Fight Night round 3 DOES have health bars. You just had the ability to turn them off for people who wanted to play without knowing when the opponent would get knocked out.

Halo had a health bar. And even though the sequels got rid of the health portion, doesn't the shield meter serve virtually the same purpose?

Anyways, I like games with no healthbars, like the original Dino Crisis or Rainbow Six. Adds a bit to the atmosphere. However, I haven't played Fight Night, and am not sure it'd work well with a fighting game; clothes ripping is a nice visual feature, but I'd prefer a glance at a nice graphical readout rather than having to interpret how much more of a pummelling my guy could take because of their aesthetic.

In one of the other threads, Jack Burton proposed substituting the health bars for "spirit meters," sort of like the ones found in the wrestling games.

Yeah, if I find that thread again, I will cut and paste it into here; I think it would fit better here. Give me a second... EDIT: Here it is...finally found it!!! I posted this originally in the "Is MK vs. DC the best next-gen fighting game you've seen?" thread... "You know...I've actually wondered what it would be like if we did away with the traditional health bars and replaced them with...like...a spirit gauge or something...like in the wrestling games. Granted, this would be a radical change in the way the game would be played, and the whole mechanics of the game would probably have to be changed for it to be truly effective. Possible benefits I would see with the spirit gauges would be lengthened battles and more time to just kick the other person's ass. I'm all about decimating the opponent, which is why I like the wrestling games out there. I like to use guys like The Undertaker to just totally overwhelm and cripple other people I face. The lengthened battles would give us all a chance to flex our "gaming endurances" so-to-speak. There are so many ways to enhance this idea; I know I wouldn't be able to do it on my own. My current thoughts behind the idea would be weakening the other to a point where you could execute a fatality, like a finisher in a wrestling game, and it would end there. Maybe give the opponent a fleeting chance to halt the fatality as well, to give them a fighting chance to avoid defeat. However, since there are so many skilled players out there, battles would probably rage for INSANE amounts of time. Therefore, I would probably throw in a fatality gauge instead, and maybe give a set number of fatality reversals or something...ummmmm...I'm lost in my own idea. On second thought, keep the health bars; there is no way I could propose this without turning MK into another wrestling game, and I wouldn't want to do that. Although I wouldn't mind seeing submissions in the franchise one day...that would be cool. Jack Burton is going to go clear his mind...food sounds like the remedy he needs. TO THE MICROWAVE!!!" When I proposed this idea originally, I got a second by TrueNoob; he seemed thrilled by the idea. Like myself, he's a big fan of "WWF: No Mercy" and other games of that vein. I just thought it would be interesting if we ventured away from the whole "health bar" idea and try something new for a change. As you can tell, I got sort of lost proposing my idea. There are just so many possibilities in developing an idea like this that I couldn't possibly think of it all by myself. But anyway, here it is; do with it what you will. If you have any questions for me pertaining to this idea, just let me know. And THAT'S what Jack Burton has to say at this time.

If I were making a fighting game I'd definitely do it without health bars.
I can't imagine it being a luxury afforded to a major franchise though, let alone MK. Maybe when the fanbase can handle Scorpion ditching the iron-on yellow we could think about it.

I imagine most major franchises would take a small dent from getting rid of something people associate with basic gameplay. It's obviously a pretty small part, but I would guess the gameplay nuts would freak out about losing spoon fed timing, and others would just assume the game is impossible to play. At the very least I'm sure you could expect a lot of brow furrowing and confused whimpering.

With larger portions of these games weighing increasingly on pseudo-realistic logics I'd like to think it's something that could work quite naturally. It's just a matter of getting over the hump of an obsessive compulsive audience terrified by change, no matter how sound.

Let's face it; if Midway's finances are as dire as they sound, they're probably playing it safe and familiar for a while.

Yeah, I see what you mean, Mick-Lucifer. A change like that would be radical to say the least; it would really shake up the establishment, so-to-speak.

I also apologize for the way my prior post came out in this thread; I tried separating it out but it wouldn't keep the formatting. I did put the cut and pasted post from the other thread into quotation marks to help distinguish it from the rest of what I said...

Can't it be Both?

Not trying to get off topic but..no, no more Klose Kombat. We've seen enough gimmicks for one MK game.

And I like the health bar. It saves me the trouble of having to try and guess how much damage I just took.

Maybe there could be a new mode introduced into MK then.
In addition to the arcade mode we're used to, a survival mode. This mode could feature extreme blood, dismemberment, broken armor, and broken limbs. It sounds a bit sick, but it would be really intense. It may even turn out to be funnest mode in MK. These next gen consoles like PS3 and XBOX 360 can definately support it, so why not do it?

It wouldn't only be in klose kombat either. I just mentioned klose kombat because it shows damage to the characters in MK vs DC. Which is awesome!

Health bars brings consistancy into the game.

Without them, a fight could go on forever (i.e. WWE games), which could get boring. Besides, there's only so much a person can really take.

Shit that would be a good option to have though. Turn off the health bars and jus go by how much damage that shows. That would be a step in the more real approach to the franchise

I like health bars, but if Midway were to get rid of em' I wouldn’t mind.

But what ever sense of realism it had would be ruined once I remembered I was playing as a ninja with cryokinetic abilities.

Jack Burton doesn't mind the health bars, but when you think about it (especially when playing as someone like Raiden, who's a god, or someone supernatural in background), the health bars sort of take away from the realism as well. Really, you're only as good as the amount of health in that health bar, and that takes a little away from the strength of the characters in my opinion.

However, I'm a longtime MK player, and therefore quite used to the health bar system, so I wouldn't aggressively campaign for a change in that respect. It's just something to think about.

And THAT'S what Jack Burton has to say at this time.

Unless there are real-time repercussions for phsiological hits -- or you're just talking about removing the HUD and replacing it with pseudo-realistic indicators that may (or may not) be obvious to the trained eye.

I think that without health bars, the action would definately be more intense. Like I said,Fight Night is better without them. I've played it with the health bar and it's not the same. You or your opponent start to play more conservative when the health bar gets low. If you don't know about your health, you just try to stand your ground........you keep going strong in the fight and build the intensity.
It would really be cool to see a fighter move differently once damage occurs. That would be a good sign of low health. In Resident Evil games, (while running)you hold your stomach when your health is low. That's the type shit we need to see.

I actually don't think it's a bad idea, but you'd need it to be really well thought out, by a really good team, and then you'd need to play test the shit out of it for about nine hundred years. Taking a regular arcade fighter base and implementing unusual ideas successfully isn't easy. Because it's all well and good to make a game which looks good or has lots of "innovation," but making it competitively playable is entirely a different (and more important) issue, and that's where Western developers of fighting games trip up so often. "Let's do this new thing, it's completely innovative, it'll set the market on fire because no other fighting game features this concept!" Welcome to Failand.

I think you'd be looking at like a Japanese based THQ team or something in order to make such a thing work properly.

Even then... like... It's difficult. Because you want to be able to see how healthy your character is at all times, right? Through physical appearance and they way he or she moves? Well, 95% of the time you're playing, your character is in the middle of a move animation. So if you have your character try to get accross how damaged he is by physical appearance then right off the bat you're mostly looking at how he looks when he's idle, like in wrestling games where a player puts his hands on his knees and looks exhausted, or favors a leg.

You'll never get to see that "exhausted" or "damaged" idle stance when you're fighting because, well, you're fighting, not idle. During move animations your character is always going to look fit as a fiddle because there's only one animation for that move, and you'll more often than not be in the middle of a move animation (including sidesteps, wavedashes, etc.) So then you're looking at modifying the move animations to reflect the characters damage so that you can actually see how damaged he is without having to backstep half a screen and idle for a second to watch him favor his leg or whatever so that you can get an idea of how damaged he is.

It was alright for Fight Night, because the "move animations" really just consisted of a few basic animations performed at different angles, a hook, a jab, a right cross, etc. So they could easily be slowed down and sped up and whatnot, and the player would get a pretty good idea of how exhausted his character was by the way he threw an uppercut. But in a 3D fighting game you don't have just a hook, a right cross, etc, you generally have dozens and dozens of moves per character. So it becomes a whoooole lot more complicated to have each move be modified to varying degrees to reflect whatever state your fighter is in. Which is either going to be a complete nightmare, or unbelievably painstaking. Like creating the same move animation over and over again to get an animation for a left high roundhouse when your character is fresh, an animation for a left high roundhouse when your character is tired, an animation for a left high roundhouse when your character has an injured right leg, and so on. Insane.

If you just slow animations down to reflect damage, you're changing the fundemental properties of an arcade fighting game so much that it would barely resemble what most people would associate with being a fighting game (like Fight Night,) and you're almost in a whole other world with a whole new set of balance problems and so forth.


The other thing you're looking at is cuts and bruises, and aesthetic damage like that. Even in Fight Night it was pretty hard to see, and the game was relatively slow, with relatively close camera angles. Can you imagine trying to tell the health of your character in MKDA by looking at their facial damage during the fight? You couldn't even see it most of the time. You could maybe use clothing damage to help get an idea of a characters health but you'd have to be REALLY obvious about it. Even in Soul Calibur when I lose armor sometimes I don't even realise it. So doing things that way wouldn't be easy either I don't think.

Thinking about the logistics of implementing the idea of physical damage rather than a health bar in a typical arcade fighter... I don't see it happening unless you make some major fundamental changes. Like, really major. I'm sure it would be doable, but I'm not sure it would remotely resemble "Mortal Kombat" anymore, or if it would even be worth it for the amount of time and effort it would require. Maybe it'd be good for an actual fighting sim. But maybe not so good for a Mortal Kombat game. Unless you want to turn Mortal Komabt into a fighting sim or something.

What I think should be done, is that the fighter's condition changes as the health bar goes down (i.e. fighter stumbles while walking when health bar is half down).

Also, the health bar should move much slower. That way, the fight won't last too long, and the game will be more realistic.

I love that about wrestling games. First, if you have good gameplay, a long match is never boring. If it's boring, it's because you have a boring game.

Second, a spirit meter allows for comebacks, which are great. It's not an automatic lose when your health reaches "zero". When you watch great fights in movies, the protagonist usually gets the hell beat out of him first, at least in the really good fight scenes. That's what makes them great.

I know everybody wouldn't like it, but I think the No Mercy/Def Jam(not Icon) model would be great for an MK game. If you substitute Fatalities for Specials, you can do them in-match and they become more important. Instead of just being for show, they could actually win a match for you. Plus, you could use the environment more and it would allow for more than just two fighters in a single match.

The fighting genre needs to evolve and I believe this is the next logical step. Think of how GTA changed the face of action/adventure games by introducing more freedom. This would be just like this. Sure, there are games that have been doing it for years. In GTA's case, it was RPG's like Zelda and in MK's case it's wrestling games.

So, MK team, if you read this, do it or don't, I don't care. If nobody's done it by the time I get into the industry, then I can be the first to do it. Your loss.

Shibata,
you have a good(long)reason why the idea may not work......but you mentioned one big thing, 3D.

I mentioned that this could be more like a new mode in MK. How about if this idea was(instead)put into a modern 2D game. The effects of lost limbs and different animations could be easier. Much easier. It would be really interesting to see live actors in it. They may have a problem with the lost limbs part though :)
Everything has to start somewhere....start it in 2D if it can't be in 3D. Old MK with a sick twist.

... Given the moves you're dealing with, wouldn't faster be more realistic?

I don't know why anyone would talk about this as a removal of health as a functional tool. A measure of consequence seems like a pretty fair base standard. I do like the idea of losing the HUD as an equaliser, though.

It'd be nice if reactions could be specific to certain area hits (discussed by other people, I think), and a little less formulaicly based on percentages (of health). It obviously has to serve a purpose of communicating the stage of the fight, but it'd also be kinda nice if a fighting game could encourage something a bit more natural and intuitive.
Idiot savants mapping portions of the health bar gets old!