So there you are, minding your own business, when the CEO of Giant Game Publisher approaches you with an offer: he wants you to lead the development of a brand new entry in That First Person Shooter that he makes, and he wants you to make sure it’s fun to play. How do you make sure it’s fun to play?
Well, one obvious thing is to make sure the enemies are actually good. Obviously, having a good story, great characters, strong sound design, interesting guns, and great mechanics will help as well, but personally, as a shooter enthusiast, I find that there’s one area where most shooters fall short, and it’s called feedback.
Some old dude said that every action must have an equal and opposite reaction, but far too often, video games do not feature reactions that seem in any way equal. When I pull the trigger on a shotgun, I expect my enemies to go flying back like they have been hit with a shotgun. All too often, I find that instead, they don’t react at all.
One of my biggest pet peeves in shooters is the idea of the enemy health bar. Many games feature this mechanic, from Bioshock Infinite to Battleborn, and all of them are worse off for it. The problem with the health bar is that it feels like it should be a half measure, something developers put into a prototype to show that enemies are losing health, not something that should be in the finished product.
Shield bars are non-diagetic, that is, they exist outside the context of the game’s reality; they’re metaphors for damage, rather than actual indicators of such. What this means is that damage stops feeling in-universe, and the game doesn’t really react to you. It’s a lazy means of communicating damage, and it doesn’t feel near as believable as it could.
Binary Domain, which is the best third Japanese third person shooter ever made, is so great in part because of the game’s emphasis on enemy disassembly. Your enemies are all robots, which are traditionally boring, but when you shoot a robot in Binary Domain, its armour shatters and blows apart. Shoot a robot in the legs, and the robot falls over, then tries to crawl towards you before it explodes. There’s nothing as satisfying as that shower of sparks and steel as your bullets slam into the enemy robots.
Halo’s elites have energy shields that become brighter the more you shoot them until they ‘pop,’ at which point electricity crackles around the elite. The shield’s brightness provides an immediate level of responsiveness that, over time, becomes easy to estimate. Setting an elite’s shield up in stages — glow, pop, electricity — also makes it feel like you’re actually getting closer to a goal in a way that an empty bar doesn’t.
Even when I see a health bar diminishing in a video game, I rarely feel like I’m actually making progress. When an enemy starts limping or gasping for breath, I feel like I’ve accomplished something. When he behaves the exact same way throughout his lifespan, then I feel like my shots aren’t doing much. If I hit someone with a shotgun and he keeps on running, then the fact that his health bar has a lower number on it now doesn’t even register with me.
An enemy who stumbles when he gets shot is waaaay more interesting than an enemy who ignores the bullet. The health bar is a barrier between action and reaction; it’s a dissatisfying way of handling reactivity.
There are, of course, other ways of looking at this subject. Here’s a great talk by Jan Willem Nijman on the art of screenshake, which is how his studio, Vlambeer, makes their games feel so good. It’s the same basic principle.
The more a game reacts to the player’s actions, the more tactile the feedback seems, the more interesting the game becomes. If you want your game to feel great, then the best thing you can do is ensure your enemies can communicate their damage states instead of just displaying a lower number on their health bar.
Comments
14 responses to “Your Shooter Deserves Better Feedback”
Man, I’m going home tonight and playing Binary Domain again….
The answer is you make DOOM.
Agree 100%. Health bars annoy me. Sure I can understand it for a boss but that’s a boss. You expect a massive robot not to react when you hit it with your pellet gun, but an enemy that takes a shotgun to the chest and just says “eh”? Just annoying.
Soldier of Fortune comes to mind. Now there was a game with impact.
Man i’d shotgun a guys limbs off for a new and good soldier of fortune.
This is why I got bored with The Division. The game started fun, with enemies reacting to most of my shots. Once it became “unload multiple clips”, I was out.
You’ve suddenly got me interested in Binary Domain. Its always annoyed me how an enemy is 100% fully functional right up until death. More games need to have enemies change in relation to their amount of remaining health, whether they retreat to recover their life, or if they sustain too much damage they drop their weapon or stagger unable to run, or blindly fire as they can’t see anymore.
Combine this with a brutal AI as mentioned in your other post regarding F.E.A.R. and you have the makings of the best game ever.
I never knew I was do bothered by health bars until I read this. You make some good points.
The way that Elites crack a wobbly right have you break their shields is just perfect. Gears of War has pretty good feedback with lots of blood spewing out and the DBNO crawling. Melee hits feels especially solid too with the way enemies stagger back and get stunned.
Special mention to MechWarrior Online for making getting shot at feel good too. The way the cockpit rocks and rolls as you take autocannon fire is just immersive af
You know what also bugs me? Hit markers. They have a cross (usually) appear around your reticle and the sound effect for your bullets (and grenades oddly enough) change. It’s an easier and lazier way to inform the player that they’re hitting something and makes them feel like they’re accomplishing something.
Also, special shout out to Resident Evil 4. Shooting someone in the head makes them flail around in pain.
I think one thing that halo got right about shooters is making the weapons feel the way they should. Got a rocket to the face? You went flying! Got s sniper shot to the head. Game over. Took a shotgun blast at point blank. Lights out.
Some other games have gotten this right as mentioned before soldier of fortune was awesome for blowing enemies to pieces and setting them on fire to watch them flail around and die.
Too many fps games are feeling like a cross between fps and RPGs with health bars and damage text and the like. I don’t mind it in borderlands as it is part of its charm but has no place in other games. The division was a really bad offender. If I shoot and enemy in the face with a sniper rifle I expect them to die not to shrug it off like a paper cut.
It’s that kind of shit which breaks immersion and makes a game feel clunky and boring. I mean who wants to unload clip after clip into a trash enemy? It is ok for bosses as they are meant to be bad ass mothers but seriously gets old when every enemy is a bullet sponge.
Bring back Soldier of Fortune!
Blow off heads and limbs with single shots from high caliber weapons all day long.
Some good points and I think pretty much every gamer will agree with you. I don’t even really player shooters anymore but playing one that feels more visceral with enemies noticeably being affected by my shots (and me being affected by theirs) sounds great.