Why are health bars still in games? They're literally obsolete - everything else in games has improved

Why are health bars still in games? They're literally obsolete - everything else in games has improved.
We can easily simulate shit like the organ systems of characters which make games (for example, tactical shooters) 10x as more fun.

Other urls found in this thread:

dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/40d:Wound
dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Combat
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Go play your sniper games and get lost

...

...

nice ID dubs though

good response, faggot

don't mean to doublepost but holy shit mario doesn't even have a healthbar you fucking fucktard fuck

...

Do not underestimate the realismfags

If your computer is shitty and old, good luck with the lag. Try implementing that shit in an RTS game like StarCraft. The CPU keeps track of all the stats of each unit and sub-unit on each side. Not everyone can afford some server PC with 4 physical CPUs with 12 cores each.

But how is this sacrificing gameplay for realism? It's much more fun and gameplay intensive to have to attack at weak points like in DF than to just do the generic "attack" command and HURR DURR you dealt x damage.

And Odyssey has em too

how embarassing

because the ability to take more then 1 hit is vital to several genres of gameplay you retard

...

bait thread

What the fuck are you talking about nigger? Are you trying to apply some cuck "fallacy" shit to something that isn't even an argument?

OP is cancer. Abort thread.

Except in DF it's basically just flavor text for your generic "attack" command.

Eat shit tard

...

dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/40d:Wound
dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Combat

You're so disconnected from individual dwarves that wounds barely mean anything, unless you're trying to save half your army from a huge battle. In which case you just dump a bunch of medics. Or maybe a soldier lost his arm so you have to retire them. Beyond that none of that shit matters.

Actually it's interesting you bring this up, because Dwarf Fortress is forever being held back by its half assed attempts to be realistic. All the trades are literally just reskins, and the game lags hardcore because it's on a single core and the history of the world bottleknecks everything.

They're all things that sound cool on paper but people who actually play the game either tune them out or aren't aware of their existance.

...

I didnt imply shit, you are talking about simulating organ systems, when you simulate the organ system of life as we know it there are certain stimulus that will be able to cease its functions in a single instance, AKA instant kill
I merely posit that there are MANY types of games that would suffer under such a system

You certaintly did imply shit, dude.
You definitely >implied that everything would die in one hit regardless of implementation

because fun > realism
in many games full body simulation would be at best unncessary, at worst a hindrance that would suck up a bunch of time and money to develop and actively detract from the gameplay

You don't know the true faggotism of orbs.

You're right, we should all use lives instead.

So you basically confirmed what I said earlier

You're a fucking idiot OP.

I'm guessing you would also think Tetris would be a better game if it simulated euclidean physics down to the subatomic level.

You mean "Marios", right?

realism=/=fun

Deus ex did healthbars right.

sucks how metal gear solid 3 is basically the one and only 3D game with a health system that wasn't zero effort, but it still fell flat.
there was no incentive whatsoever to heal yourself, healing items were infinite and running out of them was impossible anyway.
i mean you could beat the game with all four limbs broken and leave in the crossbow bolts shot by the fear and it didn't make a fucking difference.
would've been amazing if you had a bad limp from one broken leg and had to crawl for two, and if you jumped or were knocked down he'd scream in agony and take a major hit to health.

the fact is OP that normalfags (Holla Forums) don't want to be challenged. they want their epic anime hero to ALWAYS win. games where you're a nameless nobody none of the NPC's care about, or games that are hard and make them feel insecure about their skill is a big no no. they want games like toukiden where enemies stand completely still and let you unleash cinematic anime combos on them uninterrupted.

i'm sorry that you have aids, user

Speak for yourself.

While a deep wound and battle system is not advisable for games with lots of units (especially when badly coded. You said yourself, DF runs on only 1 core), it in itself is not a bad thing.
Quite the contrary.
Every hit has clear and logical reprocussions. Armor actually matters. Characters can actually get maimed or crippled.

Oh neat, a dubs thread!

The other dude was shilling it like in combat you actually can tell your dwarves where to strike, or you can have a level of strategy to focusing weakpoints. Really you can only have an input on it via how you customize your dwarves armor and weapons. Even with weapons it's shit like "Slashy adamantine/steel weapons for undead" "Bashy silver weapons for armor" and retiring dwarves who have their chin chopped off.

Hell no, you are asking for a literal artficial difficulty.

Any realistic damage system would include one-hit-kills. Throats, bigger arteries, brain and heart, to lesser degree kidney and lung wounds.

OP IS A FAGGOT THIS TIME AGAIN

Kill yourself.

cumming in my pants just thinking about it

This thread is fucking retarded

if this isn't bait, they provide a good approximation for health without needing to read shit, which makes resource management a hell not a lot easier
don't try to fix what isn't broken

I'm not even gonna give you a (you) OP

Well done Holla Forums. I mean I also think OP is a faggot but some of these responses are so retarded that I'm feeling inclined to play devil's advocate.

The two aren't mutually exclusive idiots, do you really think people play realistic games because they don't find the realism makes the game more enjoyable? Hell a lot of enjoyably unrealisitic gameplay mechanics sprang from developers initially trying to make their games more realistic.

No not every game needs an elaborate health system, but lord knows we could do with more of them. I swear none of you here better be the same anons who have complained about the dumbing down of the RPG genre over the years.

Because everyone has a life unlike you

Why are you posting this shit since yesterday?

chzech
I only spam to trapfags

These are girls

no those are futas

God I want to pop every zit on that face so bad

More like things would be comically unpredictable. Take Dwarf Fortress: It's possible both for an experienced miner to cleave the head off of a Forgotten Beast in a single blow - but it's also possible for the pick to get lodged in a shoulder, wrenched from his hands, and chucked into a magma chasm, resulting in a million-page text log of wrestling that achieves nothing. In some kinds of games, this sort of dynamic would be good - in others, not so great.

Simply put, no one design ethos works for everything. Attempting to apply one design idea (In this case: The internal workings of the body should be simulated in lieu of a health system) to everything would range from troublesome to absolutely disastrous.

We should all switch to clothes damage system and all characters should be anime girls. It's 2017 goddamnit. Men's asses are obsolete and need to be replaced with cute girls or passable traps. It's the only way games can be considered art.

You can target areas in adventure mode.
It seems like you don't "get the point" of playing Dwarf Fortress. I don't know if you have ever played D&D or a similar game, but the point of tabletop games is to create a story interactively. The story of your characters is created as you play the game. It's the same thing with Dwarf Fortress. The point of DF is emergent storytelling, and that you can get a different story with every fortress. The "flavor text" you are describing is controlled by game systems, but it is ultimately the meat of the game, the true reward for playing the game as opposed to seeing your dwarves get stronger or getting cool gear as in conventional RPGs.

Fuck rating boards.

AO is a fucking industry bogeyman. I'm convinced it's a bludgeon that the ESRB can use to bully any publisher they like into changing a game for whatever reason the ESRB's affiliates deem "not kosher."

How the fuck is a realistic damage model considered for a military game considered AO?

Because they're video games, retard

how unfortunate

full gore systems again when

Retard

be nice

You're right user.
Sorry about that OP.

user! Think of the children!
The children with shitty parents that buy them M rated games

...

...

Shit thread, faggot
Keep playing your generic FPS

You are right user, numbers are better than imprecise bars.

Health management is fun. Eating gravel to heal is retarded.

What game requires you to eat gravel to heal?

I'm assuming anything that regens over time, as in theres nothing around but the gravel at their feet.

Sage and report.

Why did we move away from having segmented health bars to the gradient type? That shit is not useful for indicating how much health you actually have.

I would also add that there are many ways to display a character's 'health' without slapping an ugly bar on the screen. In some kinds of games, knowing you're character is damaged but not exactly how close to death can increase tension or challenge.

Personally I hate games that don't give players complete information. But it might have been interesting to discus.

Numbers is the superior healt indicating system

Guess what faggot, that would just mean you have a hidden healthbar for each and every one of your organs.

I fully understand DF is about roleplay, seeing what crazy shit the game throws at you and all the weird situations you can get in: Like walling off your hospital and turning it into a graveyard because you know all the wounded people are effected by some were- disease, or having a permenent PTSD society because you keep getting invaded and all the migrants that come to your fortress are scared for life because they have to enter through a chamber of dead invaders because you haven't been able to clean up all the blood and guts before the next invasion comes in.

It's just that we're talking about gameplay not the RP elements. I didn't consider adventure mode though.

Localized damage effects aren't just something you can slap into a game for muh realism. It completely changes how the game plays. For one it's basically random what part of you gets damaged, so you add a big RNG element to the game which isn't necessarily desirable in many genres, in the case of fast paced shooters getting hit could randomly cause your knees to explode or something then you'd be slow, so you're then encouraged to play it like a cover shooter, etc.

For example I've been playing Brigador a lot for the last few days and something like this would shit the game up.

I agree but if you're going to have a bar then why not have a functional one.

Even the 2D Mario games have a healthbar. You can see how many hitpoints you have left by whether Mario is grown or shrunk, and/or whether he has powerups/Yoshi. It's a visual indicator of how many hitpoints you have, therefore it's functionally identical to a healthbar.

Then you would just have an invisible health bar for each separate organ. But I bet you know that already.

I fucking love dwarf fortress health model
Should have stayed in school fuccboi

Because defining a health bar is just a
int hp; or float hp; away instead of writing a whole bunch of code for simulating organs.

it would be an array of int or floats, or alternatively an object

...

Boy, I guess you must hate Super Mario

...

Yeah, you're right, DMC would be way more fun if the boss could just puncture an artery and you would have to watch Dante die from blood loss because you fucked up a single time. Great idea, OP.

There isn’t a single game on the face of the earth that is both fun and realistic.
Prove me wrong.
Protip: you can’t

Arma 2 + ACE mod (extra realism) + Realistic weapon mods + CQC gameplay.

It's a shame there are no servers left.

Probably wasnt that fun then

the only unfun thing was Arma 2's aimbot AI, which is unrealistic to begin with.

Usually. 2 if you got a shroom.

But the point is there is no blocking or defending. Touch an enemy and it's over.

Besides, it's not like there's nothing you can do in games to migate injury. There's this thing called ARMOR. And HEALING MAGIC.

...

now that doesnt sound very realistic, user

What the hell? Health point systems are retarded in tactical shooters because you can get shot in the leg multiple amount of times and die even though it's your fucking leg.

Even Mario 2 has an actual visual health bar.

Your legs have a health bar, and when its low on health your movement is crippled. Pretty much Deus Ex did.

Organs don't need to be simulated, I'm just disappointed that I share this board with so many basic bitches who think that a modicum of realism will automatically make a game shit.

I like them in rouguelikes and tactical shooters, but they are clunky mechanics that kill the pace of a game.

Generally localised damage in shooters is only relevant in multiplayer or in RPGs, which is why people are calling you a retard for saying health bars are obsolete. There are plenty of cases where you would prefer to have a simple bar over localised damage but instead of acknowledging that in your initial post, you instead used [current year] as an argument.

I never claimed it's a blanket improvement for every genre, but health bars should be eliminated in tactical shooters and in most if not all RPGs.

Casual rpg faggots do love their bullet sponges

Yes but you used tactical shooters as an example of it being true, in constast to now as you are claiming that to be a domain where it would fit. I know this may sound like nitpicking but you did word it that way.

It's overengineereing at it's finest.
It's better to have a simple health bar than keep calculate state of each particular organ all the time.
And don't mention the lines of code that would have to be done.
And how are you going to tie it to the experience/leveling system?

Dwarf fort while complex in these organ systems is a text based game. So you don't have to worry about graphics too much.
Imagine a computer that would have to run the game with additional 1337 next gen graphics for the kiddies that don't give a shit how particularly you kill shit.
It's useful for sniper games but means shit in the rest of the cases.

Hi Grill.

Speaking of bars'n shit, am i the only one who wishes the UI/HUD in games were more… i dunno realistic?
Like to check your health you'd have to press a button so you raise and look at your hand that has a device that shows your health and maybe other stats'n things like ammo etc?
I can understand it in more hectic shooters but on more calm paced like TES/Fallout's it'd be much neater to have as little HUD as possible, preferably only the crosshair when you have a gun equipped but everything else has to be manually checked out.

Is there not an option to disable HUD?

SOURCE FAGGOT

Fun Vs. Realism is not a debate it's eristic and a fucking sham created by retards. There are just different schools of thought when it comes to what makes a game good. Uber realism cannot sacrifice fun because some find fun in uber realism videogame or fun in uber surrealism. There are just too many narratives and colliding arguments that haunt this topic.

What are you, 12?

What is it that scares developers out of making a game rated AO? The difference between an M and an AO is a year anyway, so it's not like it means much.

Your entire post is based on this idea that every game could work with a realistic damage system when it reality only a few could.

Traditionally, AO was used solely for pornography, and as such, all major physical stores refused to sell any AO rated games. This fear of blacklisting is probably still ingrained in upper management even though it is less of a death sentence with digital distribution where a rating isn't required everywhere.

Dubs

pathetic

I wrote an organ system using c++ that was like 1000 lines of code
It's not hard, you have a giant class that keeps track of all the bodies in a vector, a bodies class that keeps track of a body's limbs in a vector, and a limb system that keeps track of all a limb's organs in a vector. Each organ has a set of variables that state whether or not the organ is vital, rigid, on the limb's exterior, etc. Then, there's a function for the limb that gets a certain amount of generic damage generated by a damage formula given weapon qualities, and then calculates whether an organ should be set to one of a few states (example: undamaged, functionally damaged, partially damaged, destroyed) and then after that the organ checks the state and updates the limb/body if it's tagged as either vital to the body or important to the limb.
It's simple really

Boy, I guess you must have trouble understanding what you read.

...

Even in the OP I didn't say that they should add simulation to make it more realistic, I said they should add it because it's fun

Why does this thread still exist?

MGS3’s system could have been beyond amazing for the reasons you stated. It also gave me an idea for a “solo infiltration” game or something like that where when you start you will never be stronger. It’s then the player’s responsibility to stay out of combat (or, on subsequent playthroughs when you’re better at the game, enter responsible combat) and dangerous situations, because if you get damage it’s either going to heal extremely slowly, in real time (there’d be narrative time jumps for the bigger injuries to slightly heal), or not at all (missing finger, etc.). Throw in a huge variety of scenarios and types of damage possible (poisoning, heat–like the room in MGS4–guns, blades, fists, disease, etc.) and various rewards to the player for getting through the regions that would afford those dangers, all on the way to the final boss, who has no more health than you did at the start (but who didn’t have to go through your trials). Give the overall game a hard time limit (so you can’t always wait for your wounds to heal) and boom. There’s a game.

Then of course your character’s performance would also be modeled on the damage it has taken. Bruises wouldn’t change things much (unless you had a lot of them), but internal contusions would. Sprained muscles, cracked and broken bones, cuts (big ones would lower dexterity), scrapes… There’d be all sorts of things to lower your speed and accuracy.

Because developers don't actually care about advancing the medium. If it works by the standards of twenty years ago, don't bother updating it.

So basically a roguelike but the gimmick is realism and stealth on a small timescale

What are you, a nigger?

DWARF FORTRESS UPDATE SOON

While i think it's stupid to implement it into starcraft, but believe it could be done, even for low end system. It's still numbers, you just have to figure out how complex you want the calculations.

Depends how you implement it. I'm not talking about in-battle healing, more like JA2 stabilisation and post-battle slow healing (which takes days).

Also, who ever said things have to be realistic - I prefer the term "immersive" or "believable" or "versimilitude". they all fit better.

t. pajeet tier programmer

In df it's a well thought out system that adds to the fun.
What OP wants is HUR DUR WHERE DA REALISM AT

Mechwarrior fag here

Localized damage is GREAT when fighting against human opponents, since people (and teams) can strategically target parts.

For example, legging light mechs to bring them to a crawl and make them easier to kill-
It's a viable tactic, but sometimes difficult to hit, since light mechs tend to move faster and have thinner legs.
It also punishes people who don't target with intent and just blindly fire- their damage may get more spread out than someone who specifically tries to core/leg mechs, or someone who notices their target's health and shoots at parts that are weaker.

It's a pretty great system especially for more strategic mech games- but of course like you say, it's not good for fast paced games vs AI because of the random element.

yeah no, this kind of system is not fun outside of sim games, fuck off.

even worse
People have a wrong idea about pain because of all those tv shows where people get huge wounds and just walk off whereas in reality if you're not overdosing on your own adrenaline or didn't notice it the tiniest thing will give you an unbearable desire to lay down.
You can see it with animals, whenever a predator gets a scratch or bite in no matter how small, it wins.

That's not even realistic, he would have to get an aspirin, some water and then lay down for a few hours to a day until the headache goes away.

I've never seen a game do both of these together, but I think it would be a great health system. It's simple enough that you don't have to think much about it, but simulationist enough that it could be widely applicable to many different types of game.

dwarf fortress has an even more complex one that works great. It gives fortress mode variety and aventure mode combat tactics.

Sure, but I had in mind a health system that is applicable to many types of games, especially ones that aren't as autistic as Dorf Fort.

Whenever I want to have serious fun, I sit around simulating organs.

or maybe you're just a little bitch, bitch

That's pretty much Kenshi's health system. Blood, and separate health for the head, chest, and four limbs. You can fall into a coma from too much blood loss, or even die if it reaches a critical negative level. The same applies to your head and chest, in that there's a first critical tier of damage where you pass out, and a second where you die. You can't die from a limb's health being crippled or rendered useless, but it impedes movement, whether or not you can use a weapon with both hands, one handed, or not hold it at all, your ability to dodge, and you can still die/pass out from blood loss caused by a heavily damaged limb.

The answer to OP's question is normalfags, it's always normalfags.

Fug, should say
>a wounded right arm would cause reduced accuracy


Neat. I forgot to mention that shock was something I'd want to see in a health system. Like if you lose half your blood, you have tunnel vision and you slow way down.
You should die as soon as it reaches zero. This would be a scenario where the blood meter shows half of the actual blood in your body. In the real world, people tend to go into shock when they lose about 1/3 of their blood, and die when they lose about 1/2.
I had single player games in mind for my system, where passing out would be frustrating and stupid. But I guess it makes sense in multiplayer games like Kenshi. I've never played it, but it sounds like a pretty cool game.

It's right in the Elvira II game from 1992, minus the blood loss part. It had two single leg sections instead of one lower body though.

Name a roguelike with no/little healing, the closest I can think of are various corruption/sanity mechanics, where opportunities to restore them in many games are rare or impossible.

It's singleplayer, but you can control multiple characters as a squad. Think of it somewhat like Mount and Blade where it's a singleplayer rpg with light RTS mechanics. So if one character passes out, you can have another character administer first aid to them to stop bleeding, then pick them up and get them somewhere safe while everyone else continues to fight. Enemies also fight in squads, rarely alone, so the game emphasizes team fighting over lone wolf playstyles, unless you get to really high combat levels where you're a demigod with your weapon/martial arts, and even then you're still not invincible.

you mean "little guys", right?

Also

Counterpoint:

That's straight up bullshit. Severing an artery in the neck is different than severing one in the leg, severing a nerve in the hand will have a different effect than one in the shoulder, cutting off a hand has a different effect than cutting off a head, etc. And that's not even getting into blunt trauma, or puncture trauma like stabbing hearts, lungs, or brains. Or eyes.

AO is much more of a death sentence in the console market. The majority of console game sales go through brick-and-mortar stores, so getting your game pulled from e.g. Walmart and Target will decimate your income.

Why is auto regenerating health even a thing? Are the people lizard reptilians that it only takes a few seconds before they recover?

All living things repair themselves over time, time is just fucked up in games so 30 minutes of real time is several hours in-game.

*Flavor text for RNG. in fortress mode

Now that I think about it, I can't think of any game that has grenade knockback (except perhaps ARMA, but I've never played it). Are there any games that do?

...

...

I work in a hospital and I've seen people lose so much blood that their heart was stopping. They weren't going to make it on their own…

It's game designers being lazy. Regenerating health allows for drastically simpler-to-design levels. Embed related.


A lot of damage is permanent. You're never going to grow back a lost hand, for example.

I wish the healthbar plebs could die off already so that the Locational Damage Ubermensch can reclaim their rightful place as the Videogame Health System Master Race.

Doos Eggs did it best, 3D Fallout almost did it right, if only a crippled torso/head were more punishing/lethal respectively.

Hitman and the good Rainbow Six games (i.e., pre-Vegas) didn't have any healing during missions.

Well maybe they should've been born as lizard people. Humans are inferior in every way.

to be fair, kirby games are fun

...

...

Not saying it is, but it's still using healthbars and thus not OK according to the thread topic.

Unless you're planning to literally simulate every tissue in the body and how they interact with each other, at some point you're going to require a numerical abstraction of how much damage that body part has taken, aka a health bar. It might make sense to have internal anatomy present but not actually accessible (e.g. have a heart location that has the same headshot bonus) but implementing that without a health bar is absurd. Graphics and other gameplay/physics simulations are much priorities for computational time.

Basically, the thrust of the thread isn't healthbars specifically, but boiling the entirety of health down to a single number.

Well, you don't really need a health bar, you need a STATE. A true/false flag. Working or crippled.

And how do you determine when that state changes? Doing a single boolean means your entire game is one-hit kills for vital organs, and ignores the distinction between e.g. a point-blank shotgun and a 50m pistol shot.
A less stupid idea is to determine when the state changes based on how much damage has been taken. If you were sane, you would model this as a single number, and boom you now have a healthbar.


That's my personal belief, at any rate. Can't speak for OP.

Unrelated thought: I think that a full organ system would make sense for a more tactical/strategic risk management game like XCOM; use the target locations from your vantage point within your cone of fire as the % chance to hit, and the brain and heart locations as the % chance to crit.

Well that explains it, this is a cuckchan thread

The X-Com clone UFO: AI, since it's based on the Quake II engine, uses fire cones and physics simulation to resolve weapons fire, which meshes neatly with cover and friendly fire. On another note related to the topic, it also includes stamina as a separate "healthbar" parallel to normal damage, so that (much like nonlethal damage in D&D 3e) if total stamina damage exceeds health, the target will drop unconscious. Sadly, the entire time unit/reserve system since version 2.4 has been FUBAR to the point of unplayability, and the devs seem disinclined to fix it.

Wow, best game of all time.