Are Health Bars Making Games Worse? | Design Delve
Added 2024-03-01 16:04:33 +0000 UTCThis week's episode of Design Delve is now available!
Comments
This is really interesting! Horizon: Zero Dawn is amazing when I played my first playthrough with Ultra hard and that removed most of the UI like health bars. It suited the game so very very well! If you haven't played it yet this is the way to go (if you also like challenge).
Jonne Taivassalo
2024-03-25 08:46:09 +0000 UTCFun essay! To me it also depends on how much focus there is on the player's damage output. If it's a game where your attacks don't vary much a health bar is less useful. Spiderman and Batman might get stronger but they'll usually have the basic strong and weak attacks along with a few gadgets. But if you're trying to decide whether to switch between various weapons or add certain upgrades, it's helpful to know how much each is affecting the boss. (Could also lead to the pitfall of "bad" (unethical or lazy) game design of placing players into a loot upgrade treadmill).
William Alexander
2024-03-07 16:43:56 +0000 UTCI would really love the opportunity to move second wind to a new site (or to have a more easily navigable archive). I love this series but it's usually something I like think about rather than catch during a quick lunch or work break. SW's current setup is quite functional. This is not a dig at you all or your work--but it is a reason your views might be a little lower.
William Alexander
2024-03-06 14:31:53 +0000 UTCThough old games could also fall prey to that problem. Classic Doom turning your screen a solid bright red for a few seconds when you get a couple of big hits in a row comes to mind (what the Youtuber decino called red-sceen-gaming moments)
Wally Hackenslacker
2024-03-04 15:49:21 +0000 UTCYeah, it's such an inaccessible design. It's like "we're letting you know you are in a bad situation by making sure you can't see shit to get OUT of said situation".
Johan Agstam
2024-03-04 13:03:25 +0000 UTCNot much to add really, I think you nailed it. Yeah, I want to know my own health, but whether to have access to it for bosses really depends. Yes, it gives you an indicator of how you're doing from run to run, but it also can get you staring too much at the health bar and not how you're dealing with the attacks. As an MV fan many MVs do not have health bars, but some do, but honestly I think I almost prefer to just base it off the different stages of the boss fight, which is sort of diogenic (was the word) feedback, isn't it? You can judge where you are in the fight by what attacks the boss use and sometimes their appearance. Hollow Knight doesn't do this too much, most of the boss fights have their full capacity from the beginning (unlike something like the Mantis lords which has a medium first stage a hard second stage and a piss-easy third stage), but say Ender Lillies does it with all its bosses except the first one.
Johan Agstam
2024-03-04 09:41:58 +0000 UTCI feel like the Ultemecia boss in FF8 counts as having used diegetic health indicators. The only way to know if you’re making progress in the final stage of that fight is when she starts blathering
Matthew Bruno
2024-03-03 20:26:00 +0000 UTCAt least regarding the player character, I will always prefer a health bar to the "screen goes veiny and red for a few seconds until your health regenerates" style of health indicator. I just find it obnoxious and immersion-breaking. It's like if being showered with pounds of bullets gave the PC a migraine that goes away after a couple of seconds and then it's back into the fight like nothing happened. Have you guys seen Ahoy's video essay on health bar presentation in classic arcade and 8-bit computer games? The Chicken-o-meter video, named so for an spectrum game that displayed it's health bar as picture of a roasted chicken that gets progressively eaten as you lose health.
Wally Hackenslacker
2024-03-02 17:11:30 +0000 UTCI can totally see this in a game where your player is a starship or something (I'm thinking Starfox 64). Instead of a health bar, you see a piece of the ship break off or smoke coming out of the ship. I think it depends on how much is going on: if the gameplay is simple enough, this can work, but if you are playing something like fire emblem or starcraft, I can see this being useful. Though there are some games which can go either way, like pokemon. You could totally add wounds and some little animation to show the pokemon breathing heavily if they are low on health.
Jedirex92
2024-03-02 13:52:36 +0000 UTCI like how in some of the Halo games (2,3,4? don't remember) your health bar is invisible so after your shields are depleted you don't know how much health you have left, I feel like it increases the tension without fully removing all health information since you can still see your shield
Bark Flemmingrad
2024-03-02 07:14:24 +0000 UTCIt would be interesting to interrogate the ludonarrative dissonance of enemies staying at full strength, or even getting stronger, as they take damage and approach death. I think Monster Hunter provides a good example here, as well, where enemies start to mechanically tire out, taking more breaks between attacks. When they do perform "stronger" attacks at low health, they're often reckless and leave them open for much longer afterwards. But it'd be hard to imagine a Souls-like where the transition to phase 2 is "the enemy's armor falls off and they start to stumble around more" without this somehow making them deadlier/stronger.
Steve
2024-03-02 05:29:57 +0000 UTCBack in the 90's, Square and Sony did an amazing job trying to remove the health bar concept with Bushido Blade. I haven't seen anything like that for a long while. Mess up early enough in the game and your stuck with the damage through the rest of you life. Ground break in a fighting game but something like that could really change the RPG genera by effecting your capabilities until you heal properly.
whitney
2024-03-02 00:49:57 +0000 UTCI would say it’s genre dependent. Survival Horror does well from vague indications, action games sometimes just need to say when I’m on my last hit but sometimes I really want all the information to analyse I can get.
Tim Wilson
2024-03-01 21:23:52 +0000 UTCIt's funny, while watching D&D actual plays I noticed if you turn on the heath bar for your opponent and leave the numbers off it acts as an easy visual reminder as to the rough look the enemy is in. It even seemed to encourage the one running to make more narratively accurate fit to damage descriptions based on the physical appearance of the bar. It was also easier on the DM too because if players wanted to know how an enemy is looking they didn't need to ask the DM for clarification. Of course no bar would be more stressful, but require the DM to make their own decisions about how to convey this information and if you include the numbers, the game definitely starts to feel more tactical. It's fascinating to see these areas of design overlap across media.
chronicDreamer
2024-03-01 17:03:44 +0000 UTCAre private videos making video games worse? | Design Delve In this episode of Design Delve, J & Ludo dive deep into the depravity of Youtube to ask the question... Was it all a mistake?
Tsarius
2024-03-01 16:35:28 +0000 UTCBack up!
Nick Calandra
2024-03-01 16:34:31 +0000 UTCMan, Big Health Bar must be a powerful lobby group to take down a video that quick.
Pollio
2024-03-01 16:19:35 +0000 UTCAaand it's gone.
van_Zeller
2024-03-01 16:17:21 +0000 UTCEpisode is coming back up momentarily, we had to make a quick fix.
Nick Calandra
2024-03-01 16:17:12 +0000 UTCWas about to say the same thing. Pops up as "video private" for me
01anon
2024-03-01 16:16:55 +0000 UTCNot available anymore...
Paul Morgan
2024-03-01 16:15:39 +0000 UTC
