I touched on this topic very briefly around 9 years ago but, if I'm honest, it was never a huge topic for me until Bob Case got to his analytical break down of Baldur's Gate this past week and I realised my feelings on the subject were stronger than I anticipated.
The health system of any game is vitally important in order to balance all gameplay elements. While the concept of "health" can be more or less abstract across different genres (what is "health" in a card collecting game (CCG) or a real time strategy game (RTS), for example?), I'm going to focus on its place role playing games (RPGs) and first person shooters (FPSes)...
Back in the '90s and early 2000s games sytems were very strict in their mechanics (by today's standards). This might be considered a remnant of the whole arcade era where mastery of a game's mechanics meant that you spent less money but lacking that mastery meant you placed more coins in the slot. Conversely, it might be considered a remnant of the pen and paper (PnP) RPG mechanics from the '70s and '80s during the development of Dungeons and Dragons and myriad other PnP gaming systems. Maybe the truth is somewhere inbetween - if there's one thing computers are good at is "hard" systems whereas real life role playing can be very "fuzzy" in its implementation.
At any rate, by this time, FPSes and RPGs had settled on hit point-based (HP) systems where a character has a total number of HP which can then be whittled down in many ways: enemy attack, traps, or environmental hazards (such as fire). At the point where those conditions were no longer applicable to the character, their HP remained static, below their total and could only be increased through absoption of some healing item, like a medikit or health orb, a magic spell, or whatever suited the game's premise.
Then came Halo 2.
There are various articles chronicling the history of regenerating health in games: See GamesRadar and Giant Bomb, for example. However, it's clear that the concept of regenerating health did not truly exist until Halo 2 came along. Most prior systems were various implementations of the resting system traditionally observed in roleplaying games. These sytems were implemented as a sort of "real time" rest whereby instead of skipping to the end, the player has to sit through the healing process. Even other cited examples, in those articles are generously labelled as "regenerating" whereby health, stamina, or shields are treated as interchangeable elements of the health system.
No, what we're speaking of is the complete and utter regeneration of a character's health as during combat and as soon as the action of taking damage ends. Even the limitation of no rengeneration during combat is applicable for this as well.
It is a commonly accepted truism that within any walk of life that limitations allow us humans the opportunity to excel in those endeavours. Often, when presented with unlimited possibilities, human beings tend to become paralysed. It is only when our focus is narrowed that we are able to really excel and apply ourselves. Now, of course there must be exceptions to this premise - the whole of history is littered with people who broke out of expected norms in one way other another - I just don't know them specifically.
However, taking this concept to its logical limit, we're left with the idea that limits within game systems necessarily make more interesting gameplay - as long as they're integrated holistically with the rest of the gameplay.
But I'm digressing.
Let me set out my argument: Very simply - having a game system which requires no thought from the player or little management results in boring or uninteresting gameplay. Worse still, it results in multiple game systems feeding into that specific game system being unfocussed and underdeveloped because less thought is required for the whole thing to function.
On the other hand, I'm not necessarily a fan of of those heady '90s and early 2000s days of carefully accounted health systems. I think that they were overly restrictive and resulted in systems that punished creativity from players who lacked a certain skill level. i.e. If you were a master of the game, you could advance without needing so many of the carefully placed health packs or limited-use spells to manage the health of your character(s). If you were not a master of the game, as most people are not during their first and subsequent playthroughs and maybe don't enjoy total mastery of a game system (as most people seeking entertainment do not) then you will live or die by their placement.
Famously, Half Life 2 (and subsequent games) would alter the contents of utility crates based on how well the player was doing as a balancing mechanic. This meant that, if a player was low on health, they would receive more medikits... if they were low on ammo, that would show up instead... depending on some arcane pentagram of intersecting "game needs" which the designers had drawn up. This was implemented in order to give all players a "relative" difficulty to their game skill - a very skilled player would recieve fewer resources whereas a less skilled player would receive more. Fittingly, the most important aspect of any game is to provide entertainment for all of its players..... though this concept is disputed by a good number of players and some developers who view equal challenge as the epitomy of the art form. Though this is a discussion for another Analyse This...
I actually think that Half Life 2's implementation is a very sincere and interesting implementation of balance. However, this interesting system was layered atop systems that adhered to the concept of 'entertainment' instead of being designed around skill. The health system and weapon ammunition resource systems are both dependent on player skill... thus the enemy management systems are also dependent on those concepts as well. You will find that enemies in Half Life 2 are designed to sometimes miss or near-miss the player in order to make the game feel more dangerous than it actually is. It's still very easy to die in the game so it's not as if there's no challenge.
Unfortunately, in a large proportion of other games, those interlinked systems are not designed with this care to attention and so balanced systems don't realise that player skill is relative, even within a single person as they play through a game. Games where the enemies will attack with the same ferocity whether the player is low on resources or not have the problem that the challenge increases as the player's resources are depleted. On the other end of the spectrum - games that level scale too aggressively end up making the game too easy. because the challenge never varies by much.
Let's take a generic enemy encounter in Half Life 2 - the first time through the game no player can be expected to understand or anticipate what is coming in advance. So let's take that encounter; the player does very well but then there's no autosave or the player doesn't save after the encounter... they plow into the next encounter with full health but then are defeated; beaten by the enemy. They reload to prior the first encounter and go through it again, though this time they are less optimal - they take more damage and waste more ammunition. Between the two encounters there are only the same number of supply crates because the number of these do not balance based on the condition of the player so the player rolls up to the next encounter, the one that killed them, with fewer resources than they previously had.
Now, they need more skill to complete the encounter than they previously had. This is somewhat balanced by their increased knowledge of the encounter and environment it takes place in but a designer cannot quantify this increased knowledge, you cannot track it on a per player basis for many reasons.... some of them are due to momentum*, some of them are due to retention of knowledge**, awareness of three-dimensional space or even objects and collectibles within that space.
Ultimately, and gaming experience becomes an uncontrolled mess that the designer has to work around with cheats (aka balancing mechanisms) and play testing. Half Life 2 did this through managing assets in the game world but since these assets themselves could not be managed thoroughly due, I guess, to geometry and level design issues, their potential ultimate impact on the user experience was more limited than a more versatile implementation might be. In fact, it can be observed at certain points in the game, a particular encounter appears to have 'beaten' the designers who have had to balance it by littering the environment with many resources for the player to utilise as they need. The showdown with the helicopter is one such place.
Some people refer to implementations such as the one used in Half Life 2 as "adapative difficulty" and there is the argument to be made that they all lie on the scale from no adaptiation (most old games) to complete adaptive difficulty (The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion). I think we could ultimately agree that any game that alters its behaviour with respect to difficulty due to player condition has adaptive difficulty of some form. However, I think we (as a cohort of gamers) might disagree as to the impact on difficulty and experience... as well as intent of the designer/developer. For example, the mere mention of a lower difficulty for Sekiro resulted in a severe backlash from players who felt their experience of the game would be infringed in some manner from the idea of such a solution that would enable lower-skilled players to enjoy late game content. The common refrain was that these people couldn't achieve the skill required to enjoy late game content and thus must be denied access to it.
The thing is, most games are not sport. Most gamers are not Michael Jordan, Usain Bolt, or Michael Johnson... nor are they the second-rung olympic atheletes or less famous players. Games exist as entertainment first and foremost. They are not an exam. They are not a gated community. They are meant to include as does any movie or book or piece of music. We may not personally resonate with any individual piece of art but we will find something that permeates into our consciousness or being.
Yes, you can make games that are exams, that gate people from experience, but the best games do not. The best games measure us and may even publicly rate us for our performance (see: Bayonetta or that style of game) but I feel that those games are actually in the minority these days. Of course, rating performance does not equate to blocking advancement: they block results. I think that is a really good way of doing things; you don't get an "S" rating in every encounter? You don't get the best denouement. You get lower than an "S" rating? You still get an ending.... just maybe not as good an ending. (Of course, Bayonetta also has an automatic mode which removes most of the difficulty from the encounters.)
You see, many people conflate achievement with resonance.
Bayonetta, as a game and genre may not resonate with me, personally (I'm crap at those types of overwhelming bullet-hell style games) but I can play them to some extent. I can, physically, manage to get to the end of any of those games through trial and error. It doesn't make me a master of those games... in fact, I'm pretty sure the only obstacle to my "completion" of a game is perserverence and time, not skill (though the line there is pretty nebulous). Honestly, I don't have the patience for a game that I feel doesn't respect me or my time.
However, I would try any number of times for games that resonate with me. Resonation is a love for a particular implementation of a genre or idea... So what if I don't manage to be perfect? I'm still enjoying all the other aspects of the game. The difficulty of a game is not its only aspect - that is a core misconception of some people.
This is, again, where the conversation becomes complicated because there are games that are not difficult but present the idea of difficulty through obscurity (such as Sekiro or Dark Souls) and ask the player to master systems they may not understand. Those games have value and I wouldn't necessarily ask them to make themselves easier but, acknowledging the ethos above, allowing for varying player competence is a core aspect of gaming, as much as allowing for player understanding is a core aspect of any novel or movie. Some people will figure out "it was the butler that did it" before other people, and some people will just be along for the ride, without putting significant mental effort into the art piece. At the same time, you don't write a novel in obscure prose, requiring a dictionary for all people who are well-versed in the particular language the work is written in (Well, unless you're Mervyn Peake).
You don't tend to film movies in confusing cut/counter-cut/invert viewing angle/etc. (except for the transformers movies and that appears to work for them!) otherwise you'll make it very confusing for viewers. Similarly, for comics, you need to keep the characters in the same orientation between panels, otherwise you run into issues where people can't understand who is who or how the layout of the partially-drawn environment works out.
Part 2 of this series is now available to read!
The health system of any game is vitally important in order to balance all gameplay elements. While the concept of "health" can be more or less abstract across different genres (what is "health" in a card collecting game (CCG) or a real time strategy game (RTS), for example?), I'm going to focus on its place role playing games (RPGs) and first person shooters (FPSes)...
Back in the '90s and early 2000s games sytems were very strict in their mechanics (by today's standards). This might be considered a remnant of the whole arcade era where mastery of a game's mechanics meant that you spent less money but lacking that mastery meant you placed more coins in the slot. Conversely, it might be considered a remnant of the pen and paper (PnP) RPG mechanics from the '70s and '80s during the development of Dungeons and Dragons and myriad other PnP gaming systems. Maybe the truth is somewhere inbetween - if there's one thing computers are good at is "hard" systems whereas real life role playing can be very "fuzzy" in its implementation.
At any rate, by this time, FPSes and RPGs had settled on hit point-based (HP) systems where a character has a total number of HP which can then be whittled down in many ways: enemy attack, traps, or environmental hazards (such as fire). At the point where those conditions were no longer applicable to the character, their HP remained static, below their total and could only be increased through absoption of some healing item, like a medikit or health orb, a magic spell, or whatever suited the game's premise.
 |
| A healing spell in Baldur's Gate remastered |
Then came Halo 2.
There are various articles chronicling the history of regenerating health in games: See GamesRadar and Giant Bomb, for example. However, it's clear that the concept of regenerating health did not truly exist until Halo 2 came along. Most prior systems were various implementations of the resting system traditionally observed in roleplaying games. These sytems were implemented as a sort of "real time" rest whereby instead of skipping to the end, the player has to sit through the healing process. Even other cited examples, in those articles are generously labelled as "regenerating" whereby health, stamina, or shields are treated as interchangeable elements of the health system.
No, what we're speaking of is the complete and utter regeneration of a character's health as during combat and as soon as the action of taking damage ends. Even the limitation of no rengeneration during combat is applicable for this as well.
It is a commonly accepted truism that within any walk of life that limitations allow us humans the opportunity to excel in those endeavours. Often, when presented with unlimited possibilities, human beings tend to become paralysed. It is only when our focus is narrowed that we are able to really excel and apply ourselves. Now, of course there must be exceptions to this premise - the whole of history is littered with people who broke out of expected norms in one way other another - I just don't know them specifically.
However, taking this concept to its logical limit, we're left with the idea that limits within game systems necessarily make more interesting gameplay - as long as they're integrated holistically with the rest of the gameplay.
But I'm digressing.
Let me set out my argument: Very simply - having a game system which requires no thought from the player or little management results in boring or uninteresting gameplay. Worse still, it results in multiple game systems feeding into that specific game system being unfocussed and underdeveloped because less thought is required for the whole thing to function.
 |
| The health system in Half Life 2 once you get the hazard suit in Dr. Kleiner's lab. Incidentally, before this point the health system used is a soft one with regeneration, with no visible numbers. |
On the other hand, I'm not necessarily a fan of of those heady '90s and early 2000s days of carefully accounted health systems. I think that they were overly restrictive and resulted in systems that punished creativity from players who lacked a certain skill level. i.e. If you were a master of the game, you could advance without needing so many of the carefully placed health packs or limited-use spells to manage the health of your character(s). If you were not a master of the game, as most people are not during their first and subsequent playthroughs and maybe don't enjoy total mastery of a game system (as most people seeking entertainment do not) then you will live or die by their placement.
Famously, Half Life 2 (and subsequent games) would alter the contents of utility crates based on how well the player was doing as a balancing mechanic. This meant that, if a player was low on health, they would receive more medikits... if they were low on ammo, that would show up instead... depending on some arcane pentagram of intersecting "game needs" which the designers had drawn up. This was implemented in order to give all players a "relative" difficulty to their game skill - a very skilled player would recieve fewer resources whereas a less skilled player would receive more. Fittingly, the most important aspect of any game is to provide entertainment for all of its players..... though this concept is disputed by a good number of players and some developers who view equal challenge as the epitomy of the art form. Though this is a discussion for another Analyse This...
I actually think that Half Life 2's implementation is a very sincere and interesting implementation of balance. However, this interesting system was layered atop systems that adhered to the concept of 'entertainment' instead of being designed around skill. The health system and weapon ammunition resource systems are both dependent on player skill... thus the enemy management systems are also dependent on those concepts as well. You will find that enemies in Half Life 2 are designed to sometimes miss or near-miss the player in order to make the game feel more dangerous than it actually is. It's still very easy to die in the game so it's not as if there's no challenge.
Unfortunately, in a large proportion of other games, those interlinked systems are not designed with this care to attention and so balanced systems don't realise that player skill is relative, even within a single person as they play through a game. Games where the enemies will attack with the same ferocity whether the player is low on resources or not have the problem that the challenge increases as the player's resources are depleted. On the other end of the spectrum - games that level scale too aggressively end up making the game too easy. because the challenge never varies by much.
Let's take a generic enemy encounter in Half Life 2 - the first time through the game no player can be expected to understand or anticipate what is coming in advance. So let's take that encounter; the player does very well but then there's no autosave or the player doesn't save after the encounter... they plow into the next encounter with full health but then are defeated; beaten by the enemy. They reload to prior the first encounter and go through it again, though this time they are less optimal - they take more damage and waste more ammunition. Between the two encounters there are only the same number of supply crates because the number of these do not balance based on the condition of the player so the player rolls up to the next encounter, the one that killed them, with fewer resources than they previously had.
Now, they need more skill to complete the encounter than they previously had. This is somewhat balanced by their increased knowledge of the encounter and environment it takes place in but a designer cannot quantify this increased knowledge, you cannot track it on a per player basis for many reasons.... some of them are due to momentum*, some of them are due to retention of knowledge**, awareness of three-dimensional space or even objects and collectibles within that space.
*Sometimes players will get into a "zone" whereby better play leads to better play... they have momentum and being broken from the game in a loading screen or through a death will disrupt this thought volume - which is the reason why egregious loading screens are bad for play
**Some people lack the ability to recollect events in the order they are perceived to arrive under times of stress (stress being an intangible bar across the whole of humanity whereby you cannot reliably instantiate the same conditions upon the same individual at different times).
 |
| Half Life 2 actually shows the player health on the left of the reticle as well as in the bottom left corner. The loaded ammo in the current weapon is shown on the right side of the reticle. |
Ultimately, and gaming experience becomes an uncontrolled mess that the designer has to work around with cheats (aka balancing mechanisms) and play testing. Half Life 2 did this through managing assets in the game world but since these assets themselves could not be managed thoroughly due, I guess, to geometry and level design issues, their potential ultimate impact on the user experience was more limited than a more versatile implementation might be. In fact, it can be observed at certain points in the game, a particular encounter appears to have 'beaten' the designers who have had to balance it by littering the environment with many resources for the player to utilise as they need. The showdown with the helicopter is one such place.
Some people refer to implementations such as the one used in Half Life 2 as "adapative difficulty" and there is the argument to be made that they all lie on the scale from no adaptiation (most old games) to complete adaptive difficulty (The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion). I think we could ultimately agree that any game that alters its behaviour with respect to difficulty due to player condition has adaptive difficulty of some form. However, I think we (as a cohort of gamers) might disagree as to the impact on difficulty and experience... as well as intent of the designer/developer. For example, the mere mention of a lower difficulty for Sekiro resulted in a severe backlash from players who felt their experience of the game would be infringed in some manner from the idea of such a solution that would enable lower-skilled players to enjoy late game content. The common refrain was that these people couldn't achieve the skill required to enjoy late game content and thus must be denied access to it.
The thing is, most games are not sport. Most gamers are not Michael Jordan, Usain Bolt, or Michael Johnson... nor are they the second-rung olympic atheletes or less famous players. Games exist as entertainment first and foremost. They are not an exam. They are not a gated community. They are meant to include as does any movie or book or piece of music. We may not personally resonate with any individual piece of art but we will find something that permeates into our consciousness or being.
Yes, you can make games that are exams, that gate people from experience, but the best games do not. The best games measure us and may even publicly rate us for our performance (see: Bayonetta or that style of game) but I feel that those games are actually in the minority these days. Of course, rating performance does not equate to blocking advancement: they block results. I think that is a really good way of doing things; you don't get an "S" rating in every encounter? You don't get the best denouement. You get lower than an "S" rating? You still get an ending.... just maybe not as good an ending. (Of course, Bayonetta also has an automatic mode which removes most of the difficulty from the encounters.)
You see, many people conflate achievement with resonance.
Bayonetta, as a game and genre may not resonate with me, personally (I'm crap at those types of overwhelming bullet-hell style games) but I can play them to some extent. I can, physically, manage to get to the end of any of those games through trial and error. It doesn't make me a master of those games... in fact, I'm pretty sure the only obstacle to my "completion" of a game is perserverence and time, not skill (though the line there is pretty nebulous). Honestly, I don't have the patience for a game that I feel doesn't respect me or my time.
However, I would try any number of times for games that resonate with me. Resonation is a love for a particular implementation of a genre or idea... So what if I don't manage to be perfect? I'm still enjoying all the other aspects of the game. The difficulty of a game is not its only aspect - that is a core misconception of some people.
This is, again, where the conversation becomes complicated because there are games that are not difficult but present the idea of difficulty through obscurity (such as Sekiro or Dark Souls) and ask the player to master systems they may not understand. Those games have value and I wouldn't necessarily ask them to make themselves easier but, acknowledging the ethos above, allowing for varying player competence is a core aspect of gaming, as much as allowing for player understanding is a core aspect of any novel or movie. Some people will figure out "it was the butler that did it" before other people, and some people will just be along for the ride, without putting significant mental effort into the art piece. At the same time, you don't write a novel in obscure prose, requiring a dictionary for all people who are well-versed in the particular language the work is written in (Well, unless you're Mervyn Peake).
You don't tend to film movies in confusing cut/counter-cut/invert viewing angle/etc. (except for the transformers movies and that appears to work for them!) otherwise you'll make it very confusing for viewers. Similarly, for comics, you need to keep the characters in the same orientation between panels, otherwise you run into issues where people can't understand who is who or how the layout of the partially-drawn environment works out.
Part 2 of this series is now available to read!
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