Health bars: cumbersome and obsolete?

In battle, knowing the status of one or more enemies with a quick glance can be quite important.
This information is especially useful when fighting multiple opponents, as you may want to focus your attacks on the weakest/strongest.

Thus a very very long time ago, someone invented Health Bars exactly for this purpose.

However, all this clutter on the screen does not really give any meaningful information during a battle:


It is also quite distracting, and the oblong neon red sign does not really fit the medieval-fantasy-teslapunk theme.

Luckily, SoTA allows us to disable the Health Bars completely by just pressing a button.
Unluckily, this also takes away the ability of knowing which enemy is the most wounded without clicking on each individual enemy and looking at their bar on the top left corner of your screen.

This would be an option... if the battle did not take place in real time, or your enemies would politely wait until you finished clicking them one by one before they started biting your ankles again.

~ D&D ~

I remember during my very first D&D campaign when we were fighting skeletons, I had naively asked the DM after hitting one enemy: "How much health has it got left?".
He laughed and replied: "Do you think skeletons hold a LED scoreboard with their Hit Points on it? I can only tell you it's got a few broken bones, but it can still swing an axe".

Although the '70s are way behind our backs, most games still have enemies holding a scoreboard. And of course they all fight to the death while(HP > 0);

~ The Ultima way ~

Actually, I remember a few games (most of them start with "U" and were made by a certain Richard Garriott) where you had descriptons instead of health bars ("Gazer critical!") and wounded enemies would try to flee from the battlefield (letting them flee gave you Compassion "points" in Ultima IV if I remember correctly).

​

~ SoTA? ~​

Now I don't particularly want to see a myriad of "Wolf grazed!" in the chat window, but said wolf could whine, bleed, slow down, limp and eventually try to flee or hide behind other wolves rather then hold a scoreboard.


So my question is: is the above planned? Or are we stuck with pre-Age of Darkness health bars?

 

It was said that at some point health bars would be replaced by enemies showing actual wounds, limping etc.
I'm not sure if this idea will still make it into the game as too many MMORPG fans don't want to leave their comfort zones and want all of those done to death, run of the mill elements in the game that next to every other MMO has and thus kill any innovation and unique element...

 

It was my understanding that the health bars were a temporary measure until actual indicators on the character could be implemented.

 

Well if not in EP1, lets hope enough folks encourage its inclusion in the road map for EP2.

 

Let's hope Ep1 as I think there'd be a back lash if it was suddenly removed from the game going into Ep2.

 

Speaking as a PvPer and all around performance junkie, I want/need the equivalent of a Health Bar. I'm open to alternative indicators, but it's essential to have an accurate "heartbeat" into my toon's status at a given moment. I do not necessarily require an indicator floating over my head, although I do prefer one over targets (enemies or friends) as it allows me to prioritize targets more easily. Especially in hardcore healing situations. A chat/dialogue solution might be an interesting option, but I only see it being used by the most dedicated RP-types.

One think that Blizzard did right was to open up their UI for add-ons. HealBot was my lifeline. However, Portalarium may not have that kind of freedom, due to their use of the Unity engine. I have seen some good WoW UI mods that floated a vertical (rather than horizontal) semi-opaque bar in front the toons. This seemed like a nice design, but the only mod I tried like that hammered performance. In our ERP software, I've seen some cool things done with indicators using pies, odometers, and heatmaps. But I'm not sure how well that'd translate to a high-speed PvP deathmatch.

Since we're in Alpha, I'm confident that SotA will see an overhaul of the GUI before full launch. The ability to reposition party indicators will hopefully be a priority. But I'm not expecting them to reinvent the wheel. I'd rather they focus on story and content.

 

Originally the devs were going for a very minimal user interface, I assume this is still their goal.

 

I too think the health indicator bars need some more refinement. I would rather see visual distinction on the Avatar or enemy itself, but if we are stuck with health bars, they could at least be a little more streamlined and uncluttered.

 

Yea and removal of the exact damage done.

 

They could start off extremely easily, just show the active, targeted MOB and not every mob.

 

I really, really, reallyreallyreally hope they implement cool looking (weapon-specific) critical hit animations too (something Fallout 2'ish, but with more variety, pretty please???) - like decapitations, dismemberments, torso cleavage (nice and BLOODY), hilarious death screams (or sanguine gurgles), etc... that would add so much to the combat experience without even having to modify the mechanics much imho...

 

Maybe that and some kind of code that prevents hp bars from stacking on top of each other? Sometimes they seem to smother each other.

 

Sorry for getting off topic, but I really wanted to add that other comment.

 

It was not your understading. It was clearly stated several times. But we keep waiting release after release...

 

I agree. It makes no sense to run around the world with floating bars above heads. Especially the wildlife.

I know it doesn't help colour-blind players, but I do miss the old dot system that changes from green to yellow to orange to red. It's so simple, and most of the time you know what you are up against with enemy monsters.

There is also the Monster Hunter option of having animation cues show the state of someone's health. So the moment they start getting low on health they begin to limp around. I mean, wouldn't that add some challenge to the game by hiding stuff like health bars? to make you really pay attention!

 

It would be cool if their textures could be altered to make them appear bloodied also.

 

Since we are going for realism here, cows should leave a fresh pile when being chased by a player. It is important the the wild life demonstrates fear. The deer are on the right track.

 

Cows aren't exactly wild life :> I'd think cows would get confused if chased by a player... Moooo?

But I'd support realistic animal behavior, it would only make the game more interesting. Not just running. I can't speak for rabbits on the field, but the rabbits I've seen around here will freeze in place if they see someone, hoping if they stay still, nobody will see them. Then, only when you start coming towards them do they start to run.

 

Visual cues might be hard to implement with this current deck system, unless you have lazy eyes (focus on the deck and another on the fighters), lol

 

Ah of course. The system definitely needs more tweaking to avoid shifting 100% of the player's attention to the glyphs.

For me, it's mainly because glyphs move too often:
1. I start watching when I draw my weapon to see if something comes up that I can use immediately.
2. Then I keep watching to see if I get any combo.
3. And I keep watching to see if I can stack anything.
4. Then I'm still watching because I was saving some glyphs in the hopes of creating a combo or a stack, but I will use them alone before they disappear.
5. GOTO 1.

I would rather have a more static hand, like in a "real" card game, e.g.:
- When I draw my weapon I am dealt a hand. A full hand.
- Glyphs don't disappear unless I discard/use them.
- That's it.