Which RPGs do this?

Fable III has a flashy thing when you're near death IIRC. I don't know if that's what OP is talking about though.

thats just as bad as not having one in the first place, combat is not the only time you take damage. what if you are using a potion that has a super increase in speed or something but the cost is a damage health affect, what if you are close to death but don't know it because the hud is hidden when not in combat. you die in a noob way that you shouldn't. or maybe you think you can risk a bit of a fall as a short cut to where you are going so think its worth it to take that little bit of damage but not knowing your are on the verge of death.

thats when you really have to baby sit your health, you'd have to look at your stat menu to check your health before you do any thing or just every few minutes in between combat just to know how much health you had. the idea of a visual expereince is not to flip through papers or the virtual equivelent like back in paper/DnD days.


Red Dead Redemption
Fable 3 (which I have experienced recently which was actually why I started this because it doesn't give any indecation that you are getting hurt until you are hits away from death.)
SK is going to have a hud that disapears when not in combat
madworld? I havent played that game so I am not sure if thats how they handled the damage but thats what it looked like from what I have seen.
there are a few more, I have an image in my head but the name escapes me; where the screen gets redder and redder until your dead and you often die because of the screen affect itself.



yeah, its what made me make this thread actually.

Since when was Red Dead Redemption an RPG?

So i can't get a health bar in real life. My dreams are crushed.

Part of that particular mod is having the ability to call up the hud at will. Whenever you need it, there is a button that you can press and Voila, there's the hud for you to see. After a few seconds it will go away till you need it again. That's what I like about it, there when you need it, hidden when you don't.

its a game in which you play the role of whats his face, and then later his... nvrm. there have been plenty of threads on the CF about what defines a game as an rpg, and I won't debate it hear because I don't want the subject to get shifted.


mod? thats how the vanilla game is supposed to be. if there was a button that would not be as bad as I thought, but it still involves one more uneccesary action to check my health. I haven't played any good games where the health bar was taking up a whole visual chunk of the screen any ways. most of the time they are small and in one of the corners, which is completely unintrusive unless your playing style involves viewing the game from the corner of your screen.

The point is, is that if a mod can do it, then it can easily be done in vanilla...and that unnecessary action you speak of is only a single button you have to push, it's not that hard to do. If anything, the thing that's unnecessary is to have the hud/health bar visible at all times...even when I don't need it there. All that is doing is cluttering up my screen and obstructing my view. the argument goes both ways.

I agree with you.

The numbers in the corner was a really great system if you ask me. I would love to see it in a few RPGs.

there are not very many cases where that part of the screen is so important that you fail something because it was covered by the status bar, the point of a hud is so that you never are ignorant of how close you are to death or how much ammor/magic you have left. like I said, I would not hate no hud screens so much if there was a button to push that made it come up (for several seconds not just a glimpse) but I would still hate it because its an uneccesary action to check one of the most vital bits of information in an rpg.

We have games that let you change key mapping, invert controller axis, change the color of your characters eyes (which you will never see) but no developer has come up with a way to toggle the HUD?

Personally I like the HUD. For Oblivion and Fallout 3 I got mods that added more HUD. For me the HUD helps to replace the senses that cannot be recreated in a game. In the game Ghost Recon there is a compass in the HUD that shows when enemies are close and gives a rough idea of direction when the enemies are a bit farther away. Some players viewed this as giving the characters psychic abilities and modded it out, but in real life you would be able to hear movement that is not yours and you would definitely know which direction the enemy is when they start shooting at you. In real life I constantly feel, hear and smell the world around me, that cant happen in a game. In real life I can tell when I feel good or when I feel like crap, in a game I have to look at the heath bar. I only like HUD-less when stats don't matter, for example a game like Myst would not need a health bar. In the game Amnesia: The Dark Decent you have both health and sanity levels and you have no way of knowing what level they are with out pausing the game. My friend told me that you can tell when you are losing sanity because the controls become less responsive; to me this just means it's time to replace the batteries in my wireless mouse.

Honestly, I don't care how it's done. As long as the information that I need is conveyed to me in an accurate way that I can understand I'll be happy.

Far Cry 2 had one of the best health systems IMO.

5 health blips, each partial blip would restore to a full blip. A syringe would restore you to full health. Once you got down to two blips you also needed to apply first aid, rip out bullets, reset dislocated joints etc. which would put you back up to 2 blips again.

Made for some pretty tense moments hiding behind cover performing amateur surgery.

It'd be nice if games in general had a toggleable HUD, like a hotkeyed version of "tm" in Oblivion/FO3/etc. I don't really like having it imposed on me whether it's minimal or cluttered: I'd prefer to have the choice of turning it on and off as I see fit. I do remember there was one game that did this: I forget which one offhand, but I wish there were more like it.

Edit: more on topic, I've been playing Fable 3 lately which is one of the culprits. I love many aspects of the game but their attempt to banish the HUD and menu system in general is awkward, inconvenient and mostly just annoying.

I wouldn't say that I end up dying randomly without knowing why in games without health bars, because these games usually use alternate methods to indicate how injured you are which are supposedly more "immersive", I say supposedly because I don't find getting blood splashed on my screen (Unless I'm wearing a helmet with a transparent visor or goggles I can only assume it got into my eye, though I'm pretty sure getting blood into your eyes would NOT look like what you'd get if you were watching footage and someone got blood onto the lens.) from getting hit in the foot very "immersive", am I meant to assume that the blood somehow sprayed up from my foot all the way to my face? And somehow, games without health bars still use other HUD elements that are also unrealistic, like a guage for ammunition or a crosshair, at least in my experience, so it comes off not so much like the developers wanting to do away with health bars because they're unrealistic as just doing it because it's something people are obssessed with. As you can see, I don't particularly approve of this trend. Now, I wouldn't mind developers doing away with health bars if they can actually come up with a better alternative, but blood on the screen is not such an alternative.

Though I've never played an RPG without a health bar, I've played first person shooters without one, and third person shooters, and sandbox games like Red Dead Redemption, but never anything I'd call an RPG, and my definition of RPG isn't as strict as some of the ones I've seen here, not that I'd want to not have a health bar in those genres anyway, for a game to rightly not have a health bar, it must do away with all other unrealistic hud elements as well, because it's hypocritical to consider a health bar too unrealistic to have in your game when a number on the side of the screen that shows how many bullets you have in your gun is fine, if anything, I'd say that's more unrealistic than a health bar, as people can usually tell when they get wounded because it causes pain, something that the game can't accurately convey, so it's necessary to use a more abstract method to tell you how seriously wounded you are, such as say, a health bar, granted, in real life, you probably can't instantly tell how close you are to death, but hey, it's a game. With ammunition on the other hand, while I don't have much experience with real guns, I'm pretty sure that for most guns, the only way to know how many rounds you have left without actually checking is by keeping track of how many times you shoot, which is something players CAN do without the game helping them. So why should health bars go while the ammunition gauge stays?

I like health indicators - be it a bar, a globe filled with red liquid, or even those dopy old "hearts". I especially like it when the hud is aesthetically pleasing and artistic - but also functional.

http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/203034-daemonica-windows-screenshot-one-of-the-only-true-puzzles.jpg has both a visual indicator and numbers. The lower left has a window for an at-ready inventory item (none in this screenshot), a shortkey to inventory, and the compass.

http://www.gamershell.com/static/screenshots/8114/180078_full.jpg has a nice compact HUD. The eagle represents the character's body parts (there's locational damage). The damage also corresponds to the visible locational damage (wounds) applied to the character models. The two arcs on either side of the eagle represent other aspects of the game (fatigue on the left in green, audience approval in cyan on the right). And that's all I need to know.

I like functional and aesthetic design. Sometimes, a health bar would be out of place in a concept. Whether the game works depends entirely on the developers.

I think Dead Space's means of showing you your health was quite good. I think they should go for that kind of approach in RPG's. Maybe as a magic meter you could wear some amulet that shines a specific color depending on how much magic you have. As far as health goes, I think it's okay for now, a health bar would be nice, but I get by without it.

I like the lil number.

I honestly like how they do it in COD. I am not one to glorify COD through and through, but I really like how they do health. I also like how games are starting to get out of having to find potions to gain back your health. I like it when games allow you to regain your health after you are done with a battle, or gradually over time, and if you find a potion GREAT! It can help you as well.

I honestly think game companies are just experimenting with new ideas, and are trying to just figure out a new way of doing it. They could spend more time getting game testers to play it however.

This holds so much truth for people who game to much.

You play less than me or enjoy a game for different resons? [censored] casual, get out of my face!

If I have low health in a game I won't mind using a health bar or not. Visual cues are fine.

But if I'm playing a game where it takes a while to die, yes I would like the health bar.

I like small bars.

A casual gamer is someone who plays when they have the chance. Someone who structures their gaming time around their lives and not the other way around. That is what casual gamer means, nothing else. I don't see how that's a hard concept to grasp.

Anyway, why would a HUD have anything to do with how much time you put into gaming? That makes absolutely no sense. It's a design choice, you want to show off as much of your pretty game as possible and HUD's get in the way of that. I don't really have trouble immersing myself in a game, but seeing a HUD without some reason for it (Such as Samus' helmet for example) is hindering your ability to get immersed, that's not a point that can be argued, that's how it works. The more aware you are that you are playing a game the less immersed you are, simple facts.

The best solution is having the HP bar be invisible except when it changes, you''ll see it briefly then it'll dissapear. Function and design in harmony.