Monster/NPC Health Bars/Names

I am all for no health bars and no "floating names". I don't even like SotA to have world chat but that's a whole different topic entirely From a healing point of view, there has to be a fairly straightforward way to see how comrades are doing so heals can be administered accordingly. Visual queues, sounds and maybe a skill like anatomy that someone mentioned earlier seems like the way to go.

 

I want to test this in alpha and see how it works, at the moment I'm really into this idea.

 

Ok, this is my first message on the forum but I really want to say my opinion on this thread.

DON'T remove the health bar for the player/companions.

I need to know how much damage i do to my foe. You can remove " numbers " if you really want (even if I'm not 100% sure about this) but please: DON'T remove health bars.

Put a specific state on enemies to know how much damage they get like some people have said here on the forums: use textual references ( ex.: barely wounded, wounded, almost dead, poisoned + wounded, etc. ) or graphical ones ( small icons on the top of characters' heads) . Almost all of RPG/JRPGS that I've played in my life had numbers/health states. Even UO has numbers. Last Ultima-Saga Games didn't have lot of numbers but they had health bars. There are people around here who even said " remove the entire UI! No names, no UI, no inventory, nothing! Wo-hoo!" . I don't want to offend anyone but that's very dumb in my opinion. UI is also part of a game's aesthetics: you can't condemn the entire UI of a game only because you're comparing it to your World of Warcraft/classicMMO experience. There are lot of UIs, some of them are minimalists other ones have a lot of infos. Why can't we just have a nice looking/balanced UI for Shroud of the Avatar? I don't get all this UI rage

I want to play a computer role playing, not some kind of virtual-fake LARP.
Also, I don't want to start a second full time job to understand at least 50% of game mechanics (combat, in this case): I need to get into the game, play and have fun... even for 10 minutes. Don't troll saying I want a casual experience or that i'm a noob and blablabla: please, no. I want this product to be a complex but intuitive gaming experience.
Intuitive, Accesible and Complex.

I want the Dream-Game that Richard Garriott described on that old E3 '96 video, 17 years ago:

" After U9, we're going to create a game which will be a mix between Ultima X and MUltima 2 "

^^^ I want this game.

I want it to be the perfect mix between Ultima Online and Ultima-Saga, not Mount & Blade 3: fantasy edition.
Richard... being ambitious is wonderful, being too much ambitious frees the Guardian.

I was going to buy 140$ Explorer edition of SOTA but I'll be a bit undecided to buy the game if this " thing " is going to happen. Please, don't troll/get mad with me, this is only my point of view about this dilemma: it comes from the deep of my heart ;P ^_^ .

With love to the community, to Portalarium and to Richard Garriott.
One sincere italian fan from Rome,

-Kleshar

 

It all depends on the execution of how simplified they can make the statuses of the monsters and NPCs. If they do a good enough job, I am sure that it will be very easy for people to realize when a person is weak or not. Some simple indications like somebody who's using a one handed sword would put his other hand on his wound (like across his chest or something), leaning over panting, or you visibly see more scars/blood on a person face/armor if they have received enough damage. Monster Hunter does a great job of showing that when you fight the big bosses and it wasn't at all an issue (but it's an entirely different game, I know). In terms of names, I believe that should be an option unless they can go into crazy enough details to easily distinguish somebody. Again, it all depends on the execution. If and only if they are willing to go through the effort of making it VERY easy to see the status of a person and individualize them to pick them apart from the crowd, then I say go ahead and remove the names and health-bars.

 

Two Suggestions:

One: No health bars for monsters or enemies sounds great, but a player should still see his own health bar. It makes sense that you know how hard you were just hit and how much longer you'd stay in a fight without having to check and see if your arm fell off or if you are now limping. Party members could either show health bars or more general indicators like Resident Evil uses, such as "Good, Fair, Poor, Danger" to indicate how close they may be to death. This can also be color coded instead of using words depending on how the UI will eventually be set up.

Two: Getting rid of health bars opens up the possibility for a new/current skill to help you con monster health and condition. Perhaps something like Anatomy could let you activate it during a fight and it would report out monster health a single time, with a chance of failure. I am thinking like Evaluting Intelligence from UO: "This creature looks as if it would not survive another direct hit" or something similar.

 

I believe RG said you would still be able to see your own health, so that should not be an issue.

The greater is healing and seeing your party members health. This is kind of important for healers and managing buffs on a party, but it also depends on the UI and way in which parties are implemented.

In NWN they showed pictures on the side of the screen for every party member. This worked well until the list was larger than the screen and you had to scroll. However, I still would not want a bunch of health bars all over my screen from party members.

For SOTA it would be nice if you had an option for health bars on parties members, so it could be toggled. As a fighter you may not care what other's health is, but as a healer you might need the extra information. Or even something where you could tag a party member and a warning would come up when they were low on health.

 

Toggles would be great. There are sometimes when I like to see the bars and other times when I don't.

 

Totally agree with you guys! The health bars of my Avatar and his/her companions NEED to be displayed. You can't play without knowing your PRECISE health/status bar. As I said before, this is not a medieval simulator. This is a fantasy RPG. THE Ultimate RPG, if you're going to do things in the right way.

For enemies, you have three options:

1) Don't display damages, numbers or health bars. Nothing. I think this is exaggerated.

2) Introduce graphical or textual references on enemies' heads IF you dont' want to display numerical damage. IF you don't want to display " numbers ".

3) Display numerical damage and get rid of textual/graphical references on enemies' heads like a lot of JRPGs do.

-Kleshar ^_^

 

I agree with Kleshar it will be very helpful to know the status of our friends and pets! If we don't know their status then we will likely lose them unexpectedly.

 

Regarding the healing issue- in my mind, the solution is to move away from the heavy focus most RPGs have on healing as a numbers game. It would be a lot more fun to have characters that choose to focus in that support role having to cure diseases, blindness, madness, etc in the heat of battle rather than simply replenishing HP.

Also, if healers aren't having to constantly be pounding out +HP to party members they could even have some combat viability- for example removing a poison from a comrade and redirecting it at an enemy. Or they could have control abilities to give them some breathing room as they patch up a buddy.

 

In fact, "healing" could be spread out among various skill sets- for example, if a party member is afflicted with some kind of negative energy drain, as a necromancer I could alter the negative energy to positive- healing instead of harming.

You get the idea.

 

I think a necromancer could nullify or lessen its affects personally, but overall I like the idea.

 

Sure, the details/mechanics I don't much care about- just the idea that we aren't in such rigid, one-dimensional roles.
In my mind that would reduce a lot of the need for healers obsessively watching health bars and dps/control just pounding through ability rotations.

 

Ya, I'd rather not see someone just standing back healing.

Lineage2 had the "vampire rage" buff where you'd drain health from enemies.
RIFT and Neverwinter had a debuff you'd put on the mob that would heal people who damaged it.

I'm hoping the game doesn't fall into the "holy trinity" trap and that means no big heals. Buffs, regeneration, drains are all more reasonable.

 

I'm still for no UI at all.

How to measure your health if there is no health bar for you? When you get damage the screen gets slowly red and you can hear your heart beating. The more damage you get the more red the screen gets and the faster the heart beats. So you get a feeling for when you should heal yourself without having a bar floating around.

How to measure the health of party members? They look beaten up, limp, are covered in blood. If they are in desperate need of help, they could yell out for help automatically when the health drops to a certain percentage so that healers know that now would be the perfect time to heal them.

We should think outside of the box with SotA. Yes, it is a game but it is also a virtual world you live in. Imagine if the devs include support for Occulus Rift. You will then be in this game and there would be health bars and names and numbers floating around? This would totally rip you out of the feeling of being in the game.

We should do away with all of those things that would make the game a standard-MMORPG. Let's create something new, something unique, something that is not UO or WoW or all of those other games. MMOs have become less of immersive games and more of number calculations. Some of you might like it this way but let's face it - counting numbers is not about gaming.

 

Lord_Darkmoon - I am with you on no UI at all. Would be a breath of fresh air.

I wouldn't mind some U7 action for damage indication either, but not a perm adjustment to the screen. All that red would just make me mad But, in U7 you would get more frequent red flashes when your HP was low and you were being damaged. Something like blood spurts, or an audio/visual emote from the in-game character itself would work. Even if the screen did fade to a bit of red, but only when HP low and you were getting what the game client would have thought is "too much damage to live much longer."

 

What do you think about getting rid of in-battle healing all together? Why should healing be instantaneous anyway? Seems to me that healing would take some uninterrupted effort and some time to mend. It always seemed ridiculous to me that slapping on a bandage or two would immediately restore health.

Before you discount this idea as not being "the way things are done" consider all the calls for breaking out of the MMO mold, for going in new directions and for redefining what and RPG is. Let the battle go to the most skillful, not who has the most heal potions.

 

Getting rid of healing in a battle alltogether would be very interesting.
Interesting too would be if you could only die if you do not treat your wounds in some time.
Let's imagine this:
You get beaten up in combat. If you get 0 HPs you have to bandage yourself and seek out a doctor or healer in a town to get healed. If you do not bandage yourself you will continue to lose blood and die after some time.
Reaching 0 HPs would reduce your skills a bit so that you should think twice about attacking a monster in this state.

I remember the game Gothic. If you fought someone and he defeated you, you were not dead. He did have to deal a death blow for you to be finished. So if you are reduced to 0 HPs the enemy goes to next hero to beat him up. So you would have time to wait for help.

I would also prefer a low-magic setting so that healing magic would be very rare.

 

Not totally opposed to that either Mugly. I don't think healing in combat should be totally banned, however. Maybe just tweaked for science.

Healing shouldn't be instantaneous. Not only that, but if you are casting you should take x% more damage than you would if you were not. Both of those are not dependent on whom the target is, and kind of goes for any casting of magic at all.

I don't like any kind of timer/cooldown, so instead of having them, make healing draws a bit harder to come by in some way. Limit healing in other ways if possible, or make super effective healing a several skill thing where you would have to choose to become a master healer.

As for bandaging, it should be used to "stop" loss of HP. So if you have a damage over time effect on you, it should be used to stop the DoT but not to gain back HP. Anyone remember Action Quake? Q Q Q Q

 

I don't need healing gone altogether. I appreciate some teamwork and tactics presented by focusing opponents down or synergy. But I just don't want it a large amount. And I don't want to replace it by a ton of potions which do the same thing. Small heals, some regeneration, some drains or the like. And save most of it for after combat.

To the extent that you take away big heals, it also means that you may not need spells which target friendly players. You can still have AoE "healing wind" types of spells or whatever. This can radically simplify combat and targeting mechanics.