The Science of Video Game Healing | Extra Punctuation
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- čas přidán 31. 05. 2023
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Isn’t the luck healing thing what uncharted did?
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Never again, please where can I give you money so you never have to do this again?
Wow, a 90 second add to start an 8 minute video??? holy thirsty escapist
gah damn. zp stop paying the bills?
I like how in a few Duke Nukem games, his health is referred to as "ego", implying that Duke can will himself bulletproof by how cool he recognizes himself to be
and getting shot lowers his self esteem
Explains why Forever was the last Duke game, it was so bad for Duke's ego he can't cope with anything more than a light breeze any more.
isn't Nathan Drake's similar except it's Luck and only the last few bullets actually hit him?
@@Lucifer_Crowe In game is just a generic "get hit, you lose health - cover some seconds to heal" system but yeah, I think that one of the developers said that canonically its how it works.
The new Warhammer boltgun game does the same thing and calls it "contempt"
7:02 …that’s actually how Naughty Dog explains how Drake survives everything in Uncharted. The generic red borders and black/white screen change whenever he gets shot at isn’t his health, it’s his luck running out.
Came here just to say this, and you beat me to it. Yeah I think it was Amy henig specifically that said this a while ago.
When you actually die, his luck is gone and you actually see the bullet hit.
@@Wiles731 same :)
True. So retroactively, all regen healing can be thought about as just luck like in Uncharted
@@Wiles731 So, I've never played the Uncharted games, but when you say that Amy Henig SAID this, I have to ask, is there any indication of this explanation in the game? If not I don't think it counts, it might as well just be a clever explanation they came up with post hoc.
that is actually how I house rule HP in D&D. you only actually get a severe wound when your HP reaches zero. I also house rule that if someone brings you back from 0 HP you get a permanent exhaustion point that you can only remove if you get medical care and time to recover. your actual HP is just your ability to keep fighting without getting seriously hurt.
for shooters I see regenerative HP more like suppression. if you get too suppressed and you don't take cover you get more likely to get hit. Red Orchestra/Rising Storm did something like it and I love it. getting shot is fatal, but people shooting at your direction gets you suppressed, and it works like regenerative HP. and if you don't look for cover you move slower and its harder to see.
This is why I like XCOM (and probably a bit of why you like it too). Getting shot, even once, means you need days (possibly weeks) to recover and the aid of different resouces can impact that time, but you never just snap back. XCOM 2 and WotC also weave in extra trauma that need dedicated time to properly heal from, showing all the ugly PTSD of fighting aliens.
Also field medkits don't actually reduce recovery time. Presumably it's just enough bandages and military-grade meth to keep the solider going until they can evac at the end of the mission, they'll still have to spend a few weeks in the infirmary after.
@@GumbyBrainDoctor it's also funny because they did that for balance. In Enemy Unknown the medkits did reduce the healing time but honestly, I like the X2/WOTC approach, it makes you play more tactically and to really think about it before letting a soldier tank a lot of damage. It's also way easier to imagine that indeed your soldier is just on enough adrenaline and morphine to put a horse down and a bit of bandage to stop the bleeding
In XCOM EW, the infirmary time was based on the lowest health a soldier was at, and then randomized so sometimes a minor wound that wouldn't do much to stop a soldier from fighting would sometimes mean weeks out of action to recover from, and vice versa.
Anyways, healing in combat could reduce infirmary time if it means preventing health from getting really low between skirmishes, but it's not a get out of sickbay free card.
Mordhiem has limb amputations & mental effects as well. One of the basic in mission 'healing' items is just Bugmans brew I think.
This is because it worked for the game. Soldiers that when get hurt will need to take a long time to recover and won't recover before ending the mission make you think tactically.
I love how healing in farcry games seems to only affect your forearms
Like you’re Achilles but exclusively take damage in the arms
Hidetaka Miyazaki once said he saw Bloodborne's "health" bar as more of a "will to carry on" bar. As in you keep taking hits until you will to continue gives up and you collapse. Rallying is you getting that shot of adrenaline to keep going. Not sure how that works while you're being sliced to pieces by giant wolves but there we are.
Everyone in that world is half monsters with crazy regenerative speed and half in a dream, where the impossible is possible. The "will to carry on" fits here as well, as in your "death" is when you give up
huh, I always thought its because as you slash an enemy he bleeds, and therefore heals you. like, when you use a healing blood vial hunter doesnt drink it - he crushes it in his arm, implying that healing only requires contact with blood
(or maybe just the blood being present? something something bloodlust i dunno)
@@AAAAAAAA-vd6zv Magical blood essentially. It heals people
Its the central point of the lore
@@AAAAAAAA-vd6zv dont they stab them into the leg?
@@AAAAAAAA-vd6zvThe Hunter doesn't crush the vial, he injects the blood into his right leg.
The "luck" idea is actually what was described a bit for Nathan Drake in Uncharted. That bullets "whizz by" him, which brings down his "health" and when he dies it's because he got hit.
No way. This is definitely headcanon
i really liked the opening of battlefield 1 as it used the "replace whole character when killed method" it was quite an intense opening and a fairly good tutorial as you were using all different types of combat, by switching between people
I was just going to type this myself. That opening mission set a really high bar for respawn mechanics that I've never seen another game (including the rest of Battlefield 1) quite match.
If only they made a whole campaign like that, switching through perspectives as battles develop.
Roguelike spunkgargleweewee
That's similar to what I feel made the early star wars battlefront games so good. Gaining ground felt like a war of attrition at times with huge body counts on both sides, rather than one god-tier guy who takes down an army
@@beady0081you know you made me wonder what the battlefields in battlefront would look like if the bodies didnt despawn, like hundreds of bodies piled on chokepoints
@@joevenespineli6389damn that would be awesome! Like cut back on the graphics a bit and make that happen!
I quite like the approach the original Deus Ex took to healing. The in-world mechanics all revolve around nanomachines rapidly knitting your bones and flesh back together.
Medkits do have regular first-aid materials in them-which comes in handy if you upgrade the Medicine skill to get more efficient healing-but they only exist to prep your body for the chemical injection that gives resources to the nanobots already in your body.
Med-bots will restore you to full health, regardless of your Medicine skill, because they have nearly perfect surgical expertise and a nearly unlimited supply of the materials and resources that your nanomachines need to work. However, they're bulky, and they can usually only be found in secure locations that could feasibly house and power one.
My last call out is the difficulty settings. You have the 3 classic modes and a bonus mode. On Realistic, any shot or blow you take to the head or torso is basically an instant death. You might get lucky and get "grazed" in an extremity-which always cripples the limb and prevents you from using it effectively-but that's often right before the second shot gets you.
I've played through the entire game on Realistic several times, and I cannot adequately emphasize how much you have to rely on investigation, caution, and creativity to get through everything.
Yeah, but that's all just words used to describe an amount of hit points for parts of your body and what normal video game things you do as a player to heal them
@@MegaZeta when the protagonist is a cyborg, it makes perfect sense.
And it reflects real life: if you get shot in the leg, you need *surgery* not fkn painkillers, and you'll find running pretty tough until you get it.
There are an absurd number of reasons OG Deus Ex is a classic, and this is one of them.
Speaking of the paper-doll Deus Ex style of healing, there's a little survival horror game that does something similar, but is crueller about it, and in a way it's a bit more "realistic".
It's called Fear & Hunger. And it really is CRUEL. And highly NSFW, because it's basically Berserk through the lens of RPGMaker horror.
While your health is represented as a health bar, your limbs can also take damage. And be permanently removed, whether by a menacing enemy attack, or by yourself if the limb gets infected and you don't have any green herbs on-hand (if you don't amputate soon, the infection WILL kill you). Losing a leg is the least concerning (you still shouldn't be fine with losing a leg, homes), but losing BOTH is bad news bears, 'cause you'll be left crawling forward in a place where you should NOT be left crawling around. Losing a single arm is a lot worse, since you usually need that arm in order to attack or hold a shield, and losing both makes you pretty much useless.
Fear & Hunger definitely isn't for everyone. It may LOOK like an RPG that you've seen a baker's dozen of, but it's actually more like a survival horror immersive sim in terms of mechanics, so don't go in expecting to be able to grind your way past difficult enemies. There aren't traditional levels in Fear & Hunger, and the REAL experience you get in the game is, well, ACTUAL knowledge and experience. You learn which fights to take, and which to avoid. You figure out what limbs to lop off of enemies first, what items are particularly effective against them, what paths are available to your character based on their skills, etc.
I don't know if Yahtzee would actually want to try Fear & Hunger, since while it has that Metroidvania-esque open-endedness to it, he might not be too keen to blat himself with this particular rake. Especially when it's a rake that might make his bum start bleeding. (it IS channelling the soul of Berserk, after all)
I dont think you do get it. The 1st commenter is entirely right.
Its nice the developers managed to find ingame world lore to fit healing potions into the gameplay. But it isnt a different way to heal that differs from other games.
Different would be if you had to catch the nanobots yourself in a pokemon-style way, battle them against other nanobots and level them up to make injecting them into your body more efficient.
@@duckbaker I mean, yes, I agree that it's simply another way of integrating a healing potion. But the distinction is that it makes sense within the conceits of the game. That's why it doesn't create a jarring break in immersion.
Honestly, the only thing I can think of that would make the original Deus Ex's healing mechanics feel more grounded, is if you could only use the medkits while you were outside of combat.
The thrust of the video isn't that hp-or any of the other ways we abstract how close you are to a failure state-is bad; it's only a negative when the mechanics don't match the internal logic in each game.
The alternative examples that Yahtzee gave are also just changes in vocabulary as well; eventually you'll run out of luck, units, etc... and it's going to trigger that failure state.
The important thing is that it jives with the setting. In a sword and sorcery game, potions make sense. And the Deus Ex mechanics-where you either visit a surgical robot or use medkits to field dress your wounds, before juicing up your sci-fi nanomachines to quickly regenerate your body-does exactly that.
Although a mediocre game in most aspects, the way ZombiU simply had you control a new character wherever your current character died actually made it quite immersive, and it was very fitting in that genre, also eliminating the feeling of some rando having plot armor and surviving the most ridiculously dangerous scenarios over and over again.
Project Zomboid does this as well. You could even find your old zombified character where they perished and loot them for your old gear if you want.
Cool mechanic.
It’s interesting how they could translate that and work it into Dark Souls where you lose your previous vessel, but your soul moves into another. They seem to like making death canonical.
@@Evanz111 Very true, that's one of my favorite things about the franchise; they make death make sense in-game and it's a beautiful marriage between gameplay mechanics and world-building and theme.
State of decay was also like that except the permadeth in that was was fucking brutal since you’d lose all your stats and only have a few people and that guy might have been your doctor or leader or some shit and now your fucked and next thing you know everyone’s abandoning you and dying and the 30 hour game you played is just done.
Void Bastards was better though.
Battlefield 1's prologue did the replacement idea and it was spectacular, if a little bit linear. Something like that combined with the campaign mechanic from the 2005 Battlefront II, where you have objectives and a limited amount of reinforcements, would make for a fantastic large scale combat campaign
Exactly. And, in that instance, I think my poor fps skills enhanced the experience, making it feel chaotic, bleak and desperate. It really resonated with me, I thought it was genius lol
Sekiro handles it so much better. Health is a thing, but the game places so much more focus on the posture system, and that's what encourages the player to get back into the fray.
One thing definitely worth discussing here is the space between "Crap! I need to heal" and "All better! :)" In some games, this space is instantaneous; in other games, there's a longer gap.
One one extreme, you have Breath of the Wild. The moment you're concerned about your health, you can pause, eat a million mushrooms or apples, and be right as rain. Cover shooters will regenerate your health, as long as you're not in immediate danger and can afford to sit still for the time it takes to regenerate. In Pokemon, you can heal whenever you want, but it'll cost you a turn; likewise with Estus flask-style healing, where you have to risk getting hit during your healing animation. After this would be one of my favorite healing methods, residual healing: you can START healing whenever you want, but the healing process takes time. Then you have medkits, which mean you can't heal until you find one out in the wild, which Yahtzee talked about. Next would be no healing during a level, but the game allowing you to heal in between fights. And finally, you have no healing, ever. If you get hurt, that's a permanent loss. Maybe don't get hit next time, idjit.
None of these are necessarily good or bad, but like Yahtzee said, they encourage different playstyles. The larger the gap between desire for healing and acquiring a healing tool, the more the game encourages caution and avoiding getting hit. Immediate healing is in general "easier," since you can fix your mistakes. When you can hold onto healing items, this essentially extends your health bar; if you have to use the healing where you find it, that forces the player to make the choice then and there.
There's also the dynamic on how much it heals. Getting a full heal is different from a partial heal, allowing dynamicness both in how healing is distributed as well as player motivation. Painkiller's approach to healing is quite different from Doom's, even if you theoretically killed just as many monsters while healing just as much health by the end of it.
@@Tuss36 True! I was considering adding that to my post, but it was long enough already. XD
In a great newgrounds game called "Madness" there is a mechanic similar to your suggested luck tokens.
In the game you play as a super-soilder, who has such inhuman twitch reflexes he can dodge or parry bullets on a regular basis, but as he gets shot at so much his natural stamina depletes, he eventually will fuck up one of his inhuman dodges and eat a bullet.
Shoutout to This War Of Mine for having a realistic health system. A little damage is a big hassle, a lot of damage can be fatal even after a few days if you don't help them recover properly. Same as sickness from the cold, and depression depending on the character's responses to your actions. One of the few games where getting into a conflict actually gives me a feeling of dread
Rainbow Six Vegas had an interesting twist on the "meathead shooter" regenerating health formula in that you have unlimited regeneration but an extremely low health total. This meant that you could take an infinite number of slight grazes, but getting caught in the open was a death sentence. Combined with a fairly long distance between checkpoints (the only game I know of where such a thing is acceptable), the mechanics encouraged the game's core fantasy of a tactical shooter, where cover and flanking were everything and you really DID want to avoid getting shot.
Oh yeah I loved Rainbow Six Vegas. The game was very strict with the damage you could take so the regenerating health was not tacky. It's also how I think the original Modern Warfare games would have been able to feel less clunky, if you just had enough cover mechanics that fit in instead of being basically binary, you're either behind a rock big enough or you're not. Being able to lean, cover fire, peek etc. would be a game changer
I preferred Rainbow Six: Raven Shield where if you or a teammate got shot, they died or were at least a casualty that may not survive by post-mission. At best you could hope to survive a minor wound by low caliber weapons if you had sufficient ballistic armor.
I liked the first aid kits in Left 4 dead and how they'd take time to use the bandages, as opposed to "eat first aid kit and feel better"
As opposed to pills, where it’s implied that you just dump all of its contents in your mouth and just eat it all
@@MorbidMindedManiac i mean that would work irl for pain relief, your kidneys just might explode the day after
@@zoggere4226 Painkiller overdose any% speedrun
Going back to what Yahtzee was saying too it does leave you vulnerable for quite some time which is exactly leads you to being pounced by a hunter in L4D
@@MorbidMindedManiac maybe all the pill bottles have like 2-4.
That's my head cannon at least cause I like the idea of people scavenging for supplies but not taking all the pills for later use then we come through and are stuck with the scraps throwing empty bottles all over the world
On the subject of a luck bar, Brother In Arms:Hell's highway did something akin to this. You only ever got hit by a bullet when you were dying, but your "health" was a measure of how close the bad guys were getting to hitting you, and I loved that system.
Along with the suppression system, it ended up working a treat.
That "luck bar" idea is what I found refreshing in the Smash Brothers games. You don''t have health, but an increased risk to fall of the edge of the screen.
After a decade watching RedLetterMedia, I never expected to hear Jack earnestly try to sell me kitchen junk. Looking forward to the day Rich Evans hawks me dollar store shaving kits.
This is mostly because Google/Facebook own a duopoly on the online advertising marketplace and thus extract 51 cents of every advertising dollar earned, simply because they can.
How did I never realize that was Jack from RLM until now!
As someone who doesn't particularly like Packard and has always found him sleazy, this move surprises me in the least.
@@lpsp442 Oh wow, look at this anti bald hate.
@@diegowushu His shiny pate has nothing to do with his behaviour and history.
Some games go fairy realistic with healing. One of the best parts of project zomboid to me is how a small mistake can lead you to hurting yourself for a month in-game (which is by default 30 hours irl). A broken leg means youre confined to your base and any areas that you're absolutely sure are clear of zombies.
And all that does is incentivize someone who hasn't had a long time on that character (read, most of them) to just dump their equipment and find a horde of zombies to tear them apart because it is, surprisingly, not fun to be stuck unable to play the game for 30 hours.
Was also going to bring up Project Zomboid as the only game I've played where you can cut yourself on some glass and then have to fuss with changing the dressing every so often as part of ensuring it doesn't get infected.
@@williambourn7798 Or take it as an opportunity to read some books, work on the base, etc. Even in multiplayer i've never had a friend intentionally die due to a burn or broken limb. Maybe you're right when it comes to public servers, but i don't have experience on those.
@@alec7182 yes, intentionally dying just feels wrong. Especially if you have some skills. On our server, even when someone gets bitten we make the best of it. "Okay I have a few days, anyone need something tailored before I get the firing squad?"
I was about to mention Project Zomboid! This is the one game that I can think of where a wound can take from 2-3 days to a few weeks to heal depending on the severity of it.
7:19 Hell Let Loose does this to a degree. If you die, the screen goes black. There's no kill cam, so you can barely register where the kill came from, and you become another soldier on the battlefield. It still has bandages for healing and such though.
Battlefield 2 in the og xbox did this as well. If the soldier u controlled died, u switch to another in the same unit, and if all of that unit dies, u have to start the mission again.
Hell Let Loose shows why its good and bad though when you get into it its a great game - but when your new to the game it can be very frustrating and many people probably quick before seeing the good bits
A lot of multiplayer shooters, especially milsims in line with the arma format, effectively do exactly what he describes.
This is the very same way you die in "Ghosts of Tabor" it's kind of like Tarkov in VR. It's just "screenblack". You hear no more sounds. :D It's very bleak and I love it. If only the game didn't crash every two seconds.
I like the mechanical role of healing in Hollow Knight, where finding an adequate window to do so during a boss fight required good understanding of their patterns (to the point where if you really understand you probably don't need to heal in the first place). Plus if you're on the back foot you need to get some hits in to generate the mana, encouraging you to turn aggressive much like DOOM 2016 did.
Love the Max Payne 3 line when you nab a bottle of pain killers. "They had their armor, I had.mine."
I kinda liked Fear and Hunger’s take on body damage where if a character loses a limb, it’s gone for good, at least until you perform some sort of ritual at a specific location to get them back.
Quite a few games also have that. Rimworld and dwarf fortress also allow for specific body parts to be damaged beyond recovery (except replacing limbs with robotic ones in rimworld)
Ethan's magical juice, healing his jacket as well as his hands was always entertaining. I get the story tried to explain how Ethan healed. But I like to imagine a Louisiana family sitting on the miracle "cure all" in their run down home.
I heard Joseph Anderson’s reaction in RE8 to making the healing canonical and it was hilarious, I admire how bold of a retcon it was.
@@Evanz111
It wasn't really a retcon. In 7 you can get a leg cut off at the ankle by Jack and some of the Molded, then you have to crawl to your severed leg and use healing juice to reattach it (if Jack does it, he even gives you a Strong Heal and explains the mechanic)
This is something that one little line of text in LoZ: Wind Waker really handeled well. When you catch a fairy in a bottle, the item description says "When your life energy runs out and you collapse from *EXHAUSTION*, this fairy will replenish your strength." The recontextualization of Health as Energy/Stamina really solves the disconnect between healing and injury.
I've always been fascinated by 'Health as a Resource' concept, as that philosophy can lead to many approaches in both game design and how a player tackles a game itself, both of which can vary wildly depending on what kind of game a developer wants to make. In Bloodborne health is quite literally a commodity that can be hoarded for later us in the case of Vial -> Blood Bullet or Healing, while in a lot of Persona and SMT games Physical Skills often cost HP. Both these and similar approaches to using HP creates a tight-rope experience of players having to find the right approach for them to survive or thrive, which I think adds a lot more to a game than simply Health = How Much More You Can Fuck Up.
*Everyone ever:* "Healing can never be even somewhat realistic because nobody wants to play a game where after every fight you need to not only get first aid to not bleed to death, but also spend entire days on bed to get back into shape, and if you die that's it forever."
*Kenshi:* _Taking notes furiously_ "Sorry, did you say 'permanent limb loss' or 'falling unconscious from the pain'? Nevermind I'll do both"
Games that take injuries seriously are my favorite ones.
This is probably the nicest Yahtzee has ever been to Sonic 😅
This is such a thoughtful exercise on a topic we've had in gaming forever. Awesome job, and thank you for taking the time to discuss it!
Resident Evil’s herbs will always be my favorite healing system because it leads to difficult decisions that reinforce the feelings of vulnerability and survival.
And it makes it feel like you're toking up to deal with 90s survival horror BS.
It's not healing, it's just drugs. I mean it looks like a joint.
@@Kinos141 it’s totally medicinal! Jill need it for her cataracts.
@@EllieBerryPie Nah man, it's the strongest shit around in raccoon city
Now they got their crappy "medicinal" oils found in Lousiana and europe.
@@aladontheinternet6363 lol for a while in Colorado you needed a medical card to get the super high potency shit, if you were smoking recreational beat you could get was the equivalent of a single green, but if you got the card? That shit was like when you mix the red, green and blue.
Gotta say, Matt was on fire with the editing today. Good job Matt!
7:00 Call of Juarez: Gunslinger actually did something a bit like that. Primarily it works on generic FPS health regen, but the player also has a Sense of Death timer which lets them dodge a single fatal bullet, and then needs to recharge before you can use it again. There are upgrades which interact with it that make it a valuable tool for reversing an unfavourable situation, too. And both it and bullet time are central to the game's theme of revenge, demonstrating in gameplay how Silas' quest is turning him into a cold-blooded killer as the player improves their skill and acquires new upgrades.
Well, I feel like Kenshi deserves a mention in this. It basically gave up on any health abstractions and just straight up let's the characters you control permanently able to get dismembered and wounded. And I imagine there are plenty more strategy games that let you do just that.
PS: Welp, turns out you can attach prosthetics for everyone, so I was wrong all along.
Permanently is a strong word, when you can just glue a robotic limb that's a lot better than your old one anyway.
@@longhenry4358 Just edit the additional info in the original comment, no need to delete
@@soumynona1971 Just did, thanks for mentioning.
To be fair, prosthetics are expensive and hard to come by in Kenshi, so unless you happen to have enough "cats", your character will be crawling across the wasteland and eventually get mauled by wildlife and/or taken by cannibals for supper.
@@AzureToroto They're so hard to come by I can get any Masterwork limb I want by just stealing it off the Black Desert City's shop. 20 minutes into any run.
Once you know what you're doing, the game is very easy to cheese.
Someone might need to Snopes me, but I've read multiple times that Yahtzee's description of a "luck" system for HP is actually how D&D hit points work, canonically. Losing HP isn't getting wounded. It's getting hit, but not lethally. The more experience/armor you have, the longer (and more near death situations) it should take before the dagger inevitably hits you in the neck.
It's been a minute since I've read it-so no one execute me if I'm wrong-but I'm pretty sure the 5e DMG, and several other games based on its system, still takes the time to say that HP can be played as meat points, but it's meant to be an abstraction that shows how the battle is wearing you down and that you're visibly closer to slipping up and taking a lethal hit.
So, exactly what you said. And I think that's been around since, at least, 3.5 (if not as far back as AD&D).
The old Star Wars D20 system from WOTC used Vitality and Wound Points, where Vitality effectively was a stand in for luck, while Wound points was your actual health. An interesting addition was for Force Users: it also acted as a mana bar, so the more Force you used, the less vitality you had and the higher likelihood that you would get injured. But Jedi got more vitality than others to simulate the tremendous survivability of the space wizards
Here's the clause from the SRD under Combat section for hitpoints.
"Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck. Creatures with more hit points are more difficult to kill. Those with fewer hit points are more fragile."
Exactly what HP represents is fairly abstract, and different tables handle it differently. Most tables these days handle it as an overall "survivability" metric, with only the last hit die representing actual meat. So a critical hit that knocks off a ton of HP but doesn't take you down might represent an arrow nicking your ear or going through your coat.
Of course, that's kind of incompatible with how healing works, because if you aren't wounded, it's not clear exactly what the healer is doing...
@@RumpusImperatorit could be that the healer is moreso restoring your stamina or focus. Like temp HP is effectively a huge dose of caffeine making you more aware or awake
7:10 Syphon Filter had a similar mechanic where you had a "danger" bar that filled up as you were shot at. When it was full you lost armour. Lose armour and you can take one or two hits. The game never really had many health kits so armour and danger were the main two bars you needed to look for. In the second game they introduced a flashing danger bar for headshots that would one hit you if you were too still.
I've always liked Zelda's health system where not only do you get to increase your health by defeating major enemies but you also get pieces for exploring the world, it makes it seem like Link is growing as your adventure goes on. Plus the games where you get to fire a sword beam at full health incentivise you to stay at full strength.
The game I played with the most realistic approach to health was a Rainbow 6 game from decades ago. Basically, you control one man in a squad of dudes and if you get shot, more often than not, you're dead and you then control someone else in the squad. The idea was to always shoot before the enemy does so that you don't die, which turns out to be a good strategy.
The Evil Genius series has one that works well for what it is. It’s a strategy base building game where Logistics is your biggest concern. Your minions are semi-autonomous and will go about their duties while you , the Evil Genius, are sitting at your desk in Inner Sanctum. You work to repel the forces of Justice that show up to investigate/ ruin your whole operations and while you can personally fight that’s a last resort because the game only ends when you die. Your minions are replaceable provided you have enough money. Your minions heal so long as you have a Medic Room but that requires power which requires money, and even then it needs to be equipped enough to take care of your growing forces. Meanwhile you heal by resting at your Office Desk in your Inner Sanctum. Theirs levels of health bars and healing. Your minions are basically bullet sponges that can fight back, the state and set up of your base is another health bar and then you have a more classic health bar. Just recently I lost because I angered too many people at once and any minion capable of fighting back the Agents of Justice were dead and strewn across the hallway and they strolled up to my office relatively unopposed after too long and killed me.
all the classic R6 and Ghost Recon games were like that. they had a huge focus in careful movement and planning... I miss those games, its really bothers me that we never saw a indie game that tried to replicate them. I bet Ubi has the mechanic hostage with some patent or some bullshit like that.
Well, that explains American police. /satire
Swat 4 had a similar system, although it also had limb damage so you could take somewhere between 2-5 hits before dying (course you didn't get to shift to another member of the squad, die once and its back to the start of the mission). Of course the problem there was you were incentivized to arrest foes, which meant they often had a chance to shoot back at you first.
@@dannybeane2069 That sounds like it would add some fun tension to the game - risk vs. reward.
The "luck" system he thought of is actually implemented in Madness: Project Nexus in the form of a TAC bar that would regen overtime and give you bullet dodges. Kinda like a fancy regenerating shield.
What's funny is his example of soldiers replacing each other was actually used in a WWI shooter, Battlefield 1. To be fair, it was only in the introductory mission, but it was still a neat idea.
it was also in Battlefield 2 for PS2. you played with a full combined arms company that you could jump from soldier to soldier at will. and when one died, you switched to another.
7:10
There was a flash game that did something like this called "Madness Combat: Project Nexus". It was a 2D sidescroller shooter beat em up hybrid where characters had conventional health and a "Tactical Awareness" meter. If your character crosses paths with a bullet, they take "Tactical Awareness" damage (shortened in game to "Tac Bar") and you watch them perform a slick little sidestep that dodges the bullet but may interrupt your current action or attack. Your character wouldn't take any health damage until the Tac Bar was empty and you got shot again, at which point you could take a massive salvo of health damage from a single bullet. There was no way to recover health during a mission, but the Tac Bar regenerated whenever you weren't being targetted in combat, and outside of combat.
It was also very interesting because the Tac-Bar actually took damage differently from the health meter; getting shot from behind inflicted double the Tac-Bar damage. Likewise, unarmed and melee attacks (fisticuffs) could drain your Tac-Bar very quickly, but wouldn't do nearly as much health damage unless they were dished out by a character with very high melee and unarmed stats. This encouraged weapon combos and creative tactics to first wipe out a character's Tac-Bar very quickly, and then finish them off with a weapon that could do lots of health damage.
One more notable concept implemented in this game around the Tac-Bar was the Zombies mode. You had to first enter the "Create your own character" arena mode, then level them up all the way to level 30 before you could even unlock zombie mode. The thing is, zombies in this game didn't just generically attack you with hand swipes and stuff we see in other zombie games. Instead, what they do is they gang up on you, grab you, and eat you. Getting grabbed by a zombie traps you and forces you to complete a QTE to break free, all the while you see your character's Tac-Bar deplete very rapidly. If it reaches 0 in this state, the zombie starts eating you and you die right away. Also, zombies could re-grab you very quickly after breaking free unless you immediately performed a dodge move, which meant that getting surrounded is basically a death sentence. This meant the zombies weren't just more melee meatheads to shoot, they were actually an imposing threat that was not always so easy to deal with.
One of my favorite instances of health as a unique mechanic is in Hylics, where defeating enemies drops meat, and you can only convert the meat to health in a hub world you go to after you die. It makes death an essential part of the progression, in a satisfying way.
Honestly after playing boltgun this week and getting save locked in several sections where there wasnt any healthkits I think there is something to be said for regenerating health in shooters.
Yeah Boltgun definitely made me miss the way the modern Doom games and Ultrakill handled health.
07:03 Syphon filter had a system similar to that, you had a DANGER bar and when it was full, you start getting damage,first to your armor and then to your health and if you get health damage, it cant be healed during the rest of the level.
Depending on the genre, you could also replace "health" with "armour/shield integrity". Your armour can absorb up to a certain amount of damage, but if it absorbs more than that, you die. Instead of "healing", you have to replace/repair your armour, or (in the case of an energy shield) recharge your shield so it can take more hits
Replacing your character with a new one after death is one I've always adored. Infinity Blade was my first introduction to the idea, playing as your character's son going down a bloodline of vengeance.
Yahtzee’s idea about luck instead of health was actually already done in the Uncharted games. Every bit of damage Nate took was supposed to show his luck running out, and only the final bullet actually kills him.
The Luck system you describe featured in Hard West and works quite well. The expendable soldiers idea is something I'm wondering about since CoD2. Why have a singke character who we never see, named Generic McGenericsson, instead of having a rotating squad?
If your game is sci-fi/futuristic, maybe one option would be to have the health bar be an energy shield like that one from Dune. When you get hit the shield depletes and healing restores it. Any direct hit and you're dead.
Can I throw in a game with a somewhat realistic damage and healing system? Rimworld. It is a colony management game where if your colonist gets shot or stabbed, that injury does a few things:
- Increases your pain (a percentage value that immobilizes a character once it hits 100%)
-Potentially causes you to bleed (a rate of taking damage that if it reaches 100%, you bleed out and die)
-Reduces your limb's functionality (so mangling a left arm will lower your ability to pick up and interact with things)
To get rid of damage, you use medkits to stop the wound from bleeding and increase the speed of recovery, which a body will naturally do over days, and go faster if you set the colonist to bed rest. During the time, the injury can get infected if the place they are in is not clean enough. Granted the injuries move fast to heal in this game, a complete body mangling only takes like 2 weeks tops, but the game's calendar year takes 60 days, so 2 weeks is kind of close to 3 months of recovery.
The sponsor segment being done in Yahtzee's fast paced style is perfect.
Would have loved to hear him do it though...
Honestly considering the types of sponsors you can get I would love to see a full Zero Punctuation ad read complete with slightly off color jokes.
Wasn't fast paced enough to take up less than 20% of the runtime of the video though 😂
I'd rather see he maintain his integrity by avoiding doing ads, especially considering most of these ad companies have pre-written scripts to follow and very strict rules on what can and can't be said.
Have an advert of him recommending something he actually enjoys, like Branston Pickle.
@@jackukridge5381 or Breville sandwich toasters 😂
I always liked the way Bungie did it. In Doom, "health" was a very gamey thing designed for gameplay purposes but simply calling it "shields" in Marathon and implying that once your personal shields are gone you die from a single hit genuinely makes it seemingly logical despite functioning the same way.
Just calling the number something else means it goes from "completely unrealistic" to "completely reasonable" and its fun to see how our minds work like this.
I've had this idea bouncing round in my head for awhile. You know WALL-E? You know that scene right at the beginning of the movie where he notices his treads are worn down, then notices a perfectly good set of treads on a dead robot next to him, and the next shot his treads are replaced. What if you had an entire game and health system like that. You are a robot and your enemies are robots, your different limbs and components take damage and you can perform maintenance on them but after a certain point you are going to have to scavenge parts from fallen enemies. Could have a unique aspect then if at points you specifically aim to take down enemies in particular ways in order to ensure certain components remain intact for scavenging. Could also tie into progression as you don't level up so much as you find better quality parts.
The console release of Battlefield 2 had an interesting take. It was kind of what Yahtzee suggested for a war game, you had regenerating Health but if you died you didn't restarting a checkpoint you just swap to a different guy and you only lost the mission when all of your guys were dead.
I do think there's something to be said for CSGO, no healing, one life, format. To be fair the round is only two minutes long, but you don't *have* to have healing.
Convergence does something pretty interesting. Since you can rewind a set amount of times to cover your mistakes it basically acts like secondary life system. You can choose to avoid taking a single hit during combat, but if you run out a lot of the platforming becomes instant reset. This becomes a bit trivial when you get a lot of the upgrades but it at least forces you to keep track of how many rewinds and think about you're using and why you're using them.
The fact that the original Assassin's Creed found an in-universe way to present precisely your 'luck' health mechanic is one of the things that really earned it my respect back when it first released. It construed you messing things up in the animus reconstruction of your genetic memory as a deviation from what the master assassin Altair actually did in his own life, which was not getting hit by an errant sword strike or plummeting to his death even once (obviously, or no decendents). As such, there was a tacit implication that you weren't living up to your forebear somehow, while still giving you the leeway to continue on regardless.
Then they went and dropped that in AC2 to replace it with completely uninspired 'health potions', which was probably the only regression between those two titles. I was glad to see it make a return in AC3 after that, and since then they almost seem to alternate between each approach (probably in part because they're alternating between regional studios too).
I wish I knew where to find a video like this about tabletop game healing that was as thoughtful
I had to watch an ad before this started, followed by a 90 second ad in the video, followed by 2 ads as soon as that ad finished. Brilliant.
I personally like how the healing in the Farcry games work in which you do something wild like unbreak all of your fingers or dig out a bullet with a knife or some shit.
There’s actually a game system that exists where it explains your health system as being luck that’s running out, and eventually bullets starting hitting you and then you’re dead. Although I feel like a right pillock because I can’t remember the name of it.
6:39 “meathead shooters”. Love it. 😂
I've been thinking about the luck system for some years now, since I've always found the fact that you could get shot with a high caliber machine gun and just get back to tip top shape by bandaging your arm or cracking a dislocated joint, or just hiding behind a box for a few seconds very immersion breaking.
When I was younger, and especially in the "hide behind a box to recover health" type of games I used to "role-play" these events so that my character would have a bullet just barely miss them. Being in the somewhat difficult intersection of enjoying fast-paced fps games and also realistic mechanics, this kind of a luck system would instantly make any game my favourite of the year! Thanks Yahtzee for voicing this out loud!
Never been the biggest fps guy, but I remember really enjoying playing Goldeneye with the enemy accuracy cranked down & damage cranked up-- such that they missed a lot, but it was a one-hit kill when they did. Firefights felt more intense.
For all it's flaws, the health system in Duke Nukem Forver was such a neat twist on normal regenerative health. Duke can't get injured, but his ego is bruised a bit, and you build up health by just building up his ego.
The luck thing was somewhat done in "westerado", where you have hats, and every time you got shot your hat flew off and you replaced it
The military soldier replacement was, I think, done in Red Orchestra 2
I was surprised you didn’t bring up Ultrakill. A heath system whereby you regenerate your health by the amount of blood you coat yourself in. It means when you’re low, the pace doesn’t grind to a halt as you scroll through menus of items, hide behind cover, or explore the last ten minutes of level you walked through. Instead, you find the closest ugly bastard and introduce the concept of gibs to them. Taking large amounts of damage restricts how much you can heal back so you can’t just tank everything by continuously standing next to someone and shooting them. Using the games grapple reduces your max health for a few seconds so there’s some risk vs reward of bringing you closer to a health source I.e. an enemy, but you can’t regen as much because it was easier to get to them. Not to mention it opens up weapon ideas such as the screw driver which deals less damage than its alternatives, but makes an enemy a walking heal station as it slowly chips away at them cause if more blood to spur. To me, this feels like one of the best healing systems for a fast paced game. Not to mention there is a small element of explanation to it, as our robot protagonist V1, runs on “vampire pistons” which are fuelled by blood.
My favorite health system is in Escape From Tarkov where all the limbs (include thorax and stomach) all have health pools. Having your head or thorax zeroed means you die. Other zeroed limbs mean debuffs and losing health in all other limbs
Also the way surgery kits work: you can, with relatively rare items and at great risk of being caught out, restore lost limbs. Problem is, they come back with significantly fewer HP. There is a real and lingering cost to getting hit hard, even with the "cure" for it.
Point your hands out, wave your gun around, the jingle plays, the green number appears and everyone's less dead. Easy.
Happy?
"Luck" was literally how Brothers In Arms suppression system worked with how the screen turns progressively red the closer you are to actually getting shot
That WW1 example is exactly what the introduction to Battlefield 1 did and while I’m not a huge fan of that game, that mission has still stuck with me to this day.
I like it when games treat health not just as a failure tracker but as a resource as is often the case in roguelite games where health can be exchanged for currency or something else of use. It's always satisfying when a gamble of short-term pain for long-term power pays off.
7:19 This is actually how Helldivers 2 uses their lives system. Every time a grunt dies, you immediately take control of another fresh-faced recruit dropping in from orbit to do their part and also probably die trying. Then again that game also has healing items but there's only so much a shot of morphine can do when your soldier has been smashed into compote.
That WW1 example was part of what made the Battlefield 1 intro mission so good. You hold as long as you can, but inevitably your position will get overrun and you die, and then you play as the guy at the defensive line behind him. I've also said and heard for years that this idea was criminally underused, because that's the one mission where it happens.
I find it pretty cool that Guild Wars 2 and Lotro are more "morale" based. It's why you can rally from the downed state in GW2 (and have anyone walk up to you to revive you in most places if you get 'defeated') and why minstrels are a healing class in Lotro.
Brothers in Arms did the regen health along the “luck” idea. Instead of turning red, your screen got increasingly dirty from the ground being shot up around you, until one bullet finally hits home and turns everything red.
Then you’ve got Ghost of Tsushima’s protagonist character meta-aware he’s in a Kurosawa setting and just strengthening his resolve to shrug off sword blows.
7:20 Battlefield 2: Modern Combat did something very similar to this. You could control any of your allies on the battlefield at any moment with a soldier-swap mechanic, but you had a finite amount of soldiers. When you get killed, you take control of the closest friendly unit you hed when you died. Once you run out of soldiers, you lose. The game wasn't exactly a masterpiece, and many people don't even know it existed, but with a more serious tone and some tweaking, that mechanic could be extremely fun and thought-provoking
I always loved estus. Its like this warm soup which is reminiscant of the only comfort you have in this world. A fire
Alien Soldier has the best health mechanic.
You recover health by parrying the enemies proyectiles, and when you reach your maximum health, you can do a super attack that shreds trough enemies and bosses.
The ww1 example yahtzee brought up is actually the first level of the battlefield 1 singleplayer campaign, which in general i enjoyed far more than i expected to enjoy a battlefield campaign
He even reviewed that campaign too, musta stuck with him subconsciously.
Fun fact, that idea with the luck is the canon explanation for the health system of the Uncharted games! The games' protagonist, Nathan Drake, is canonically very lucky when it comes to not getting hit by bullets. The "health" lowering is actually his luck running out, and once it does he gets fatally wounded.
I kinda like Returnal’s health system. The pickups called Sylphium are alien blobs that fit in with the arcadey, alien world but they repair suit integrity instead of health cuz its a hostile alien atmosphere and you die the instant you’re exposed
Cannon Fodder did the 'characters die after one hit and are replaced with someone different-but-not-really' back in the 90s.
Weird how emotionally attached you'd get to any of the dudes that survived long enough to progress up the imaginary ranks.
I recall seeing a feature on a WW1 game way back on the ol' TV when such shows were a thing where getting hit was a big consequence. I believe you could bandage where you got shot, but it'd affect you for the rest of the mission, making you limp if you got hit in the leg or having worse aim if shot in the arm. The game also had realistic reloading for the guns of the time, which meant it took you ten seconds to load each round, which also helped to give more meaning to each shot. I haven't played the game myself, but I can definitely see it being a compelling design.
7:20 This was done before in Battlefield 2: Modern Combat (Thanks Raycevick!). You could basically take control of any allied unit on the battlefield that you had line of sight to, and if you died that just meant you had one fewer unit to rely on for subsequent fights, so skilled players lost fewer units and failure was defined by having all your troops be depleted.
I've been playing a bit of Cold War Zombies with some friends recently and tried out the Onslaught Survival mode, meaning no automatic healing, you gotta find food that enemies drop or find them in boxed. However, that one simple change made things infinitely more tense. Larger groups of enemies were seen as a much bigger threat now. Elite enemies that normally take half your health in one shot were to be avoided at all costs if you were stuck with a shorthair of health left. Everything is a mad dash to cram another can of corn in your gob and oh no! That only healed you for a quarter of your health and that Hellhound wants an exploding hug! It's great!
The luck mechanic suggested here is used in Hard West, but with health, too. 7:02
The funny thing about the "luck bar" idea is that the Uncharted series actually uses it. I remember one of the developers, I think it was Druckmann, saying that Nate never takes any damage. His luck gets reduced with every shot that narrowly misses him until his luck runs out, and he gets killed by a bullet that actually hits him.
I once described the system in Uncharted to my little brother as "luck." As Drake gets shot at, the screen turns more and more grey, but if I remember correctly, it's not super clear that Drake has actually been shot. And so when he balked at the idea, I just said, that's you getting shot and being lucky not to get hit, and if you stay out of cover for too long, your luck will run out. For Uncharted's "health" system, it works really well.
I’m pretty sure there was an old WW2 game that had its “health regeneration” being “danger”. When you’re spotted and being fired at in the open you’ll start being suppressed by fire, and if you don’t get to cover for too long eventually you get hit and it’s a one hit kill. But then it makes sense for the “health” to regenerate because the danger has now passed.
The turn based SRPG Hard West uses a combined luck and health system. You have a luck percentage and depending on how close the hit was, your luck diminishes an according amount. Once it runs out, you can receive regular damage.
Effectively it ends up being more akin to "ablative armour", but it suits the western theme quite well.
Having healing powers like the T-1000 would be rad!
Axelay is one of my favorite examples of this. In that game, if you get hit by a projectile, any current weapon (you can equip three at a time) that's currently active gets disabled. You'll die if either all three weapons are disabled or if you crash into a wall or enemy.
Us older gamer types will remember Cannon Fodder from 1993 (War...has never been so much fun) where not only when your character died were they replaced by another less-experienced character, all your would-be future squaddies queued up outside the recruitment office next to the tombstones of the people you'd needlessly had killed by being crap earlier in the game. A lovely bleak slap in the face of a game that :)
there's a tabletop RPG for star wars that used "luck health" that showed how far you were from getting a blaster to the face.
The third Brothers in Arms game essentially had the 'luck' system described here. Functionally almost identical to health regen - just assume that, when you're out of cover, your health/luck is constantly draining. It's mainly a cosmetic change - instead of taking countless hits and impossibly healing from them, you're taking risk and if you take too much you get shot once and it's game over. It was pretty much perfect for a non-sim military shooter.
This reminds me of a 2.5D puzzle platformer game from a few years ago called Life Goes On. Every hazard is instantly fatal and you have to restart the level, but your corpse sticks around permanently as a physics object. For instance, it can block spikes so you can walk over them. Almost none of the levels are beatable without dying at least once, and how many times you die is your score.I liked it quite a bit but the last few levels got frustrating and I never finished it.
The Star Wars tabletop RPG based on 3rd edition D&D actually did that "luck" suggestion with its splitting of your health pool into wounds and vitality, with the latter representing the conventional D20 system hit dice, and the former being a value equal to your constitution, and damage taken to it is much harder to regenerate. Vitality represents how much energy you have for all the fancy acrobatics that let you not be hit at all, and only once you run out of it do you start failing to block blaster shots with your fancy light sword and getting third degree burns from each one that connects.
The "luck as HP" concept was utilized as nice little stylistic touch in Hard West.
7:18 I've heard similar suggestions for dnd, with just the acronym HP standing for Heroic Points instead.
I've seen that kind of luck based health in TTRPG's. Specifically off the top of my head, Dusk City Outlaws (heist game in fantasy Venice), your luck is your health, you start with a certain amount and either lose it from bad stuff happening, or you can spend it as a resource on failed rolls to instead succeed
I remember Resonance of Fate, which whilst it did have RPG style health and healing, your party members had this "Hero Point" system that as long as you had one left, you didn't follow the normal rules of damage, but as soon as you ran out, suddenly the music becomes more frantic, the insanely anime acrobatics and confidence your characters had whilst vaulting, somersaulting and diving whilst shooting their enemies vanishes, and all three start quivering, shaking and otherwise being acutely aware their plot armour is depleted and they are extremely close to death. (I think they even moved and attacked slower. Running out of hero points was bad) The game had a back and forth dynamic with the points, you wanted to keep enough to stay safe whilst strategically spending them to do big combo attacks.