Are Health Bars Making Games Worse? | Design Delve

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The example that comes to mind for me is Cuphead: during the boss battle there is no health bar, and that's good because it's more important for the player to focus on dodging the bullet hells and reading the boss's telegraphs and patterns. But when you do die, the Game Over screen shows you the boss's secret healthbar, and now you have just enough information on how close/far you are from victory (or even just from the next phase of the battle) and how much you're improving with subsequent runthroughs. (And then there's that damn robot.)

One aspect you didn't address is the use of healthbars as signposting. In a game with some open world aspects, if you run up to a boss and hit it with your +1 Twig of wisdom and it takes off a tiny sliver of health, it lets you know: "Hey, I shouldn't be here yet. Why don't I try that other path towards the Sword of a Thousand Truths, and come back with that weapon."

I really like how healthbars were used as a way to communicate time-stress in MGS4. Snake going through the microwave room and watching his health slowly deplete was so incredibly stressful

Having "bosses" with health bars that then die in one hit can be quite funny if used properly, i.e. once per game. See Rick the Door Technician in Jedi Survivor. I literally laughed out loud when I turned that corner, got attacked by Rick, and killed him in one hit.

I just absolutely adore the feedback you get from Monster Hunter Bosses. There is no greater feeling than landing a big, charged attack and it breaks a part, cuts a tail or even knocks it over. It just makes it so worth it.

Regarding boss health bars, one thing I noticed is that the old Zelda games' bosses don't have health bars, but the bosses in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom do. For overworld bosses, it does allow the player to see that they are fighting an overworld boss and not a regular enemy, but there are other indicators that work just as well. For Dungeon Bosses, the health bars really tell the player nothing that the old Zelda games' bosses didn't already convey to the player. It's really only for the final bosses: Calamity Ganon and Demon King Ganondorf, that the health bars provide info that couldn't be conveyed otherwise: With Calamity Ganon, it is a cathartic experience to see the Divine Beasts remove most of Calamity Ganon's health before the battle truly starts, both for story reasons and as a reward for the player going out of their way to do the main story. For Tears of the Kingdom, seeing Ganondorf's health bar go off the side of the screen tells the player that they are in for a big fight.

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I think health bars on bosses specifically can help draw attention to the significance of the moment and really set the stage for a larger-than-life fight that the player is walking into. In Metroid Prime 1 all the significant bosses are the only creatures with displayed health bars, highlighting them as milestones for the player's progress. While in Tears of the Kingdom one particularly hard boss has a health bar that "breaks the rules" and extends far past the normal display after it appears, then goes on to manipulate your health bar by damaging your max HP directly. Using health bars in this way can help communicate stakes in some games where dialog is not particularly present, but make it still feel rather natural to the player themselves.

I feel like this discussion focusing so much on soulslikes (Hollow Knight incl.) ignores the whole genres that exist that just dont use health bars. Platformers, shooters, and horror games are all genres that put a lot of focus on their boss fights, and which rarely give any NPC's a visible health display, and their near-total absence makes the discussion feel incomplete. Approaching this from a perspective of "what happens if we get rid of health bars" implies that experimentation of that field hasn't already happen a lot, and I think this would be better served by just a "let's talk about health bars" style of discussion, rather than implicitly assigning value to their existence.

Preface: I tend to play platformers (usually exploration-heavy ones), shooting games (shmups), and first-person shooters, with a few turn-based RPGs. I absolutely hate it when boss encounters have no actual display of how much health the enemy has remaining. To me, it feels less tense and more frustratingly vague, as it feels like it muddies if I'm actually meaningfully damaging the enemy and makes it much harder to gauge how effective my strategy actually is against the enemy or if I'm making progress against it. The only time where this doesn't bother me is when boss enemies take a consistent amount of damage to defeat across an entire game, like how the Eggmobile takes 8 hits in almost every encounter with Eggman in the classic Sonic games. This doesn't necessarily mean that a UI health bar is strictly required. Health bars are my preferred method of representing boss health, but I'm also accepting of other ways of displaying how damaged a boss enemy is - such as how boss enemies in the Metroid series will often change color or change sprites to show damage, or how bosses in Sunset Riders start flashing red with the flash getting faster as their health depletes. As for player health indicators: I hate the "Bloody Screen! So Real" method of displaying health that FPS games were obsessed with during the seventh generation, for similar reasons of not feeling tense so much as frustrating from how vague it makes it to tell how much health I actually have. My immersion in a game is not so fragile that a red bar at the bottom-left of the screen would irrevocably shatter it into its component quarks - if anything, "Bloody Screen! So Real" feels more immersion-breaking than just having a health bar. To a lesser extent I also find myself uncomfortable with the kind of obfuscation the video described as "gradient health", as it makes it harder to gauge how damaging an enemy's attacks are. This isn't strictly a health bar related thing and is more of a tangent because I wanted to praise something I like, but one UI element appreciate in games is when combat resources are displayed next to the player character when they're actively using them. The go-to example for me is Einhänder, where your equipped weapon's current ammo count is displayed above your ship when firing it.

ff14's players and boss health bar is really important to the gameplay loop. Because in end game content, healers will need to plan out their resources in order to heal the entire party and accurate information is needed for them to do so. While the boss has a dps check, where the boss will do its mechanics in order and at the end, they will 'enrage' and wipe the party if you couldnt kill it before then. The health bar then serve as a 'progress bar' for the party to know how far they have made it and on rare occasion, if they should make sacrificial plays in order to save the rest of the party so they may finish off the boss. One particular fight I had that I still remember was a savage fight (E8S) where the boss's health is at the final few percent but the enrage is getting casted. It took me and my friend a couple of weeks of practice to get to that point. And as we see the boss gets to the final 1%, then 0.9, then 0.8; while the enrage cast is going off, and the screen is turning black from a party wipe. And we cleared it, we fucking made it.

Speaking of things behind the hood, I think it's Resident Evil 4 where the last round of a magazine always did critical damage. So that "one last shot" would almost always pay off.

personally as a player, i want healthbars, specifically for a player...i hate the "red/grey screen effect" which can mean anything form "slight breeze will end you/I can still tank a rocket"...for bosses, diagetic health can work, but often, id prefer healthbar, or at least see damage numbers(monster hunter fortunately allows those)...hard to know if a build works better than the last one without seeing some feedback...same with scoreboards in mp games, they are a great tool to see if im improving, since just watching gameplay it can be hard to measure....Darktide for example does not have any scoreboards, and it made fine tuning builds a nightmare for me

A case of health bar vs no health bar that I found very interesting was palying Baldur's Gate 3 (compared to playing DnD 5e). In BG3 you see not only health bars, but exact numerical values, which when paired with the relatively low numbers of 5e makes it very easy to calculate your chances of killing an enemy with any given attack. That made every attack into a completely calculated tactical choice, obviously enhancing the tactical element of combat, but it also takes away some of the tension that you get in the tabletop version, and it made the feel bad moments of rolling minimal damage even worse, when you know you only needed 1 damage more to knock them out.

I will always remember that in Kingdom Hearts, Sephiroth has so much health that it goes beyond what the boss health bar can display, so you need to hit him for a while before it actually starts to go down.

Realistically- if we were to rely solely on diagetic signifiers, then we would need significantly elevated design in numerous other spaces. For example- in many games- attacks feel floaty and disconnected. In those games then only way to know that your character can even interact with the environment, is via health bars. It doesn't matter to just know that your attacks are doing damage (diagetic signifiers of how much damage you've done as discussed), but signifiers that you've hit or missed the opponent. I am playing through Dynasty Warriors 8 rn- and find they lack in appropriate signifiers when you're hitting an enemy (most specifically enemy commanders). There is a sound made when hitting an enemy- but you are constantly surrounded by enemies- so you are always hearing the sound. If they added a different sound effect to show that you've made contact with the commander enemy, that would help. Right now the only way to know you're hitting the enemy commander is their health bar going down- or them flying in the air if you've staggered them.

The one thing I’ve hated for a while is action games without healthbars that instead use some huge visual. Uncharted (where I love the series) is one of the worst at this, the screen starts going black and white making the enemies harder to see and causing a bit of a death spiral

I like having the health bars when there's some tactical reason to have them. If a boss has more than one phase, then I may want to do different things as I get closer to the change point. I think Slay The Spire's blob boss is a really good example of this, since you want to use your heaviest hits as close as you can to when it splits. On the other hand, I love how Cuphead doesn't provide the information, but let's you know how far you were after you die. That kind of lets you get an intuitive feel for the boss and their habits, which is nice, but also gives you the info about how much damage you were actually doing.

I remember playing Kingdom Hearts as a child and getting stuck on the boss of Deep Jungle for days. Every time I fought it I wouldn't make any progress, and I couldn't figure out why. Then I took a look at a strategy guide and learned about the "Scan" ability, which allows the player to see enemy and boss health bars. Once I finally equipped "Scan" I beat the boss first try.