Last time I started trying to talk about health systems in games but became side-tracked into a conversation about difficulty and balance in games. Ultimately, the two are interlinked as encounters need to be balanced around the health system in a game.
But back to the health systems of games and back to my premise:
Many people say that games are desirable because of their interactivity. However, I would argue that interaction is a sub domain of choice and it's why we have such a broad definition of games that encompasses titles that some people wouldn't even classify as a game. I mean, technically, you interact with a book or movie - your brain is assimilating information and drawing pictures and still working at absorbing the entertainment, what you do not do is have decision-making abilities over the outcomes in those mediums.
Now, just to head off the arguments, having regenerating health is not a bad thing. I've played and liked games that have regenerating health but not because of the regenerating health itself. Similarly, having strictly controlled health systems is also not bad... like I said in Part 1, you need to have all the other game systems working in synergy with each other.
First, let's look at the types of health systems I've encountered (probably there are more but I'm not aware of them):
But back to the health systems of games and back to my premise:
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.People play games for many reasons but one of the reasons we play games instead of watching a movie or reading a book is that gaming allows us to make choices - whether we are aware of this aspect or not. The choice may be simple enough - a dialogue decision, exploration, who to shoot in combat or which weapon to use... how to solve a puzzle.
Many people say that games are desirable because of their interactivity. However, I would argue that interaction is a sub domain of choice and it's why we have such a broad definition of games that encompasses titles that some people wouldn't even classify as a game. I mean, technically, you interact with a book or movie - your brain is assimilating information and drawing pictures and still working at absorbing the entertainment, what you do not do is have decision-making abilities over the outcomes in those mediums.
Now, just to head off the arguments, having regenerating health is not a bad thing. I've played and liked games that have regenerating health but not because of the regenerating health itself. Similarly, having strictly controlled health systems is also not bad... like I said in Part 1, you need to have all the other game systems working in synergy with each other.
First, let's look at the types of health systems I've encountered (probably there are more but I'm not aware of them):
- Discrete health and armour* - Hard numbers for health and armour that are reduced or increased through interaction with damage-dealing or healing items and activities in game systems (e.g. enemey attacks, environmental hazards, resting, medikits)
- Discrete health, regenerating armour** - Hard numbers for base health, armour is situationally replenished, either outside of combat or within combat after a pre-determined amount of time when not taking damage. Health is replenished through interaction with damage-dealing or healing items and activities in game systems (e.g. enemey attacks, environmental hazards, resting, medikits)
- Discrete replenishing health and armour*** - Hard numbers for health and armour which may replenish outside of combat, within specific locations or within combat after a pre-determined amount of time when not taking damage
- Replenishing health**** - Soft numbers of health which may replenish outside of combat or within combat after a pre-determined amount of time when not taking damage - the amount and type of health and/or armour is not important as damage and nearness to defeat is only a visual indication instead of a discrete number - damage taken and given is not clear and may be fudged
*This also includes as a sub-category games where armour is a fixed statistic which modifies damage received which is then applied to the health or where items or magic can apply a regenerative effect to the player characters but it is not a guarantee that all players will have these enabled.
**This also includes as a sub-category games where there is a stat that affects health which can also regenerate (maybe it is listed as stamina or endurance).
***This also includes as a sub-category games where the characters have armour modifiers which affect damage taken.
****In this instance "health" is defined as any variable that may be depleted to effect a fail condition, normally identified as death. This also includes as a sub-category games where the characters have armour modifiers which affect damage taken.
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| Batman: Arkham Knight has regenerating health - though only outside of combat. |
Let's look at a number of games that those definitions apply to:
- Discrete health and armour - Half Life (series), Baldur's Gate (series), Knights of the Old Republic, Diablo (series), God of War (2018), Dead Space, Sekiro, The Elder Scrolls (series), The Legend of Zelda (series)
- Dicrete health, regenerating armour - Halo: Combat Evolved
- Discrete replenishing health and armour - Halo 2/etc, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Mass Effect (series), Assassin's Creed (series), Batman Arkham series
- Replenishing health - Titanfall 2, Call of Duty series (post Modern Warfare), Gears of War (series),
I cannot point to any of these games and say that the system the designers chose was incorrect primarily because the rest of their gameplay systems linked into that design decision. What I can point to is that older styles of games are usually assigned the first two types of health system and newer styles of games the last two. There has definitely been a trend towards regenerating health/armour systems over the last 20 years.
This leads to the question: Why have these mechanisms become more popular over time?
I think the easiest answer is that they are simplified/streamlined systems, both from a player perspective and a designer's perspective:
As a caveat (I've said multiple times) - regenerating health is not bad, nor are any other regenerating player resources, when done well. However, even in those contexts, you will usually observe that the mechanics that are streamlined in this manner are done so in service of other aspects of the game. Whether that is to enable the flow of a story, or to enable the focus to be on other determinative elements such as dialogue options or combat fluidity... or even for the purpose of the dreaded "inclusivity" of varying skill levels.
Even in games where one system is utilised, another system can be temporarily be enabled for dramatic purposes - e.g. Mass Effect 3 where discrete replenishing health and armour are replaced with replenishing health in the final moments of the game. This is quite obviously chosen for the purpose of putting the story front and centre in that moment. However, these moments of system change are usually quite short and do not affect any other game system negatively.
Cycling back to the reason people play games - choice - health systems inherently bind choices and their inherent consequences to the playstyle of the player and the game in question. For games where the focus is on a singular instance of combat (e.g. The Arkham series, Halo and other FPSes) regenerating health allows a designer to calibrate encounters around the premise that the player will be at full health and thus is able, instead, to focus on exercising the combat mechanics in interesting ways. In those games, the other game systems do not require broad unevenness in the player character's state. i.e. outside of various ability upgrades and/or variations in particular arsenal, all players will likely be within a similar 'power envelope' and thus should be able to apply what they've learnt or gained throughout the game to that point to the encounter.
It's also worth pointing out that these games (and often the enemy types encountered) are locked to a linear progression meaning that the player will have had to progress to a certain point in order to experience them. Most of these games are not non-linear due to either story or equipment gating (see the Arkham series for good examples of both).
However, this assumption and encounter balance theory is sort of thrown out in games that provide the ability for players to increase the total pool of health and/or armour, such as the Arkham series. Since the balance of encounters is not linked to this progression system but the player always has the possibility of enabling the increase (and not punished or rewarded for not interacting with the system) it means that spending the reward points on those increases or not becomes a player-specific decision which cannot be un-chosen. If a player finds a particular encounter too difficult and then purchases the increase, that decision cannot later be rescinded. I think that this means that the system itself is not interesting from a player's perspective and the majority of players probably just purchases the increases without a second thought: "Why wouldn't I want more health and armour?".
Since the game world in Arkham is semi-nonlinear, very few fights could be assumed to be encountered by the player with a given amount of health. In this particular instance, the design of the upgrade and health systems is not well-aligned with the gameplay and challenge throughout the game. More skilled players might want to refuse the upgrades in order to give themselves more of a challenge but, in reality, the choice is largely cosmetic because taking one or two hits at any level of health pool will not result in failure. Added to this there is the explicit difficulty settings chosen at the beginning of the game.
So really, it begs the question as to why the health pool can be increased or not, especially given the tight balance that could be applied to such a restrictive type of game. I think that these styles of arena battlers would be better served with the option of increasing or decreasing the difficulty through the options menu at any time during the game instead of playing with health and armour upgrades.
In fact, Arkham Knight had a relatively underdeveloped encounter system: in my personal experience with the game, fights vacillated between easy and very difficult and the revolutionary, for the series, two person fighting was completely under-explored in favour of the baffling focus on the Batmobile sections of the game.
Role-playing games (RPGs) on the other hand (especially party-based RPGs) are more complex in the game systems surrounding the health system than these other types of games. Players can have vastly different equipment, skills and even health pools. For example, typically, a spellcaster will have a lower total health than a warrior. It's not necessarily set in stone but it is a trope of the genre which appears widely adhered to.
Worse still, players may have differing party compositions and player character (PC) roles within those parties. A party with six warrior types will fare, and play, very differently to one with six rogue types (for an example of two extremes). While this particular example is artificial (since most games would never allow that many companions of one type to be selectable in the game) it is mainly to make the point that the designer cannot anticipate what sort of party the player will have.
Even worse - in certain types of RPGs, players can wander freely around the world into areas that are gated by enemy level. This is a bone of controversy for both the industry and communities that play these games because there's no clean solution to this issue. An open world needs to be open, allowing for exploration and consequence of that exploration.
Of course, the concept of "levels" is a completely artificial one - there's no level gating in the real world but players like to feel that they are progressing in some fashion and so designers took the types of progression from pen and paper tabletop RPGs and integrated them into computer RPGs.
This is unfortunate in some respects because this legacy has left the genre with three main islands of thought regarding RPG mechanics - linearly-locked progression, open world with level-gated areas and linear/open worlds with adaptive difficulty.
Unfortunately, adaptive difficulty has a rather distasteful reputation in gaming circles due to a couple of high profile cases where it was used injudiciously. The primary one in my mind is the Elder Scrolls series post-Morrowind, with Oblivion being the black sheep of the family in this scenario. Due to these games' penchant for enabling the player to break the game through levelling, item crafting and spell crafting, and the choice to make the games open world the designers decided to implement a way for an appropriate challenge all the way through the game from start to finish (or whenever the player stopped playing).
Unfortunately, this manifested itself in bandits that at "level 1" were clothed in leathers and furs being shod in the most expensive armour in the realms at "level X" and doing an appropriate amount of damage to the player. This was bad because it created a flat experience for the player whereby their ascent into godhood (in terms of damage, resource pools and abilities) was matched by all and sundry. The player never really felt the progression, despite it being obvious that they had progressed in a visual and statistical sense. This is probably the worst kind of implementation of adaptive difficulty but, as I mentioned above, this is not the only way to do it.
There is one further type of game world that exists as a sub-design in the linearly-locked world style but it is utilised almost exclusively in the action/adventure genres - a world without levels that is gated by item posession. Whilst metroidvania style games are famous for this, The Legend of Zelda series or Darksiders 1 are good examples of RPG-lite titles that implement this style of progression. I think it would be interesting for a fully fledged party-based RPG to explore this sort of world as adhering to the level-based progression systems generally utilised in the genre has led to the work-arounds mentioned above and thus the complications in encounter and area balance we observe in these titles.
I'm realising that this post is running quite long now so next time, we'll finally discuss the how of why regenerating health can result in less interesting gameplay through removal of player decision-making.
Part 3 of this series is now available.
This leads to the question: Why have these mechanisms become more popular over time?
I think the easiest answer is that they are simplified/streamlined systems, both from a player perspective and a designer's perspective:
- At the end of the day, if the player characters heal after every encounter, then that releases the player from that management aspect of the game. The player no longer needs to be careful in a fight, potentially allowing players will lower skill levels or those players who take more risks in combat to succeed where before they might not have.
- If the player characters can auto-heal, then the level designers no longer need to account for healing items as a balancing mechanism in levels. Reducing the random amount of dropped items in any given level (which was always suspect in terms of realism) and reducing required level complexity because hidden passages are no longer required to 'gate' items towards progress.
- If the player characters can be assumed to be at full health then the combat/encounter designers no longer need to take as much care in how they design levels or difficulties in areas outside of the determined 'level' of the player character because they can assume maximum playing efficiency from the player in terms of that particular resource. This is also a similar reason why we have seen the proliferation of regenerating attack resources over the same period of time as well.
As a caveat (I've said multiple times) - regenerating health is not bad, nor are any other regenerating player resources, when done well. However, even in those contexts, you will usually observe that the mechanics that are streamlined in this manner are done so in service of other aspects of the game. Whether that is to enable the flow of a story, or to enable the focus to be on other determinative elements such as dialogue options or combat fluidity... or even for the purpose of the dreaded "inclusivity" of varying skill levels.
Even in games where one system is utilised, another system can be temporarily be enabled for dramatic purposes - e.g. Mass Effect 3 where discrete replenishing health and armour are replaced with replenishing health in the final moments of the game. This is quite obviously chosen for the purpose of putting the story front and centre in that moment. However, these moments of system change are usually quite short and do not affect any other game system negatively.
 |
| Diablo 3 had a complicated health system where some regeneration could be gained through skills or buffs passively and actively as well as through health potions and dropped health vials. |
Cycling back to the reason people play games - choice - health systems inherently bind choices and their inherent consequences to the playstyle of the player and the game in question. For games where the focus is on a singular instance of combat (e.g. The Arkham series, Halo and other FPSes) regenerating health allows a designer to calibrate encounters around the premise that the player will be at full health and thus is able, instead, to focus on exercising the combat mechanics in interesting ways. In those games, the other game systems do not require broad unevenness in the player character's state. i.e. outside of various ability upgrades and/or variations in particular arsenal, all players will likely be within a similar 'power envelope' and thus should be able to apply what they've learnt or gained throughout the game to that point to the encounter.
It's also worth pointing out that these games (and often the enemy types encountered) are locked to a linear progression meaning that the player will have had to progress to a certain point in order to experience them. Most of these games are not non-linear due to either story or equipment gating (see the Arkham series for good examples of both).
However, this assumption and encounter balance theory is sort of thrown out in games that provide the ability for players to increase the total pool of health and/or armour, such as the Arkham series. Since the balance of encounters is not linked to this progression system but the player always has the possibility of enabling the increase (and not punished or rewarded for not interacting with the system) it means that spending the reward points on those increases or not becomes a player-specific decision which cannot be un-chosen. If a player finds a particular encounter too difficult and then purchases the increase, that decision cannot later be rescinded. I think that this means that the system itself is not interesting from a player's perspective and the majority of players probably just purchases the increases without a second thought: "Why wouldn't I want more health and armour?".
Since the game world in Arkham is semi-nonlinear, very few fights could be assumed to be encountered by the player with a given amount of health. In this particular instance, the design of the upgrade and health systems is not well-aligned with the gameplay and challenge throughout the game. More skilled players might want to refuse the upgrades in order to give themselves more of a challenge but, in reality, the choice is largely cosmetic because taking one or two hits at any level of health pool will not result in failure. Added to this there is the explicit difficulty settings chosen at the beginning of the game.
So really, it begs the question as to why the health pool can be increased or not, especially given the tight balance that could be applied to such a restrictive type of game. I think that these styles of arena battlers would be better served with the option of increasing or decreasing the difficulty through the options menu at any time during the game instead of playing with health and armour upgrades.
In fact, Arkham Knight had a relatively underdeveloped encounter system: in my personal experience with the game, fights vacillated between easy and very difficult and the revolutionary, for the series, two person fighting was completely under-explored in favour of the baffling focus on the Batmobile sections of the game.
 |
| "What's wrong, Batman?" "The fight.... it was just too easy for me..." |
Role-playing games (RPGs) on the other hand (especially party-based RPGs) are more complex in the game systems surrounding the health system than these other types of games. Players can have vastly different equipment, skills and even health pools. For example, typically, a spellcaster will have a lower total health than a warrior. It's not necessarily set in stone but it is a trope of the genre which appears widely adhered to.
Worse still, players may have differing party compositions and player character (PC) roles within those parties. A party with six warrior types will fare, and play, very differently to one with six rogue types (for an example of two extremes). While this particular example is artificial (since most games would never allow that many companions of one type to be selectable in the game) it is mainly to make the point that the designer cannot anticipate what sort of party the player will have.
Even worse - in certain types of RPGs, players can wander freely around the world into areas that are gated by enemy level. This is a bone of controversy for both the industry and communities that play these games because there's no clean solution to this issue. An open world needs to be open, allowing for exploration and consequence of that exploration.
Of course, the concept of "levels" is a completely artificial one - there's no level gating in the real world but players like to feel that they are progressing in some fashion and so designers took the types of progression from pen and paper tabletop RPGs and integrated them into computer RPGs.
This is unfortunate in some respects because this legacy has left the genre with three main islands of thought regarding RPG mechanics - linearly-locked progression, open world with level-gated areas and linear/open worlds with adaptive difficulty.
In this context, adaptive difficulty usually means level-scaling of enemies. This means that either enemies have their attributes increased to match or nearly match the player character's. However, it could also mean enemies use more potent combat skills (AI routines) or are present in greater numbers or that the player receives fewer resources. The potential implementations of adaptive difficulty are numerous and often invisible - many players would never even notice whether there is adaptive difficulty being applied by the designer except in cases where it is egregious (e.g. The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion).
 |
| You can tell I'm low level because this bandit is basically naked! |
Unfortunately, adaptive difficulty has a rather distasteful reputation in gaming circles due to a couple of high profile cases where it was used injudiciously. The primary one in my mind is the Elder Scrolls series post-Morrowind, with Oblivion being the black sheep of the family in this scenario. Due to these games' penchant for enabling the player to break the game through levelling, item crafting and spell crafting, and the choice to make the games open world the designers decided to implement a way for an appropriate challenge all the way through the game from start to finish (or whenever the player stopped playing).
Unfortunately, this manifested itself in bandits that at "level 1" were clothed in leathers and furs being shod in the most expensive armour in the realms at "level X" and doing an appropriate amount of damage to the player. This was bad because it created a flat experience for the player whereby their ascent into godhood (in terms of damage, resource pools and abilities) was matched by all and sundry. The player never really felt the progression, despite it being obvious that they had progressed in a visual and statistical sense. This is probably the worst kind of implementation of adaptive difficulty but, as I mentioned above, this is not the only way to do it.
There is one further type of game world that exists as a sub-design in the linearly-locked world style but it is utilised almost exclusively in the action/adventure genres - a world without levels that is gated by item posession. Whilst metroidvania style games are famous for this, The Legend of Zelda series or Darksiders 1 are good examples of RPG-lite titles that implement this style of progression. I think it would be interesting for a fully fledged party-based RPG to explore this sort of world as adhering to the level-based progression systems generally utilised in the genre has led to the work-arounds mentioned above and thus the complications in encounter and area balance we observe in these titles.
I'm realising that this post is running quite long now so next time, we'll finally discuss the how of why regenerating health can result in less interesting gameplay through removal of player decision-making.
Part 3 of this series is now available.
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