by the attacks. e.g. they begin to move slower, their attacks become more desperate.
This would be a bit like phase 2 of a FromSoft boss but I think it could be played around with to great effect.
Particularly with the player character, where you get a feeling of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.
Another term for gradient health popular in the fighting game community is Guts
In the case of Spyro.. Absolutely. Anyone remember that one? They gave every enemy a health bar, and a randomized First + Last name. Implying these random goons we were killing had lives, families, hopes and dreams, etc..
What Spyro game were you playing? I don't remember that at all.
@@webbowser8834 "The Legend of Spyro" IIRC. Other features include humanoid firefly Sparx voiced by David Spade, and slo-mo at random moments when dispatching enemies.
@@qrowingOh gosh, I think I remember that one. It was the weird co-op one where you got tied to some other girl dragon, had wonky flight mechanics that had you constantly running into invisible walls, and the only good level was Avlar plains, right? I don't remember the randomly generated goober names, but I'm also not gonna question it. Game was weird.
@@webbowser8834That sounds like the sequels. I don't remember if the random names were kept for those.
This actually reminds me of how combat is typically handled by DMs in Dungeons and Dragons: you can have your character check visually to see how beat up or on their last legs an enemy creature is, but you dont get to know it's actual health points. And even though you can get a description of how bloodied it is, it's not always enough to tell what you should spend resources on damaging and what you should be trying to finish off with a regular attack, and it definitely adds to the tension
As someone who recently got into Monster Hunter, watching a monster develop a limp and try to escape is infinitely more satisfying than just seeing a health bar drop low
Old beat em ups used to make the bosses flash red as you got their health down. It was a cool feeling when you made them start blinking and you knew you were close, but it also felt like you weren't accomplishing anything up until that point. I guess that's an early example of a really simple Diegetic signifier.
I hadn't realised how much resources diegetic information took to program. Explains why they are not more widely used.
One famous example of gradient health bars is the Neutral Ending boss in Undertale. His attacks drained a percentage of health, so you'll take some big hits right away and then spend most of the fight looking like you're on the back foot with your tiny percentage of health, even as you can take more hits than you probably think. it's also necessary since the player could be anywhere from level 1 to level 19 (or maybe slightly less than 19, not sure what your maximum level could be while still avoiding the Genocide ending,) so the fight needs to address a range of player health states.
As for diegetic boss health, I'm old enough to remember the classic example: flashing red. The way pretty much every boss in brawlers would show damage, to the point that bosses at low-level would probably warrant an epilepsy warning now.
Fps genre has such a strong reliance on what the health situation looks like for how the game feels. In borderlands you get an arcadey shooter where you only care about timetokill and "number go down." In something like sniper elite, you use your pinpoint precision weapon to hit the one spot that will take your enemy down. In Borderlands you mostly spray and pray. Even with snipers. Both kind of fit the tone of their respective games.
Something like Arma or Tarkov does a little bit of numbers go down but none of it is visible for the player firing the shot. You either see the body run away, slump down or don't see anything. I conflated health bars with health mechanics but I feel like they do intermingle enough to mention both. Fps is so heavily tied to damage numbers 99% of the time.
Dragon Quest as a series has made your health/command window change color as you get weaker from the first game, and then I believe in DQ10, but possibly earlier in DQ9, they also made the enemies' names change color as they get weaker. It's a nice way to let you know if you're actually winning a boss fight without giving exact HP values or using a health bar. It's also really satisfying when you pull off a big damage move and see the enemy's crazy death/defeat animations before their name's color goes from healthy to near-dead. It's like that feeling of "I just took a huge chunk out of this guy's health bar!" without actually having to draw a health bar. I just felt like mentioning this because DQ's a series that gets ignored, when the UI/UX is a strong point.
If there is visual representation of the progression of damage dealt on an enemy, it is MUCH MORE SATISFYING than seeing a health bar move down. But is is also more expensive to create.
If I hack and slash at a target and I see his pauldron fly off, his chest plate crack, his helmet shatter, his shield splinter, I couldn't care less about how much HP I took away from the enemy, or if its a boss or a grunt I AM HAVING FUN!!! Even if the damage was minimal due to "armor damage mitigation". If it was simply a health bar refusing to move I would be frustrated.
But the cost of this kind of feature vs a UI artist's afternoon adding a red rectangle is probably the reason why we don't see that often.
It is also why I am enjoying Helldiver 2 so much, seeing all those parts fly off when I shoot, I don't even wonder about how much damage X weapon does, I just look at the monster loosing bits.
Something I didn’t see mentioned was a reactive health bar for bosses.
Remnant 2 has a system where enemy health, debuffs, and buffs are all displayed on or near the health bar; which I feel gives the player a lot of feedback on what they’re accomplishing against the boss beyond straight damage.
However, some bosses that do have buffs also have those fluctuate depending on phases and their reactions.
For instance, one of the Losomn bosses has 3 phases. In two of them he has a minor damage reduction buff, but that is removed during the third phase because it comes obvious through the phase change that they’ve completely lost their composure and are desperately trying to fend you off.
Their move set also reflects this change as they switch from directly confronting you to attempting quick hit and run attacks.
In a racing game called GRIP, you get both, a number that should not reach 100% and your car having a little bit of an inferno going on in the back.
Having not watched/listened to design delve prior to the second wind happenings, I can say I genuinely adore your series and look forward to every episode more than any other series on SW.
With the Assassin's Creed games pre-Unity one issue I and many others have had is that the player character is too tanky.
It becomes difficult to put oneself in the shoes of a sneaky assassin when you can take on a small army and soak up more blows than a fully armored knight.
But then one day I tried something mind blowing: I turned off Health in the HUD options.
And what resulted was that while my character was as night impervious to damage as before, I now started paying much more attention to the animation of my character getting hit.
Those animations are really lively and well done, wince-inducingly good.
No more did I look at my character taking a sword to the face and not thinking much of as it'd take only 1/20th of his health, but instead I see him stagger from the blow and think "That looks like it hurt a lot".
The ship battles in AC4 and Rogue became a whole lot more tense, as they had a pretty decent damage-scale.
Thing is that the ships have diegetic health indication alongside the health bar.
The health bar is split into three sections, first one has your ship looking pristine, second bar has the sails looking tattered and on the last bar you ship has holes with smouldering wood.
an interesting example of how healthbars are handled is the resident evil series (as well as other survival horror games, like silent hill). The healthbar itself is hidden and the only indications given as to how much health you're on is a colour system: green for healthy, yellow for caution and red for danger. These games also have a different walking/running animation for when you're at caution health or lower, where the player limps a bit. The system combines diegetic health with limited information to create a lot of tension without making the system too obtuse, which is perfect for survival horror. of course, not all RE/SH games use this system, eg. SH4 and RE4 both have traditional healthbars.
Been replaying an old game which I have never played before, but I like the franchise; Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. Anyway, just got to a fight with a lad called Malek, and he doesn't have a health bar, but he grunts and groans when you hit him. So I spend a good 10 minutes wailing away at this guy, getting no feedback other than the fact I'm hitting him. Turns out I was meant to be combo-attacking him and the fight is over in under two minutes if you know that. Sometimes it can be frustrating when you've got a "puzzle boss" but there is nothing to feed that back to the player.
the first person genre got rid of healthbars and replaced it with JAM SMEAR and regenerating health for decades. Even Halo ditched the actual health from Halo 1 and replaced it with just the shield gauge, because once your shield is empty there's this ambiguous tension about whether or not you can be instantly killed.
The thing about a health bar is when you get smacked by an NPC and your health bar goes "ding" when you lose two percent of the pixels, you are aware you were ... smacked by an NPC. But if an NPC punches you and you lose say half the health bar - you will have a moment of "OW! That really hurt me!" that your character is also experiencing. I prefer a health bar for myself but I DO like this idea of no health bar for the enemy - provided they react accordingly. If the enemy gets slower or more blood comes out or more frenzied - an actually visual representation of progression would be awesome though it will make some animation artist's life a bit more aggravating.
I do utilize boss health bars to determine if I am wasting my time (Elden Ring) on a boss that might be above my level or if a new trick/tactic I am trying is actually making an impact. However, I don't mind losing the health bar progression if there is visual evidence I am doing anything.
I was wondering if you could tie player information into the mechanics and narrative elements of the game? Since you've used Bloodborne as an example, as the Hunter gains insight they gain a greater understanding of the unknown (i.e. health bars and weak point indicators, etc), but these revelations whilst helpful come at their expense such as the increased monster spawns and new attacks they gain for high insight.
I will also say, whenever Proof of a Hero kicks in on one of the huge (Jhen Moran) or exceptionally Big Bad (Fatalid) monsters, it is the BEST "you're almost there, keep fighting!!" indicator in ANY franchise. The monster starts hearing YOUR boss fight music.
One of the best examples in recent history of doing away with a boss health bar was Cuphead. You’d be hammering away relentlessly, unable to grasp how well or poorly you were doing until you got knocked out and saw how far (or usually how LITTLE) progress you made. This made the eventual “Knockout!!!” an incredibly visceral release (just see Jack Scepticeye’s epic playthrough experience). That was an incredible inversion of the typical health bar boss fight formula that worked so well.
The gradient healthbar trick doesn't just make the lower half tense, has the additional effect of raising stakes faster. At full health, that one surprise boss swing is going to take a much larger chunk of your healthbar immediately. By making the topoff portion of your health paper thin, YOU feel paper thin after a single mistake.