Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

Let's rethink Hit Points.

245

Comments

  • Vermillion_RaventhalVermillion_Raventhal Member EpicPosts: 4,198
    I guess you could have levels of damage. Blocked/dodged/absorbed, nicked, graze, hit, bash, punish, devastate. You then have attacks that focus on high/middle/low. High are least accurate to head. Middle most accurate to arms and body. Low are in between that focus on legs. Each area has certain effects that can happen. For example a blow to the head can blind, daze, knock out, kill or just damage your head. Harder the hit the greater % for bad things. Damage ups the % for bad things to happen on the next hit. So a devastating hit may have 30% chance of death while a ick has 0%.
  • koboldfodderkoboldfodder Member UncommonPosts: 447

    SWG had Health, Action and Mind.  If you got to zero on any one of those, you would go unconscious.  A creature that could deathblow you would, but most let you get back up with a debuff where you would die if you got another unconscious knockout.

     

    Always goes back to SWG....odd.

  • HelleriHelleri Member UncommonPosts: 930
    Originally posted by Quizzical

    The only decent alternatives to hit points that I've seen are one-shot kills and multiple health bars where you die when any one health bar goes to zero.  I've seen the latter done as directional (e.g., front, back, and sides of a ship) or fundamentally different ways to die (e.g., ship sinking versus all crew on it being killed).

    In real life combat, if you land the first hard strike, you're probably going to win.  If person A shoots person B with a gun, person B probably isn't going to subsequently win that battle unless the bullet merely grazed him or otherwise didn't hurt him much.  For the first thing to hit you to be fatal isn't fun with typical combat; you'd really have to design a game around that to make it work.

    Typical MMORPG combat doesn't really allow for different types of hits other than probability-based or directional-based.  Attacking characters don't aim at particular anatomy on the opponent; they repeatedly stab a particular spot in the air.  Defending characters don't check to see if you hit an arm or a leg; for hit detection, they're probably either a box or a cylinder, neither of which have arms, legs, or a head.

    Also, hit points have been around for a very long time, but early console games tended not to explicitly state the hit points numbers.  For example, Zelda 1 and 2 use a hit point system, but never explicitly tell you how many hit points of damage an attack did.  In most cases, they don't display enemy health at all; the mob is either alive or dead.

    Actually, in most MMORPG there is no strike zone. After .getName on target it's just a glorified game of yahtzee.

     

     

     

     

    image

  • DrakephireDrakephire Member UncommonPosts: 451
    OP, your system of hit location has been implemented before...not only PnP games, but computer games as well. The game I'm speaking of specifically is Battletech.  Hit locations, with each area able to sustain certain amounts of damage before critical components fail. Occasionally a lucky shot will bypass all HP and damage a critical component directly.
  • neorandomneorandom Member Posts: 1,681
    Originally posted by Mendel

    The gaming industry has used the same basic methods for abstracting conflict resolution for so long now that the fundamental gaming aspect has gotten stale.  Weapon damage is resolved by random numbers and spell damage with bigger random numbers each whittling away on a target's (both mobs and players) pool of increasing silly HPs.  Healers (and potions and regeneration effects) rapidly try to replenish that pool of HPs before the pool reaches 0.  Additionally, there are all too many games that bestow Hit Points from items, further increasing the totals of characters and is a root cause of mudflation.  At some point, this abstraction will need to evolve; hit points can't be the best (and only) way to simulate the human body.

    Hit points abstract a person's ability to continue fighting coupled with defenses.  It doesn't abstract pain, nor bruises, nor broken bones, nor cut tissue, nor pulled muscles, nor internal injuries or any other side effect of one object hitting flesh and bone.   Hit points are not very good at dealing with lasting effects such as burns or poisons or lack of use.  Try throwing a ball with a broken wrist, or kicking a ball with a twisted ankle, you might be able to accomplish the task, but it will not be as sharp or accurate as an unhindered effort.  The basic hit point system is now dated and MMORPGs need another way to abstract the human's ability to retain life.

    Hit points were used to create a single number in a dice-driven pen-and-paper gaming environment.  But with computers, is there really a need to boil everything down to a single number anymore?   Why not an alive/dead abstraction with separate pain tolerance levels (abstractions) for each area of the body?  Or various, constant pools of health points associated with each hit location?  Or fatality percentages for each hit location?

    Changes to this basic Hit Point abstraction has ripple effects throughout the entire game system.  Combat, natural healing, magical healing, combat magics and other affects use or manipulate these values within the game world.  I've tried making several non-HP-based systems.   I've not gotten it good enough to be satisfied with, and I've been trying for almost 25 years now.

    It's not an easy mechanism to replace, but I think it is time that MMORPGs break its reliance on this RP tradition.  And I believe that the next big challenge for MMORPGs is to find a better model for the human body than the Hit Point model.

    Your ideas and opinions are welcome.

    agreed.  give attacks of types chances to disable and hinder various areas of the body.  example, leg sweeps can twist ankles or break legs.  chopping downward axe blows can break shoulders or lop off arms, sword thrusts into the gut can cause terrible internal damage and bleeding.  fireballs should heat up or burn off non metal armor leaving the target vulnerable, poisen should shut down the body.

     

    tanks could spec to have extra tough joints and resistance to injury as tanks.  instead of hp ping pong healers roles could be to supress pain, remove poinsens, and heal severe injuries between fights (but not during combat).  your dmg dealers would still be that, poisen users or magic throwers that injure and kill efficiently.  

     

    theres no reason to use just a raw health based ac/resist healer ping pong match, and we dont need 100 little hitboxes, attacks can be designed to have % chances to do certain things to injure and we can leave some luck to it.

  • IcewhiteIcewhite Member Posts: 6,403
    Originally posted by 5Luck
    Originally posted by maplestone

    You need a way for players to know if they are winning or losing. I've tried a lot of ideas for replacing hp with some other inventory of injuries, but all I've learned from it is the more complexity there is, the less players like it.

    Rolemaster taught us that 30 years ago, didn't it? (No offense to RM fans; but RM1 still stands out in my mind as the game that crushed any desire to embrace complexity entirely for the sake of being complex).

    "See arcane chart Z21, subsection B on page 213 of an entirely different book."

    "Warning: Resolving a critical check can involve consulting up to 13 charts in 4 different books, and estimated time 73 minutes."

    Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.

  • IcewhiteIcewhite Member Posts: 6,403
    Originally posted by Drakephire
    OP, your system of hit location has been implemented before...not only PnP games, but computer games as well. The game I'm speaking of specifically is Battletech.  Hit locations, with each area able to sustain certain amounts of damage before critical components fail. Occasionally a lucky shot will bypass all HP and damage a critical component directly.

    See also: Starfleet Battles.

    Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.

  • The user and all related content has been deleted.
  • onlinenow25onlinenow25 Member UncommonPosts: 305

    Reasons why I think a complicated bloated system to measure HP is nothing more than a complicated bloasted system to measure HP and has no actual value in a MMO.  

     

    But this does not mean it can't be used for a different type of game that revolves around survival.

     

      To start language is just a bunch of symbols/artifacts of humans putting meaning behind these symbols/artifacts?  Do you also understand that no matter what symbol is used to represent a numerical value that that does not change it from holding a numerical value?  

     

    Example:  Say you have two cookies.  No matter what you call 'two' you still have that same number of cookies.  You could call the number of cookies Blarg, but you still have Blarg cookies.   Hopefully this makes sense.

     

    A program revolves around numbers and equations, as such no matter what is done visually everything calculated is done by numbers.  So no matter how complex of a system you come up with you will never be able to escape the fact that everything boils down to how much damage you do, and how much health/life what ever you want to call it you have.

     

    Even in games like Street Fighter where its skill based, there are still numbers.  Characters still have different HP values and damage values for attacks.  Nothing escapes Damage and HP/Health when its a computer game, or heck even a PnP game because no matter what you end up calling it its still just Health/HP and damage done/taken which are numerical values you represent change.

     

    If the foundation of understanding what is happening in an imaginary setting is done through symbols there is no way to get around putting some sort of symbol to define it.  As such because its a value that increases and decreases its going to be a number no matter what kind of symbol you use to call it something else. 

     

    Example.  Pizza = 100.   Fat Fist = 50.   Pizza - Fat Fist = Fat Fist.   Pizza and Fat Fist are there to represent two numerical values.  No matter what they are called you end up with a numerical value symbolized in a different form, in this case words, yet they still hold the same meaning if the equation was 100 - 50 = 50. 

     

    Hence no matter what is done you will not and can not escape the fact that damage and health are representations of change which hold a numerical value, and changing the name/symbole of the numerical value will not change it from being a numerical value.

     

     

  • NovusodNovusod Member UncommonPosts: 912

    The big issue you are going to run into with rethinking hit points is dealing with One hit deaths. Very few people think One hit deaths are fun especially casual players.

     

    I think people would be happier if they didn't remove hit points entirely but just controlled the mudflation of hit points. The 100k HP characters in WoW just an absurdity. People are catching on that it is just a treadmill as you can still killed in the same amount of hits as when you had 5k HP so why inflate it. Do people really buy into this artificial progression.

     

    Games like Vindictus do HP correctly. First they didn't inflate the HP to insane pools that have little meaning. Second they created armor destructability. For example if you get hit in the head your helm could break off which lowers your defense so the next time you get hit you take additional damage. It is kind of like hangman. Break the helm, chest, legs, gloves, boots. By the time all your armor is broken you are pretty much dead or just a few HP away from being dead. It is not just a straight HP pool, you have to watch your armor durability as well. This is the ideal that other games should start copying because it is done so well.

     

     

  • tupodawg999tupodawg999 Member UncommonPosts: 724

    I split combat into hit / penetrate / damage and renamed HP as Luck and use Luck points to avoid being hit. Say a mob needs 8 to hit a character and rolls a 10 then the character would expend 3 points of luck to subtract 3 from the mob's score bringing it down to 7 turning the hit into a miss. When your Luck runs out you have to rely on your armor to stop penetration. In this system *all* hits to the actual body are potentially very damaging.

     

    (In my amateur system humans have 4-8 HP depending on size up to a max of 12 with various abilities or gear. Mobs do 1-6 points of damage depending on size, penetration and armor and all wounds bleed so you lose 1 HP each turn until the wound is bandaged. Healers "heal" normally except now they are blessings that restore your luck and they also heal / bind the actual wounds - except both characters must be out of combat to do that bit. Assassin type strikes roll luck vs luck and if the assassin wins the target doesn't get to use their luck to deflect the strike and it goes straight through to the armor / damage phase etc).

     

    Apart from anything else splitting standard DPS vs HP into hit / penetrate / damage makes it easier to make mobs different even without any clever AI and that means different player tactics for different mobs which makes the fights different e.g.

    - slow hitting beetles with a strong shell might be best fought using light armor and a two-handed weapon

    - fast hitting (and fast moving) spiders with weak penetration and soft bodies might be best fought in medium armor dual-wielding two fast weapons

    etc

  • tupodawg999tupodawg999 Member UncommonPosts: 724
    Originally posted by Mendel

    Originally posted by maplestone

    You need a way for players to know if they are winning or losing. I've tried a lot of ideas for replacing hp with some other inventory of injuries, but all I've learned from it is the more complexity there is, the less players like it. There may be something clever I've not considered, but personally, I've given up on coming up with alternatives and accepted that on some level, hp will always exist in any game without sudden one-shot death or long strategic turns.

    Definitely.  Feedback to the player needs to be simple enough to easily understand.   But the underlying mechanism can be a lot more involved than the simple HP system.

    Originally posted by Helleri

                                                                                                                                                                                                        

    Multiple bars.  That could be useful, especially to relay information to players, but I don't know if it addresses the underlying simulation.  I'll have to re-read your post in the morning and think about your idea some more.

    Originally posted by krage

    if a more realism based game were to come out i would like to see bodily damage accumulating over decreasing HP.

    The one downside though is the snowball effect from it. Pretty much makes the first few blows the defining outcome for the rest of the battle, once someone is injured it is very unlikely they will win....but ya know what thats ok imo if the game is build around it.

    I will tell you what though with such a system the environment, weapon selection, and timing is wayyyyy more important than in traditional systems since it is so unforgiving.

    Hit Points are one of the most unrealistic things in RP games.  A system without HPs would probably be seen as much more realistic.  That didn't bother me particularly, as I was wanting to make a fantasy simulator, rather than a game.

    You hit on the main problem I've encountered several times -- either the combat goes on forever (especially with low skills involved), the first blow determines the nature of the fight, or the first hit kills.   All too often, one combatant would go from perfectly fine to dead in a single instant.  I don't know how 'quick' combat between two equally equipped and equally skilled opponents 'should' be.   Realism has to allow the insta-kill, but that's not fun to play.   I was aiming for a system that required 3-7 shots before death/incapacitation, but my last effort never quite got there.

    Another thing about the combat system in a fantasy game, it needs to allow for a 'heroic' battle where one man beats several opponents.  A lot of systems that work in a 1-on-1 scenario simply fail when faced with a 1-on-2 or worse odds.   A side with 5 shouldn't always be able to win against 4 opponents, with 3 1-on-1 battles fighting defensively, and the 2-on-1 fighting aggressively and just rolling up the opponents

    You're also right about the weapons and especially timing, but I think I had those aspects pretty well covered.   When you think about it, a 3"x2"x/5" puncture into the stomach from a sword isn't really any different from a 3"x2"x.5" wound in the same location from any other kind of weapon.  You can factor a lot of the randomness out of the weapon's damage, and have fatigue costs on heavier weapons.

     

    "Another thing about the combat system in a fantasy game, it needs to allow for a 'heroic' battle where one man beats several opponents."

     

    That's one of the things I wanted. I didn't want a level 20 Aragorn to fight level 20 orcs. I wanted a system where a level 20 Aragorn was potentially killable if 20 standard orcs attacked him at once.

  • phumbabaphumbaba Member Posts: 138

    A long while back I also thought a bit, if there were better ways to do it. No idea, if it would be actually better, but I'll try to outline some aspects of a system that I think might work. As usual, I'm not suggesting any game try implementing anything like it. Just having some fun letting my imagination run wild.

    Technical aspects: I assume, the system won't be implementable, if the body is literally divided into multiple hitboxes. However, different bodyparts can be assigned a probability based on range, direction and type of attack. I would assume not that much additional information needs to move. Mostly clientside.

    Details: Each bodypart of interest has a probability and also a metric that can as well be visualized as HP. The probabilities could be modified by armor and defense skills. Each HP bar has thresholds that correspond to level and severity of damage and healing it requires. This can be tied to making healing more interactive by giving healer classes a skill to automatically notice damage levels and perhaps suggest a suitable skill (this notification would cause some delay, but I would assume it almost negligible as it wouldn't need other info than just an identifier that it's a certain damage level and a number + it doesn't need to be that often).

    Further, dividing healing into specialties like this, also supports different classes being able to heal to different extents. E.g. all classes could be able to discern and mend wounds after battle, but only some classes in battle.

    The different HP bars could still be combined to your typical single bar that's always on the UI, if needed. And then perhaps visualize the different body areas with a doll that appears when something is damaged. What happens when a bodypart's HP bar get's empty? Incapasitation for a while or until healed. What happens with big aoe's? Average damage all around.

    Too complex? I certainly don't think so.. Too difficult or cumbersome to implement? I don't think that either, but it's very much possible there are technical aspects I'm unable to consider due to lack of knowledge. Would it be more fun? Depends. The average player rushing through the game wouldn't necessarily even notice, but for some, it could make the world somewhat more immersive and interactive.

    Anyways, nice topic.

  • maplestonemaplestone Member UncommonPosts: 3,099
    Originally posted by Icewhite

    Rolemaster taught us that 30 years ago, didn't it? (No offense to RM fans; but RM1 still stands out in my mind as the game that crushed any desire to embrace complexity entirely for the sake of being complex).

    "See arcane chart Z21, subsection B on page 213 of an entirely different book."

    "Warning: Resolving a critical check can involve consulting up to 13 charts in 4 different books, and estimated time 73 minutes."

    Hehe ..."66 critical roll" and all the grumsome descriptive ways to die were always fun to read through even if I never actually played it much.

    What rolemaster (with all it's accumulation of debuffs) and battletech (with seperate hp pools and consequences for different parts of the body) did do is offer a lot of creative ways for the game to describe the damage - it's just that in the end, it felt like despite all the bookkeeping of nicks and dents, the actual end of combat was often some dramatic lucky or overpowering roll that would have one-shotted the target from full health anyway.

    ( one of the things that really struck me about what happens when games get moved to computers is how RNG gets pushed further and further to the side - the games focus on having richness of combat information/opportunities that players can react to rather than having wide variability in the damage rolls )

  • ChicagoCubChicagoCub Member UncommonPosts: 381
    What we need to do is "unthink" hit points.  Hit points were not originally supposed to represent the amount of health or life you have in your body.  They weren't supposed to be this wall of  wellness that you hack, burn, or drain your way through.  They originally represented the entirety of your ability to continue fighting.  In other words if you had 20 hit points a 10 hit point blow would not hack off half of your body.  It wouldn't even represent a serious wound.  If it came from a sword for instance it would probably be a strike so hard that it required such a great amount of your stamina to recover from that it reduced your ability to continue fighting by half.  If that 10 hit point blow were followed up with a series of 1-2 hit point strikes those would be blocks, parries, armor deflections, etc...all the things that go into a sword fight between two armored  foes and tend to wear an opponent down.  The strike that actually sent your hit points to zero was the one that actually struck flesh and hit bone.  It was unimaginative people trying to translate the world of pen & paper into cartoons with impossibly sized weapons and absurdly clad females where every fight has to be an epic blur of flips, flashes, and fire that dumbed down the hit point system.
  • TorikTorik Member UncommonPosts: 2,342
    It seems to me that these more detailed damage systems would work better in sci-fi games where you play as a ship, mecha or robot.  The human body is too fragile to make it realistic as most damage that actually hits, will usually take the character out of the fight or handicap him/her too much.
  • MendelMendel Member LegendaryPosts: 5,609
    Originally posted by maplestone
    Originally posted by Icewhite

    Rolemaster taught us that 30 years ago, didn't it? (No offense to RM fans; but RM1 still stands out in my mind as the game that crushed any desire to embrace complexity entirely for the sake of being complex).

    "See arcane chart Z21, subsection B on page 213 of an entirely different book."

    "Warning: Resolving a critical check can involve consulting up to 13 charts in 4 different books, and estimated time 73 minutes."

    Hehe ..."66 critical roll" and all the grumsome descriptive ways to die were always fun to read through even if I never actually played it much.

    What rolemaster (with all it's accumulation of debuffs) and battletech (with seperate hp pools and consequences for different parts of the body) did do is offer a lot of creative ways for the game to describe the damage - it's just that in the end, it felt like despite all the bookkeeping of nicks and dents, the actual end of combat was often some dramatic lucky or overpowering roll that would have one-shotted the target from full health anyway.

    ( one of the things that really struck me about what happens when games get moved to computers is how RNG gets pushed further and further to the side - the games focus on having richness of combat information/opportunities that players can react to rather than having wide variability in the damage rolls )

    One of the players in the RM game I ran for several years was notorious for getting the D and E critical hits, but then rolling only a +15 HP damage.   Where I would routinely get A crits and put players down with 66 or 90+ rolls on the damage.  Entertaining descriptions, but ultimately very frustrating for players.  About the only thing I thought was good about the RM combat system was how it could simulate a 'death of 1000 cuts'.

    Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.

  • MendelMendel Member LegendaryPosts: 5,609
    Originally posted by ChicagoCub
    What we need to do is "unthink" hit points.

    I love this statement.  Evolution comes from change, and change frequently comes from rethinking old conventions.   The Hit Points convention is long overdue for rethinking, and this is one aspect I think all RP games (both manual and computerized) have just accepted the standard.  This is why I feel that the next great innovation in RP gaming is likely to focus on a 'better' abstraction of the human body.

    Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.

  • syntax42syntax42 Member UncommonPosts: 1,378

    I don't think it is possible to get rid of a number system like HP.  However, it could be masked by changing the name and making the game focus around a different way of thinking.  The real problem is that games are breaking immersion by allowing players to take a hit from something like a giant's one-ton mace, and walk away, or get stabbed through the torso by a lightsaber and ignore the wound.  Instead, games need to reflect reality or at least reflect movies.  The heroes of the movies fight until they get tired and make a mistake which leads to them getting wounded.

    I suggested a system in the SWTOR forums after seeing how they followed a WoW-like system for HP.  Instead of calling it health, call it focus (for Jedi or shields for non-Jedi) and color the bar blue or anything other than green.  That's not where it gets different, so stay with me.  Instead of showing hit animations for attacks which would incapacitate a normal person, every animation needs to show a defensive move, or be blocked by the shield generator.  By doing that, you restore the lore of lightsabers being fatal instead of allowing a gaping hole through the mob's chest, but then allowing it to continue fighting.

    Is it still HP?  Yes, but it restores the immersion and provides for better lore options.  A similar principle could be applied to other game systems.  Make it so spellcasters don't magically heal wounds, but instead provide boosts to morale or focus, which regenerates at a decent pace in combat.  When your focus bar depletes, you don't necessarily die, but you risk taking a fatal wound.  Maybe you only get hit in the legs and get a debuff preventing you from walking, or maybe you lose the use of an arm, or you get stabbed in the chest and die shortly afterwards.  Recovering from such injuries should take a healer significant time (10 second cast, or more) so they don't trivialize getting hit by something like a giant's mace which weighs five times your body weight.

  • MendelMendel Member LegendaryPosts: 5,609
    Originally posted by syntax42

    I don't think it is possible to get rid of a number system like HP. 

    It's really easy to do away with a pool of Hit Points.

    For one example, imagine if wounds were a cumulative chance (percentage) of incapacitation.  A single wound from a single weapon strike might be a 3-7% chance of incapacitating that limb (or the entire person for head/torso hits)   Four wounds would average a 20% chance of incapacitation.   If there was an incapacitation check made every 1 minute for 4 minutes since the last injury, a character would have 4 chances to fail that roll (after the final blow was delivered).  If they survive, they could continue on, carrying those wounds (which could be treated and eventually removed over time).

    I also tried systems based on hydrostatic shock (disruptions of blood flow) and other ideas, none of which accomplished what I wanted to achieve, or weren't flexible enough to handle various damage types (poisons, toxins, asphyxiation, bleeding, grappling, burns, frostbite, diseases, or others).

     

    Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.

  • FrostveinFrostvein Member UncommonPosts: 157

    I always thought about using a ARMOR POINTS bar and then a HIT POINTS bar

     

    Every hit would take mostly armor damage, with some minor hit point damage. Some abilities would do more or less, just like any other game. If you lose all your Armor Points, you would take way more damage than normal.

     

    Its basically the same thing, but dressed up a bit differently and would add another level of complexity.

     

    Seem interesting.

     

     

     

     

  • rungardrungard Member Posts: 1,035

    This is an easy one.

    for yourself you get a heart rate. The faster it goes the worse shape your in. Youll never quite know when it will explode which will add an element of surprise to it. Simple and very effective.

    monsters is best handled with behavioral actions at 50, 25 and 10% health. You as a player need to figure out what they are.

    Get rid of all the bars. Leave it all in the background. There will be more satisfaction with a system that includes more uncertainty.

     

  • DrCokePepsiDrCokePepsi Member UncommonPosts: 177


    Originally posted by onlinenow25
    Not to kill a discussion but is this really being debated?Have none of you done any programming?  And do you guys understand that language is just a bunch of symbols/artifacts of humans putting meaning behind these symbols/artifacts?  Do you also understand that no matter what symbol is used to represent a numerical value that that does not change it from holding a numerical value?   Example:  Say you have two cookies.  No matter what you call 'two' you still have that same number of cookies.  You could call the number of cookies Blarg, but you still have Blarg cookies.   Hopefully this makes sense. A program revolves around numbers and equations, as such no matter what is done visually everything calculated is done by numbers.  So no matter how complex of a system you come up with you will never be able to escape the fact that everything boils down to how much damage you do, and how much health/life what ever you want to call it you have. Even in games like Street Fighter where its skill based, there are still numbers.  Characters still have different HP values and damage values for attacks.  Nothing escapes Damage and HP/Health when its a computer game, or heck even a PnP game because no matter what you end up calling it its still just Health/HP and damage done/taken which are numerical values you represent change. If the foundation of understanding what is happening in an imaginary setting is done through symbols there is no way to get around putting some sort of symbol to define it.  As such because its a value that increases and decreases its going to be a number no matter what kind of symbol you use to call it something else.  Example.  Pizza = 100.   Fat Fist = 50.   Pizza - Fat Fist = Fat Fist.   Pizza and Fat Fist are there to represent two numerical values.  No matter what they are called you end up with a numerical value symbolized in a different form, in this case words, yet they still hold the same meaning if the equation was 100 - 50 = 50.  Hence no matter what is done you will not and can not escape the fact that damage and health are representations of change which hold a numerical value, and changing the name/symbole of the numerical value will not change it from being a numerical value.  
    First of all, insulting. I myself am semi-rounded in coding, but nobody else should need to know anything coding related.

    And second of all, obviously we all know that it boils down to some numerical value, we're talking about the way that numerical value is represented, whether it's multiple limbs taking damage, one single hp bar, or some other form of indication. We know that.

    Get off your high throne of intelligence, you insulted people for no legitimate reason.


    Never fear, your dream MMO will be here....
    just give me a decade or two to finely hone my Game development
    and design abilities as well as start a Game Design Studio.
    Thank you for your patience.
  • jesadjesad Member UncommonPosts: 882

    I promise to go back and read up to this point but I just wanted to get this out first.

    Mech games have been simulating the human body for years now in both single player and MMO environments.  HP for two legs, two arms, the front and back of the torso, and the head have been available since the first Mechwarrior game hit online status and are currently in use, including attack and movement modifiers for damages taken to any of these individual body parts, in games like Mechwarrior Online.

    Through the use of a H.U.D. and a voice response damage awareness system, affectionately referred to as "Bitching Betty", a mech driver can not only keep track of everything that is happening to their mech from damage taken to individual parts to heat, and the usability or non-usability of certain weapons or items because of damage, but can also use the environment to heal themselves, in the case of too much heat, or shield their damaged parts.

    The problem with this system however is that it only really works in a technological environment.  To add it to a fantasy MMO, based on elves and dwarves, and so on, would not only completely break emmersion but it would require a learning curve that I believe would threaten the average developer of the currently high accessible games that are being released.

    Even Star Wars, the most technological of the current fantasy titles, would be hard pressed to explain why a non-cyborg Jedi would have a hud and a bitching betty.  Still, if this concept could be properly implemented it would probably be a ground breaking change in the way we fight in these games.

    I think though that the reason that you haven't seen a change in the current system, and probably won't see a change any time soon is because of its ease of explanation and use.  Even with the graphical H.U.D. and Betty in your ear in a mech game, you are hard pressed to keep your eye on your body, and your weapons when you are knee deep in the shit.  The average MMO player will have the same problem keeping their eye on only their HP.  Imagine then if one had to try to keep track of all that.  And so the single number wins out over the more complicated but deeply more realistic body model.

    Ok, going to read where someone has already said all of this now :)

    image
  • onlinenow25onlinenow25 Member UncommonPosts: 305
    Originally posted by DrCokePepsi

     


    Originally posted by onlinenow25
    Not to kill a discussion but is this really being debated?

     

    Have none of you done any programming?  And do you guys understand that language is just a bunch of symbols/artifacts of humans putting meaning behind these symbols/artifacts?  Do you also understand that no matter what symbol is used to represent a numerical value that that does not change it from holding a numerical value?  

     

    Example:  Say you have two cookies.  No matter what you call 'two' you still have that same number of cookies.  You could call the number of cookies Blarg, but you still have Blarg cookies.   Hopefully this makes sense.

     

    A program revolves around numbers and equations, as such no matter what is done visually everything calculated is done by numbers.  So no matter how complex of a system you come up with you will never be able to escape the fact that everything boils down to how much damage you do, and how much health/life what ever you want to call it you have.

     

    Even in games like Street Fighter where its skill based, there are still numbers.  Characters still have different HP values and damage values for attacks.  Nothing escapes Damage and HP/Health when its a computer game, or heck even a PnP game because no matter what you end up calling it its still just Health/HP and damage done/taken which are numerical values you represent change.

     

    If the foundation of understanding what is happening in an imaginary setting is done through symbols there is no way to get around putting some sort of symbol to define it.  As such because its a value that increases and decreases its going to be a number no matter what kind of symbol you use to call it something else. 

     

    Example.  Pizza = 100.   Fat Fist = 50.   Pizza - Fat Fist = Fat Fist.   Pizza and Fat Fist are there to represent two numerical values.  No matter what they are called you end up with a numerical value symbolized in a different form, in this case words, yet they still hold the same meaning if the equation was 100 - 50 = 50. 

     

    Hence no matter what is done you will not and can not escape the fact that damage and health are representations of change which hold a numerical value, and changing the name/symbole of the numerical value will not change it from being a numerical value.

     

     


    First of all, insulting. I myself am semi-rounded in coding, but nobody else should need to know anything coding related.

     

    And second of all, obviously we all know that it boils down to some numerical value, we're talking about the way that numerical value is represented, whether it's multiple limbs taking damage, one single hp bar, or some other form of indication. We know that.

    Get off your high throne of intelligence, you insulted people for no legitimate reason.

    What about my post was insulting?

     

    Next if you read everything you would understand why the veil or representation you are trying to put over HP will never give it a new meaningful feeling.  

     

    Have you ever played a game that tried to enact some sort of realism with injuries?  I have, there was an old mod for Quake 3 Arena called Navy Seals.  It went back and forth from the injuries being a major annoyance to being nothing at all.  It wasn't possible to find a real true balance, some changes were as minor as a second on bandage timers, or single digit changes to slower movement speeds from getting shot in the legs.  Time and time again it was either an annoyance or nothing at all.  Not to mention for when it was an annoyance, it was all about the first shot.  

     

    You could also go try out DayZ because that is such an amazing game am I right?  Because getting knocked out with a tranq for 15 to 20 mins of real time makes it feel so much more realistic right?

     

    You can't expect to feel any sort of complex realism  damage system when getting hit in a video game when we still don't even have peripheral vision in FPS games.

    Edit:  To the poster above me.  Do you actually feel any sort of realistic attachment when playing MechWarrior?  Do you ever get mad, frustrated or become a sitting duck waiting to die because your weapons got destroyed?  I haven't played Mech Warrior Online and don't really plan to but I remember back to earlier Mech Warrior games, it was pretty annoying to have your weapons system be shot out because of bad luck and then sit there waiting for the NPCs to blow you up because you have no way to repair it ( ya that old Mech Warrior with no online play).

Sign In or Register to comment.