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[sega]

Using the concept of persistent injury will create realism, but remove 'fun' if not properly implemented...I would not want to drag my foot around and play...

Dragging an injured leg actually added a bit of excitement to Bushido Blade, but only because you still had a chance to win.  You had a chance to win thanks to the realistic injuries you could inflict on the opponent.  You were definitely at a disadvantage, but it could always be turned around with an expertly timed/aimed attack.

[Perrin]

The idea sounds cool but it doesn't workable in any kind of competitive play as you'd essentially be removing any notion of balance that games like Street Fighter and such rely on.

[Xion]

so obviously a game like this wouldn't rely on the notion of balance that's in games like Street Fighter.

Personally, I'd love to play a game like this, and I can imagine it could be competitive, because people can make anything competitive.

It would just add another layer to the competitivity;
rather than just trying to incapacitate your foe, you're also trying to keep yourself fit to fight. I imagine great and improbable comebacks would be made by a man with a broken leg, a broken, arm, and a missing finger, as he struggles desperately for his life. Player uses skill, slight foretellings of the opponent's next move help to preempt them or evade them. Perception of the subtleties. Waiting for the right chance to...strike! And the foe comes down in a shower of blood. One fell blow, and the broken man's blade finds itself buried deep in the heart of his enemy. Both collapse dramatically, the winner breathing heavily. Laughing, glad that he is breathing at all.

Making characters balanced would be no problem. Just make sure they are balanced in the beginning. Just in the beginning of the match. Because the excitement would come later when the fight becomes unfair and lopsided from all the injuries sustained.

Maybe characters could be equipped with armor, too. Damageable. Maybe even a hindrance if it gets hit the wrong way, the helmet bends in on your face, you can't see any more. Fancy visual effects ensue to simulate partial blindness. Loss of blood. When you get your leg cut off you'll have to finish your foe fast or they'll get the match when you collapse from bloodloss or whatever. Round two you still have no leg but it's bandaged up. Amputee. Maybe you can buy prosthetic limbs. Maybe some of them are better than your real limbs. Costly, though, in more ways than one. Will you purposefully get your arm cut off and risk losing just to have the choice of something better in the off chance that you survive? Disarming? Counterattack perfectly and toss your foe's weapon to the ground. Watch them scramble for it, keep them from it. Use it for yourself. Dual wield. Leaves you open though, hard to defend. Environment? After you lose your weapon toss that vat of oil on your enemy. Maybe they'll dodge it, but it'll buy you some time to reaquire your weapon. Then you can stick it in the red-hot coals where the oil once was, heating it up for damage-harder get!

I don't know. I'll stop now.

[sega]

The idea sounds cool but it doesn't workable in any kind of competitive play as you'd essentially be removing any notion of balance that games like Street Fighter and such rely on.

Street Fighter balance is like balance in sports, but different than balance in some other games.  In Chess, for instance, you can capture enemy pieces.  As soon as that happens, the opponent is crippled in that he has less options.  The more pieces you take away, the less the opponent can do, especially if it's an important piece.  Games like this are more about building winning momentum than giving players even chance throughout as in a multi-round game of Rock Paper Scissors.  And as in chess, if you play smart enough, you can still win by getting a check-mate, but you don't have to necessarily worry about "making up ground" by capturing more pieces than he captured from you.

So yes, as Xion said, as long as the characters were evenly matched in the beginning of the fight, it would be balanced.  You just have to make sure that your actions can have purposeful outcomes and purposeful defenses instead of just both flailing to see a random winner.

[Perrin]

Street Fighter balance is like balance in sports, but different than balance in some other games.  In Chess, for instance, you can capture enemy pieces.  As soon as that happens, the opponent is crippled in that he has less options.  The more pieces you take away, the less the opponent can do, especially if it's an important piece.  Games like this are more about building winning momentum than giving players even chance throughout as in a multi-round game of Rock Paper Scissors.  And as in chess, if you play smart enough, you can still win by getting a check-mate, but you don't have to necessarily worry about "making up ground" by capturing more pieces than he captured from you.

So yes, as Xion said, as long as the characters were evenly matched in the beginning of the fight, it would be balanced.  You just have to make sure that your actions can have purposeful outcomes and purposeful defenses instead of just both flailing to see a random winner.

Well a lot of it comes down to implementation, but what I would fear is that a few lucky hits at the start and the other player might as well quit out of the match because they've already lost. More realistic but not so much fun.

The problem with the chess analogy is that as you explain the win condition isn't tied to the depletion of your force completely. With a fighting game the win condition is them losing all their health. So without a strategic alternative for winning, it just seems like the losing player is doomed to lose.

[shig]

It's hard to talk about balance in this kind of game when nearly no one tries to use persisting injuries in their games. You might say the losing player feels doomed to losing from the beginning but, honestly, that's a lot like what Street Fighter 2 felt most times.
 Only with time and experience game designers began developing mechanics to make the outcome of the matches more dynamic, like Desperation/Super/Special Moves bar that fills when you take damage.

[Xion]

I think the win condition in this kind of game shouldn't be a health meter, but death. Health meters are abstract representations of remaining life, but I envision something more like getting your opponent to a state where it's really actually impossible to be alive. Decapitation, multiple severed limbs (okay one would probably do you in irl but this is a videogame so we can fudge survivability a bit.), strangulation, stab-through-the-heart, etc. Maybe the different characters' "individual points" could come not only from their fighting style but from their strong and weak points as well. ie. Character A doesn't get his arms chopped off as quickly as other characters, but his legs are twice as frail. Character B is a gutless undead so he can't die from torso-wounds but his limbs are damaged real easily. If we're dealing with real injuries then why would we simulate life through anything so abstract as a health meter?

In that regard, even a fight that's going badly could be turned around with a single well-placed strike to the head by a skilled player.

I thought the chess analogy was fitting.

[Cymon]

I just now remembered an old game idea I had.

You play as a robot where each of your limbs; legs, arms, and head, are modular. As you play they get damaged but you can replace the parts with parts salvaged from other robots. So kill another robot with a serious body blow and you can take it's relatively undamaged arms. You can also store a spare on your body, just in case.

[Perrin]

In that regard, even a fight that's going badly could be turned around with a single well-placed strike to the head by a skilled player.

I thought the chess analogy was fitting.

Actually that is a good way of dealing with it. As I say I was thinking it would depend on the implementation and as long as there is a way of coming back from being really beaten down, as I say an alternative win condition than just health then it could work.

[sega]

In that regard, even a fight that's going badly could be turned around with a single well-placed strike to the head by a skilled player.

Xion, if you haven't played Bushido Blade, I think you'd really like it (or will find out you don't want this type of game at all).  I still hold it highly.  The design was pretty brave.  A little of it has been mentioned already, but it had all of what we're talking about here.  In later matches, where you were injured before is bandaged.  They had several sword stances, all of which required you to adjust your play-style to use.  You injure an arm and you can only make strikes with one arm.  Injure a leg, and you drop to one knee, and you can only shift on that knee instead of running/walking.  A well-executed strike to the head/neck and the fight is instantly over.  They had different weights/styles of weapons, which also changed your timing/style.

They extended the realism further by giving the player a first-person mode (I'd LOVE this on Wii with the motion-plus controller).  They had HUGE areas you could run around in, extending beyond what could fit in console memory (they'd load a new area when you walked into it through a tunnel or something).  As you swung your sword, you could cut down bamboo in the bamboo forest, you could climb up to new areas, run over a bridge, or jump down into the water and run into a cave.  They had no music during matches, and instead focused on natural sounds.  The game was fascinating, and is still fascinating to me.  Unfortunately, in the sequel, they got a bit more arcadey, added a character with a gun, etc... probably out of pressure from more standard VS games.  I still value the purity of the first game.

Anyway, at the time, Street Fighterish games were still popular and held as standard.  People didn't want a game where abilities weren't even at all times.  Also, Bushido Blade felt almost random until the user built enough skill to play properly.  This dashed a lot of potential-respect from new players.  This is probably the biggest hurdle of a VS game with injuries and possible-single-hit-kills.  The perception of unfairness seems inevitably exponentially higher than that of a standard VS fighting game.  Even today, people hold VS fighting games to the same standard of balance that Street Fighter games used.  I wonder if that can ever change.  I guess it's similar to the fairness of AI in games.  It's not how fair the AI actually is, but how the player perceives the fairness of a situation that matters most.

[Brice]

I definitely think this is doable, it would just require a TON of testing and tuning.

Building in consequences that go out of a single "match" and into the next definitely changes the scope of the game.  In that way I don't even really think of it as a fighting game anymore (quick unrelated arcade matches).  I would think of it more like a strategy match (think long term)

[Delmore]

Time Killers, Bushido Blade, Bloodstorm, and Tao Feng come to mind.

Out of all of these though, Bushido Blade is the only one I'd call fun!