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[Azure Lazuline]

I've noticed a few specific things that make health systems annoying:

1) Easy but time-consuming to recover (Zelda)
2) Too random, recovery is based on random drops (Metroid)
3) No real impact on the gameplay, or too frequent checkpoints (Bioshock)
4) Too few checkpoints, too hard to recover, or too much progress loss on hit/death (lots of games)

I think that as long as the game avoids most of that, a traditional health system can work. But hey, if you have a cool replacement that works for your specific game, go for it!

Oh, one particular trick I picked up from Treasure: any fatal hit instead reduces you to 1HP, and you can only die if you get hit one more time. It adds tension where there would have been frustration instead, and there are no more surprise deaths because you didn't know that super-attack does 70 damage.

[DavidCaruso]

A while back after I saw The Avengers I was thinking how cool it would be to have an Iron Man FPS where you have a shitton of weapons that are all linked to suit energy (which also would double as health, in addition to flying power, etc. and every action depleting it at different rates in addition to a slower regeneration rate.) The idea is that you'd still be able to use all the cool "overpowered" suit weapons that were in the movie but they'd just take away a ton of power (and therefore health, and therefore flying capacity, and less power for other weapons, and maybe less agility/flexibility, etc.), in addition to literally everything being destructible and tons of giant relatively intelligent enemies surrounding you (with large projectiles, etc. as well as physical attacks) so you hopefully can't just sit in one place and regenerate without fighting back. It'd be really easy to screw up though of course, and if done badly it would just end up with an extremely dumbed down game. Actually, has something like this already been done? I know several games have things like nanosuits, etc but nothing that's fully integrated together as one "main" resource, though I feel like I'm forgetting something important.

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido_Blade_%28video_game%29

Also also, might as well do the plug before Noah does: the way Alien Soldier integrated its health system with your moveset and enemy attacks was pretty elegant and awesome.

[Fallsburg]

The X-Wing games had a power concept and you could choose how to balance your power between shields, weapons, and engines.  It worked pretty decently as you definitely wanted different power settings for different encounters:

Dogfight -- Weapons + Shields
Tailchase -- Weapons + Engines
Run away and lick wounds -- Engines + Shields


Anyway, as to the article, to reiterate a point that's been already been made, while health doesn't affect the technical gameplay in something like Street Fighter, it's still a resource that has to be managed effectively to win the game.  In Magic: The Gathering, there are a lot of resources that don't matter until they do: Life, Size of your library, graveyard, etc.  I can't speak for Street Fighter at a high level as I'm only a moderate enthusiast, but there are definitely times in Magic where you will give up health to your opponent to gain some sort of strategic advantage, and I imagine that the same probably happens in Street Fighter regarding positioning (might be talking out of my ass here). 
It's like saying that the chips don't matter in poker, because they don't affect how the cards operate.

Oh, one particular trick I picked up from Treasure: any fatal hit instead reduces you to 1HP, and you can only die if you get hit one more time. It adds tension where there would have been frustration instead, and there are no more surprise deaths because you didn't know that super-attack does 70 damage.

That is a pretty awesome idea.

I think my current favorite health regeneration mechanic is Dark Souls.  You can go back to a fire if you really feel like it, but the only real thing you gain in doing so is the knowledge of what to expect.

[Glaiel-Gamer]

I agree, and have been experimenting with various methods of health bars in a few of my games. Here's some samples:

BUTCHERBUGS: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/562939
this was a game jam game we did for newgrounds last year, I consciously thought about health/healthbars/1-hit KO when designing it.

Basically you control 5 things AT THE SAME TIME, and each 1 dies in 1 hit (reducing your firepower because there's less things to control, though not linearly because I increase rate of fire when there's less of them just as a small compromise)

TETRAFORM: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/521353
This is functionally the same as a normal health bar, but without a maximum. The twist is how its used. There's not really any constant pressure to "avoid losing all my health" in the game. Every time you kill an enemy it gives your planet "life". The actual life your planet has is not quantified to the player, its entirely represented visually on the planet through growing trees, atmosphere, etc. You gain WAY MORE life than you are ever really at threat of losing (until maybe towards the end). Instead, since gaining life visually rewards the player with a greener planet, the pressure is there to not lose ANY life, because hey they wanna see what the fully terraformed planet looks like (which you only get to by playing near-perfectly)

[JWK5]

"Health" in games is a pretty broad idea, you're never really going to find an ideal setup that works the best for everything. In some games (many RPGs) nearly the whole game revolves around it, in other games it might act as measure of which player has the upper hand (fighting games) or how much room for error the player has (some action games).

With trying to make the game more "realistic" the thing to realize is that you are not making the game more realistic by making the damage incurred greater or more specific, you are leaving the player(s) less room for error (and likely making the game more difficult), though this can sometimes pay off by creating an exciting tenseness (for example, Bushido Blade). You can't really make games realistic because games are, at best, only simulating a minute fraction of reality. The best you can do is create illusions to make some things feel more natural.

"Health" is just a pacing and balancing tool, regardless of what you name it and how you implement it you should always use it to enhance the gameplay.

[JasonPickering]

I can say health certainly has a place in gameplay, depending on what your end goal is. I am the guy currently working on Microgue and moving to a 1 hit point model has been incredibly hard to nail down. (also I love what steed said about it back on page one.)

The one thing I would like to see go though is the terrible trend towards increase creep. I always hated it when an enemy might have 100 health, and my attacks always do 10 damage. there are unneeded zeros there. the enemy might as well have 100000 and I do 10000 damage (looking at you RPGs), its still the same. If you can do your entire combat system with single digits, I think you should. and if you cant figure out why you exactly you need double digits("doing 999 damage is cooler" is not an acceptable answer). that will really help you in the long run.

[JWK5]

With RPGs (and a lot of other games) the escalated numbers are more psychologically bolstering than beneficial to the gameplay. A good example of it taken to the extreme is the Disgaea games, where you can rack up damage literally in the billions (there is actually a trophy for getting 10 billion damage in a single hit). The numbers are ridiculously overwhelming but there is something satisfying about annihilating an enemy with a screen full of numbers.

Generally, though, I'd agree that unless the game is using numbers cosmetically the smaller the numbers the better.

[Paul Eres]

A while back after I saw The Avengers I was thinking how cool it would be to have an Iron Man FPS where you have a shitton of weapons that are all linked to suit energy (which also would double as health, in addition to flying power, etc. and every action depleting it at different rates in addition to a slower regeneration rate.) The idea is that you'd still be able to use all the cool "overpowered" suit weapons that were in the movie but they'd just take away a ton of power (and therefore health, and therefore flying capacity, and less power for other weapons, and maybe less agility/flexibility, etc.), in addition to literally everything being destructible and tons of giant relatively intelligent enemies surrounding you (with large projectiles, etc. as well as physical attacks) so you hopefully can't just sit in one place and regenerate without fighting back. It'd be really easy to screw up though of course, and if done badly it would just end up with an extremely dumbed down game. Actually, has something like this already been done? I know several games have things like nanosuits, etc but nothing that's fully integrated together as one "main" resource, though I feel like I'm forgetting something important.

i had pretty much the same idea while watching that movie, actually. i don't know if it has been done, i haven't seen it yet. if i were to do it i'd do it without any regeneration at all though (within stages); you'd have to beat the stage with x energy, and when energy ran out you had to try again. the difficulty mode would be the amount of energy you start with each stage, and each stage your energy would return to full (since your suit would be repaired and battery recharged and such)

[JWK5]

That's actually what I wanted to see with the Metroid Prime games. Rather than Samus have health, energy tanks, weapon ammo, and whatnot her armor has a recharge akin to Halo but depletes as she fires her weapons (with the amount of depletion varying by weapon) with complete depletion resulting in a momentary "overheat" where she can no longer fire weapons and her armor takes direct damage (which can only be repaired at the save spots).

The series already has a hit-and-run style of play so it'd be a great way to get rid of the obnoxious ammo scrounging while ratcheting up the intensity of the battles.

[DustyDrake]

Yeah, but that doesn't fit with what was and is accepted for Metroid mechanics

[JWK5]

Yeah, but that doesn't fit with what was and is accepted for Metroid mechanics

Neither did making it a FPS, but they did that.

[C.A. Sinner]

metroid prime is an "fps" in the same way that gta is a racing game, except metroid prime 3 which is shit. great example of a developer missing the point of their own game.

[Danmark]

Just a caveat, taking away progress based on time only encourages people to wait around in a safe spot so they have a time surplus.

Required is some method of determining the rewind time so that the player can't hide & wait for his progress to buffer.

A while back after I saw The Avengers I was thinking how cool it would be to have an Iron Man FPS where you have a shitton of weapons that are all linked to suit energy (which also would double as health, in addition to flying power, etc. and every action depleting it at different rates in addition to a slower regeneration rate.)

Tons of sci-fi sims (both arcadey and realistic) use a similar concept.

Subspace/Continuum is the only game I can think of where your recharging energy simply is both your health and ammo. It's used in other abilities as well, which vary in their energy consumption. Really pressures you to avoid all damage, and to make each shot or other action count.

[Graham.]

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Health is pretty weak. I think it's weak in Halo (regen) and Half-Life (x/100).

In Assassin's Creed it's like _slow_ regen. Sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn't. The speed of regen doesn't really affect your decisions.

In Halo, every combat is reduced to 30-60 second bursts. A decision you make now doesn't have weight on the future. It's like talking to a person who doesn't remember anything you say for more than 3 minutes. But, it also means you don't trap yourself in a hole for a past mistake. It streamlines play. No shit :|.

Diablo III removed the concept of personalized character growth. That would be the Halo route.
They gave play-variety by removing the problem-areas, but demolished a large sense of the ownership you could have. The argument goes that hardcore D2 players never had any ownership anyway because they would follow set builds. WoW has that problem. Variety is an illusion, with a cost, like singing mermaids on the rocks.

Half-Life has the opposite problem. Past decisions have too much consequence. Also, what the hell is 100? I don't even understand that number. It's tough for me to relate the damage I took because of a decision I made, and the actual amount of damage I took. 93 to 62, to 41? What the hell does that .... *shooting guys, forgetting*.

Deadspace was nice. You had a visual bar that was like, "oh, I have 2 and a bit lengths; I have enough packs to recover 1 and a little."

Resident Evil your character like limped when she was hurt? Is that how it still works?

Smash Bros is too detailed, but at least it does something interesting with the damage (you fly further).

You know a cool way to represent ammo? "Reload Mr Freeman!" "Here's a health pack." I get companionship; awareness of my buddy's location; and an easy-to-understand, just-detailed-enough, description of my situation that strengthens the narrative _and_ doesn't draw my attention away from the action, and it's partially randomized - surprises are better than sure things.

I had one design where you were a young dude with a dog basically wilderness camping in space. The dog had a rich behaviour set. He had different feelings about the environment, enemies, the progress of an event/conflict, and _you_. When you made a decision it would affect what your dog was doing and your relationship with him. Both were always changing.

You had your own behaviour set as well - call it animation. You (the player) could instruct your character (the guy) to, say run, and he would run. Depending on the character's context the animation would vary. For example, in Mario, when you're on ice, you slide. Duh. The difference between Mario-on-ice and my character in-some-situation, is that my characters "context" is largely defined by how he feels, though also by his physical environment (like standing on ice). When you chose to run, his run would be affected by his state of mind.

Simple example: say the main character was pissed, and worried for the safety of his dog. These two variables would affect both his animation, and the mechanical meaning of "running." For example, getting speed bursts in small spaces is hard. You normally need space to build up momentum to get speed. Now, speed is important. It's necessary for pushing certain moves to their limits, so that they open up new tactical, and non-tactical, options. If the character is pissed, he gains an advantage, and some disadvantages, that allow him to get a burst of speed with far less space to build-up momentum. Being pissed would look, sound, and play differently.

All of the character's feelings affect how he appears to the player, and how it feels to play him. The character's "health" is like his state-of-being. Situations and enemies affect his state-of-being. The player becomes aware of these changes naturally, through all the game's visual/auditory cues, _and_ mechanics.

Both the characters (dude and dog) are very aware of one another. A lot of how they feel is dependent on what's happening to the other at any given moment, and what's happened between them up until that point.

Getting pissed can happen in a lot of different ways, and there are a number of different ways to feel other than "angry," which is literally 1-dimensional. Let's say an enemy attacks you. Maybe this makes you (the character) a little more pissed. Maybe he attacks you, and scores a hit by exploiting an obvious weakness for the 5th time in-a-row. You would get even more pissed. Maybe the enemy always goes for the dog, each time you execute a certain move. You might become "apprehensive" about that move. Maybe the enemy does a kind of damage that "wearies you," blunting your motions. The dog then interacts with you in intentionally nuanced ways, so that you (the player) need to perform a sequence of staccato-like actions, so that you can give the dog what he is implicitly demanding from you. The dog is effectively communicating that he thinks, that you need, to combat your weariness. In this case he's demanding you discipline yourself and stay sharp. Maybe the dog gets cornered at one point and you lose some of the insight he used to provide, even if only for a while. For the entire game you're dependent on him to tell you a lot of things about yourself, and he's dependent on you for the same thing. He needs you to make good decisions in the same way you need him to do the same.

And so on.

In a sense, both characters have "health" in a multi-dimensional space. "Damage" is done to you by your own behaviour, circumstances, the environment, particular attacks, just seeing something, and so on. Each type of "damage" affects your "health" in a unique way by shifting your state-of-being (inside this multi-d space).

Think of it this way. Health in the traditional sense exist in just a 1-d space. Enemies shift your health down different amounts. You can shift your own health back up by using health items. Sometimes you receive a status effect, like poison or slowed-movement. In this case, your "global health" has shifted in the "poison" dimension a single degree, from not-poisoned to poisoned. What if you could be partially poisoned? Or poisoned 20%? Then your health would be in a 2-d space, 1 dimension representing standard health, and the other representing the degree of poisoning. Your "tiredness" could be another dimension, your "anger" another, your anxiety over getting surprised another, your caution over pits another, your desire for recognition from a particular peer another, and so on. Objects in the game affect you by shifting how you feel, and your behaviour reflects these changes by always reflecting your current state.

Link panting when's standing still and low on health is a binary signal, of a one dimensional health measurement. Either your health is low or it isn't. The health bar on Isaac's back in Dead Space is an analog signal, of a one dimensional health measurement. You can see approximately how much health you have. The presentation of it is very good for ratios, like, "I have half health." Your character's appearance in WoW is a set of discrete signals representing your equipment choices in an X-D space, where X is the number of visible things you can wear at the same time. People go bat-shit for their appearance in WoW, and it is only a representation of a state in a small space, in which the choices made are not very interesting or personal; and those choices have nothing to do with your character's current state.

Back to my game. The characters animation/sound and mechanical options change to represent your character's change in "health." The best part is this. The dog interacts with the main character in a way that represents his opinion of the main character's status/health/state. Note, the dog's "perception" of how the guy is, is not necessarily accurate. Its accuracy depends on the guy's context, his own context, and the development of the 2 characters' relationship.

This creates real dependency between the two stars. You actually need each other to survive. The game doesn't force you to be together by creating obstacles that sometimes needs you, and sometimes need him. You literally are half a person without your companion. You lose sight of who you are. You need his constant feedback to give you the self-awareness necessary to reach the level of persistent tactical genius, and artistry, required to overcome the games challenges. And he's dependent on you, so you need to pay a lot of attention to him to give him the support he needs to be himself and grow.

If escort missions are a punch in the dick, this is falling in love, being together... in a game.

[Azure Lazuline]

Regarding the Iron Man thing: I briefly played something similar recently, called Grief Syndrome. It's a pretty standard brawler (with awesome graphics, but that's beside the point), except the way it handled health was interesting.

You had only two meters, health and, uh... I forgot what they called it, so I'll say 'energy.' Your health slowly regenerates over time, but as it's filling up, your energy drains a bit (it drains even if you're not regenerating, but extremely slowly). Every time you use a special move, it costs health, and replaces whatever chunk of health it used with a blue one, which regens a bit faster. If you get hit during that though, that effect is cancelled, and now you're at much lower health because you risked using the super-move.

If you die, you lose a big chunk of your energy, which can only be replenished by beating a stage. If you run out, that character is permanently dead for that playthrough. The game is short and there are 5 characters (all completely different), so it's kind of like lives.

I may have gotten the details wrong, and I haven't played enough to see if this is a really good system or not, but it's certainly interesting and unique.