ehalcomb: What Happened to Health Bars? || Gaming Editorial

What ever happened to health bars in shooters? This seems like a very trivial question. The easy answer or at least the answer that most would agree on could be that, as games achieved the hardware to be more realistic, the games themselves followed suit with not only better graphics but with user interfaces. UI.



In most contemporary games, the UI shows information about the user as well as the world around them. In a modern shooter, say Halo 5, it can show ammo, a mini-map, items, and the player's shield. In modern games, mostly shooters, getting at

tacked is something that it shown very clearly on-screen with a red partial-circle in the direction of the bullets flying toward you in Halo, a similar red partial-circle with blood on the entire outside of your view in the newer Call of Duty games, and an arrow with blood smatterings in Uncharted 4. What do all of these have in common? They happen, then you forget about them.

It's very strange to me that games that are striving for realism, especially Call of Duty, are still using this particularly unrealistic trait of the human body. Taking five bullets to the chest isn't going to just slow you down and distract you for a few seconds; it is going to kill you. After the player has taken that initial hit, they are just going to forget about it an move on. In my ideal realistic game, that needs to stick with a person. A health bar would be a perfect place to implement that actual feeling of being shot without, obviously, having the actual feeling.

By this I mean that a health bar is there staring back at you as you trek through your space adventure, treasure hunt, or military simulation experience. When you get shot, a health bar reminds you of that and sticks with you. Say a man gets shot in the leg on the battlefield. By the standards of logic, that man probably won't be using that leg and thus has a higher chance of gaining another injury in the future. A developer can see a health bar in the same way. If a shot to the player takes off a certain amount of health, that player is more likely to die earlier because of it. That will stick with a player and can be a constant reminder of the vulnerability of themselves within the game world.

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I first got the inspiration of writing this after seeing footage of Naughty Dog's “Uncharted 4”. I mentioned earlier that this game uses the same hit-then-forget system that so many other games with familiar shooting mechanics follow but this game seems like a special case for me. Though I have yet to play an Uncharted game (hope to get to that series soon), I do know that this franchise is about high-flying adventure and really wants to give the player a

sense of power not by tedious trips of the stuff, but by a having Nathan Drake being at a low-point, like dangling off a cliff side or escaping a sinking shit, and then rising above to conquer. Sure Nathan gets more tattered and torn the more he adventures, but there doesn't seem to be anything specifically gauging that level of stress. I am speaking entirely in hypotheticals of course because of my nonexistent relationship with the franchise but it's still something that I, at least, think about.

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The standard shooting mechanic that we have now is fine but after seeing the same thing game after game it gets, frankly, boring. Maybe going back to the health bar mechanics of the early 2000's like in Halo: Combat Evolved or even older classics like Wolfenstein might be a fresh breath of air. I think that, recently, we have gone back to these to give our games a little more urgency. The new DOOM came out recently and has done just that. Sure its health bar/health pack system is ripped directly from it's first title, but I think the success of the game might have an effect of this mechanic coming back into the more mainstream titles like COD or Halo.

Am I basically just rambling now about something that isn't too important in the grand scheme of things? Yes, but I think that this particular ramble has some merit in a debate that I see no one having. Probably because it doesn't need to be had. I just find it humorous that gamers that strive for realism will defend the no-health-bar system of COD as being realistic when it is in fact the least realistic thing about the franchise. I'm no game designer, but realism is a component in the progressing gaming culture that will always lust for the next big jump. But I don't think that we should count something as trivial as a health bar out just yet.