The Science of Video Game Healing | Extra Punctuation 

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I like how in a few Duke Nukem games, his health is referred to as "ego", implying that Duke can will himself bulletproof by how cool he recognizes himself to be

7:02 …that’s actually how Naughty Dog explains how Drake survives everything in Uncharted. The generic red borders and black/white screen change whenever he gets shot at isn’t his health, it’s his luck running out.

This is why I like XCOM (and probably a bit of why you like it too). Getting shot, even once, means you need days (possibly weeks) to recover and the aid of different resouces can impact that time, but you never just snap back. XCOM 2 and WotC also weave in extra trauma that need dedicated time to properly heal from, showing all the ugly PTSD of fighting aliens.

Hidetaka Miyazaki once said he saw Bloodborne's "health" bar as more of a "will to carry on" bar. As in you keep taking hits until you will to continue gives up and you collapse. Rallying is you getting that shot of adrenaline to keep going. Not sure how that works while you're being sliced to pieces by giant wolves but there we are.

The "luck" idea is actually what was described a bit for Nathan Drake in Uncharted. That bullets "whizz by" him, which brings down his "health" and when he dies it's because he got hit.

I love how healing in farcry games seems to only affect your forearms Like you’re Achilles but exclusively take damage in the arms

i really liked the opening of battlefield 1 as it used the "replace whole character when killed method" it was quite an intense opening and a fairly good tutorial as you were using all different types of combat, by switching between people

I quite like the approach the original Deus Ex took to healing. The in-world mechanics all revolve around nanomachines rapidly knitting your bones and flesh back together. Medkits do have regular first-aid materials in them-which comes in handy if you upgrade the Medicine skill to get more efficient healing-but they only exist to prep your body for the chemical injection that gives resources to the nanobots already in your body. Med-bots will restore you to full health, regardless of your Medicine skill, because they have nearly perfect surgical expertise and a nearly unlimited supply of the materials and resources that your nanomachines need to work. However, they're bulky, and they can usually only be found in secure locations that could feasibly house and power one. My last call out is the difficulty settings. You have the 3 classic modes and a bonus mode. On Realistic, any shot or blow you take to the head or torso is basically an instant death. You might get lucky and get "grazed" in an extremity-which always cripples the limb and prevents you from using it effectively-but that's often right before the second shot gets you. I've played through the entire game on Realistic several times, and I cannot adequately emphasize how much you have to rely on investigation, caution, and creativity to get through everything.

Battlefield 1's prologue did the replacement idea and it was spectacular, if a little bit linear. Something like that combined with the campaign mechanic from the 2005 Battlefront II, where you have objectives and a limited amount of reinforcements, would make for a fantastic large scale combat campaign

Although a mediocre game in most aspects, the way ZombiU simply had you control a new character wherever your current character died actually made it quite immersive, and it was very fitting in that genre, also eliminating the feeling of some rando having plot armor and surviving the most ridiculously dangerous scenarios over and over again.

One thing definitely worth discussing here is the space between "Crap! I need to heal" and "All better! :)" In some games, this space is instantaneous; in other games, there's a longer gap. One one extreme, you have Breath of the Wild. The moment you're concerned about your health, you can pause, eat a million mushrooms or apples, and be right as rain. Cover shooters will regenerate your health, as long as you're not in immediate danger and can afford to sit still for the time it takes to regenerate. In Pokemon, you can heal whenever you want, but it'll cost you a turn; likewise with Estus flask-style healing, where you have to risk getting hit during your healing animation. After this would be one of my favorite healing methods, residual healing: you can START healing whenever you want, but the healing process takes time. Then you have medkits, which mean you can't heal until you find one out in the wild, which Yahtzee talked about. Next would be no healing during a level, but the game allowing you to heal in between fights. And finally, you have no healing, ever. If you get hurt, that's a permanent loss. Maybe don't get hit next time, idjit. None of these are necessarily good or bad, but like Yahtzee said, they encourage different playstyles. The larger the gap between desire for healing and acquiring a healing tool, the more the game encourages caution and avoiding getting hit. Immediate healing is in general "easier," since you can fix your mistakes. When you can hold onto healing items, this essentially extends your health bar; if you have to use the healing where you find it, that forces the player to make the choice then and there.

I liked the first aid kits in Left 4 dead and how they'd take time to use the bandages, as opposed to "eat first aid kit and feel better"

In a great newgrounds game called "Madness" there is a mechanic similar to your suggested luck tokens. In the game you play as a super-soilder, who has such inhuman twitch reflexes he can dodge or parry bullets on a regular basis, but as he gets shot at so much his natural stamina depletes, he eventually will fuck up one of his inhuman dodges and eat a bullet.

Rainbow Six Vegas had an interesting twist on the "meathead shooter" regenerating health formula in that you have unlimited regeneration but an extremely low health total. This meant that you could take an infinite number of slight grazes, but getting caught in the open was a death sentence. Combined with a fairly long distance between checkpoints (the only game I know of where such a thing is acceptable), the mechanics encouraged the game's core fantasy of a tactical shooter, where cover and flanking were everything and you really DID want to avoid getting shot.

That "luck bar" idea is what I found refreshing in the Smash Brothers games. You don''t have health, but an increased risk to fall of the edge of the screen.

Shoutout to This War Of Mine for having a realistic health system. A little damage is a big hassle, a lot of damage can be fatal even after a few days if you don't help them recover properly. Same as sickness from the cold, and depression depending on the character's responses to your actions. One of the few games where getting into a conflict actually gives me a feeling of dread

On the subject of a luck bar, Brother In Arms:Hell's highway did something akin to this. You only ever got hit by a bullet when you were dying, but your "health" was a measure of how close the bad guys were getting to hitting you, and I loved that system.

Some games go fairy realistic with healing. One of the best parts of project zomboid to me is how a small mistake can lead you to hurting yourself for a month in-game (which is by default 30 hours irl). A broken leg means youre confined to your base and any areas that you're absolutely sure are clear of zombies.

After a decade watching RedLetterMedia, I never expected to hear Jack earnestly try to sell me kitchen junk. Looking forward to the day Rich Evans hawks me dollar store shaving kits.

I like the mechanical role of healing in Hollow Knight, where finding an adequate window to do so during a boss fight required good understanding of their patterns (to the point where if you really understand you probably don't need to heal in the first place). Plus if you're on the back foot you need to get some hits in to generate the mana, encouraging you to turn aggressive much like DOOM 2016 did.

7:19 Hell Let Loose does this to a degree. If you die, the screen goes black. There's no kill cam, so you can barely register where the kill came from, and you become another soldier on the battlefield. It still has bandages for healing and such though.

Love the Max Payne 3 line when you nab a bottle of pain killers. "They had their armor, I had.mine."

This is something that one little line of text in LoZ: Wind Waker really handeled well. When you catch a fairy in a bottle, the item description says "When your life energy runs out and you collapse from *EXHAUSTION*, this fairy will replenish your strength." The recontextualization of Health as Energy/Stamina really solves the disconnect between healing and injury.

I kinda liked Fear and Hunger’s take on body damage where if a character loses a limb, it’s gone for good, at least until you perform some sort of ritual at a specific location to get them back.

I've always been fascinated by 'Health as a Resource' concept, as that philosophy can lead to many approaches in both game design and how a player tackles a game itself, both of which can vary wildly depending on what kind of game a developer wants to make. In Bloodborne health is quite literally a commodity that can be hoarded for later us in the case of Vial -> Blood Bullet or Healing, while in a lot of Persona and SMT games Physical Skills often cost HP. Both these and similar approaches to using HP creates a tight-rope experience of players having to find the right approach for them to survive or thrive, which I think adds a lot more to a game than simply Health = How Much More You Can Fuck Up.

This is probably the nicest Yahtzee has ever been to Sonic 😅 This is such a thoughtful exercise on a topic we've had in gaming forever. Awesome job, and thank you for taking the time to discuss it!

7:00 Call of Juarez: Gunslinger actually did something a bit like that. Primarily it works on generic FPS health regen, but the player also has a Sense of Death timer which lets them dodge a single fatal bullet, and then needs to recharge before you can use it again. There are upgrades which interact with it that make it a valuable tool for reversing an unfavourable situation, too. And both it and bullet time are central to the game's theme of revenge, demonstrating in gameplay how Silas' quest is turning him into a cold-blooded killer as the player improves their skill and acquires new upgrades.

Ethan's magical juice, healing his jacket as well as his hands was always entertaining. I get the story tried to explain how Ethan healed. But I like to imagine a Louisiana family sitting on the miracle "cure all" in their run down home.

*Everyone ever:* "Healing can never be even somewhat realistic because nobody wants to play a game where after every fight you need to not only get first aid to not bleed to death, but also spend entire days on bed to get back into shape, and if you die that's it forever." *Kenshi:* _Taking notes furiously_ "Sorry, did you say 'permanent limb loss' or 'falling unconscious from the pain'? Nevermind I'll do both"

Gotta say, Matt was on fire with the editing today. Good job Matt!

Someone might need to Snopes me, but I've read multiple times that Yahtzee's description of a "luck" system for HP is actually how D&D hit points work, canonically. Losing HP isn't getting wounded. It's getting hit, but not lethally. The more experience/armor you have, the longer (and more near death situations) it should take before the dagger inevitably hits you in the neck.

7:10 There was a flash game that did something like this called "Madness Combat: Project Nexus". It was a 2D sidescroller shooter beat em up hybrid where characters had conventional health and a "Tactical Awareness" meter. If your character crosses paths with a bullet, they take "Tactical Awareness" damage (shortened in game to "Tac Bar") and you watch them perform a slick little sidestep that dodges the bullet but may interrupt your current action or attack. Your character wouldn't take any health damage until the Tac Bar was empty and you got shot again, at which point you could take a massive salvo of health damage from a single bullet. There was no way to recover health during a mission, but the Tac Bar regenerated whenever you weren't being targetted in combat, and outside of combat. It was also very interesting because the Tac-Bar actually took damage differently from the health meter; getting shot from behind inflicted double the Tac-Bar damage. Likewise, unarmed and melee attacks (fisticuffs) could drain your Tac-Bar very quickly, but wouldn't do nearly as much health damage unless they were dished out by a character with very high melee and unarmed stats. This encouraged weapon combos and creative tactics to first wipe out a character's Tac-Bar very quickly, and then finish them off with a weapon that could do lots of health damage. One more notable concept implemented in this game around the Tac-Bar was the Zombies mode. You had to first enter the "Create your own character" arena mode, then level them up all the way to level 30 before you could even unlock zombie mode. The thing is, zombies in this game didn't just generically attack you with hand swipes and stuff we see in other zombie games. Instead, what they do is they gang up on you, grab you, and eat you. Getting grabbed by a zombie traps you and forces you to complete a QTE to break free, all the while you see your character's Tac-Bar deplete very rapidly. If it reaches 0 in this state, the zombie starts eating you and you die right away. Also, zombies could re-grab you very quickly after breaking free unless you immediately performed a dodge move, which meant that getting surrounded is basically a death sentence. This meant the zombies weren't just more melee meatheads to shoot, they were actually an imposing threat that was not always so easy to deal with.

Resident Evil’s herbs will always be my favorite healing system because it leads to difficult decisions that reinforce the feelings of vulnerability and survival.

7:10 Syphon Filter had a similar mechanic where you had a "danger" bar that filled up as you were shot at. When it was full you lost armour. Lose armour and you can take one or two hits. The game never really had many health kits so armour and danger were the main two bars you needed to look for. In the second game they introduced a flashing danger bar for headshots that would one hit you if you were too still.

The game I played with the most realistic approach to health was a Rainbow 6 game from decades ago. Basically, you control one man in a squad of dudes and if you get shot, more often than not, you're dead and you then control someone else in the squad. The idea was to always shoot before the enemy does so that you don't die, which turns out to be a good strategy.

I've always liked Zelda's health system where not only do you get to increase your health by defeating major enemies but you also get pieces for exploring the world, it makes it seem like Link is growing as your adventure goes on. Plus the games where you get to fire a sword beam at full health incentivise you to stay at full strength.

The "luck" system he thought of is actually implemented in Madness: Project Nexus in the form of a TAC bar that would regen overtime and give you bullet dodges. Kinda like a fancy regenerating shield.

What's funny is his example of soldiers replacing each other was actually used in a WWI shooter, Battlefield 1. To be fair, it was only in the introductory mission, but it was still a neat idea.

One of my favorite instances of health as a unique mechanic is in Hylics, where defeating enemies drops meat, and you can only convert the meat to health in a hub world you go to after you die. It makes death an essential part of the progression, in a satisfying way.

Depending on the genre, you could also replace "health" with "armour/shield integrity". Your armour can absorb up to a certain amount of damage, but if it absorbs more than that, you die. Instead of "healing", you have to replace/repair your armour, or (in the case of an energy shield) recharge your shield so it can take more hits

Honestly after playing boltgun this week and getting save locked in several sections where there wasnt any healthkits I think there is something to be said for regenerating health in shooters.

07:03 Syphon filter had a system similar to that, you had a DANGER bar and when it was full, you start getting damage,first to your armor and then to your health and if you get health damage, it cant be healed during the rest of the level.

If your game is sci-fi/futuristic, maybe one option would be to have the health bar be an energy shield like that one from Dune. When you get hit the shield depletes and healing restores it. Any direct hit and you're dead.

I've had this idea bouncing round in my head for awhile. You know WALL-E? You know that scene right at the beginning of the movie where he notices his treads are worn down, then notices a perfectly good set of treads on a dead robot next to him, and the next shot his treads are replaced. What if you had an entire game and health system like that. You are a robot and your enemies are robots, your different limbs and components take damage and you can perform maintenance on them but after a certain point you are going to have to scavenge parts from fallen enemies. Could have a unique aspect then if at points you specifically aim to take down enemies in particular ways in order to ensure certain components remain intact for scavenging. Could also tie into progression as you don't level up so much as you find better quality parts.

The Luck system you describe featured in Hard West and works quite well. The expendable soldiers idea is something I'm wondering about since CoD2. Why have a singke character who we never see, named Generic McGenericsson, instead of having a rotating squad?

Yahtzee’s idea about luck instead of health was actually already done in the Uncharted games. Every bit of damage Nate took was supposed to show his luck running out, and only the final bullet actually kills him.

Can I throw in a game with a somewhat realistic damage and healing system? Rimworld. It is a colony management game where if your colonist gets shot or stabbed, that injury does a few things: - Increases your pain (a percentage value that immobilizes a character once it hits 100%) -Potentially causes you to bleed (a rate of taking damage that if it reaches 100%, you bleed out and die) -Reduces your limb's functionality (so mangling a left arm will lower your ability to pick up and interact with things) To get rid of damage, you use medkits to stop the wound from bleeding and increase the speed of recovery, which a body will naturally do over days, and go faster if you set the colonist to bed rest. During the time, the injury can get infected if the place they are in is not clean enough. Granted the injuries move fast to heal in this game, a complete body mangling only takes like 2 weeks tops, but the game's calendar year takes 60 days, so 2 weeks is kind of close to 3 months of recovery.

Replacing your character with a new one after death is one I've always adored. Infinity Blade was my first introduction to the idea, playing as your character's son going down a bloodline of vengeance.

I always liked the way Bungie did it. In Doom, "health" was a very gamey thing designed for gameplay purposes but simply calling it "shields" in Marathon and implying that once your personal shields are gone you die from a single hit genuinely makes it seemingly logical despite functioning the same way. Just calling the number something else means it goes from "completely unrealistic" to "completely reasonable" and its fun to see how our minds work like this.

The sponsor segment being done in Yahtzee's fast paced style is perfect. Would have loved to hear him do it though... Honestly considering the types of sponsors you can get I would love to see a full Zero Punctuation ad read complete with slightly off color jokes.

The console release of Battlefield 2 had an interesting take. It was kind of what Yahtzee suggested for a war game, you had regenerating Health but if you died you didn't restarting a checkpoint you just swap to a different guy and you only lost the mission when all of your guys were dead.

There’s actually a game system that exists where it explains your health system as being luck that’s running out, and eventually bullets starting hitting you and then you’re dead. Although I feel like a right pillock because I can’t remember the name of it.

I do think there's something to be said for CSGO, no healing, one life, format. To be fair the round is only two minutes long, but you don't *have* to have healing.

The fact that the original Assassin's Creed found an in-universe way to present precisely your 'luck' health mechanic is one of the things that really earned it my respect back when it first released. It construed you messing things up in the animus reconstruction of your genetic memory as a deviation from what the master assassin Altair actually did in his own life, which was not getting hit by an errant sword strike or plummeting to his death even once (obviously, or no decendents). As such, there was a tacit implication that you weren't living up to your forebear somehow, while still giving you the leeway to continue on regardless. Then they went and dropped that in AC2 to replace it with completely uninspired 'health potions', which was probably the only regression between those two titles. I was glad to see it make a return in AC3 after that, and since then they almost seem to alternate between each approach (probably in part because they're alternating between regional studios too).

For all it's flaws, the health system in Duke Nukem Forver was such a neat twist on normal regenerative health. Duke can't get injured, but his ego is bruised a bit, and you build up health by just building up his ego.

My favorite health system is in Escape From Tarkov where all the limbs (include thorax and stomach) all have health pools. Having your head or thorax zeroed means you die. Other zeroed limbs mean debuffs and losing health in all other limbs

Brothers in Arms did the regen health along the “luck” idea. Instead of turning red, your screen got increasingly dirty from the ground being shot up around you, until one bullet finally hits home and turns everything red. Then you’ve got Ghost of Tsushima’s protagonist character meta-aware he’s in a Kurosawa setting and just strengthening his resolve to shrug off sword blows.

7:19 This is actually how Helldivers 2 uses their lives system. Every time a grunt dies, you immediately take control of another fresh-faced recruit dropping in from orbit to do their part and also probably die trying. Then again that game also has healing items but there's only so much a shot of morphine can do when your soldier has been smashed into compote.

I had to watch an ad before this started, followed by a 90 second ad in the video, followed by 2 ads as soon as that ad finished. Brilliant.

I was surprised you didn’t bring up Ultrakill. A heath system whereby you regenerate your health by the amount of blood you coat yourself in. It means when you’re low, the pace doesn’t grind to a halt as you scroll through menus of items, hide behind cover, or explore the last ten minutes of level you walked through. Instead, you find the closest ugly bastard and introduce the concept of gibs to them. Taking large amounts of damage restricts how much you can heal back so you can’t just tank everything by continuously standing next to someone and shooting them. Using the games grapple reduces your max health for a few seconds so there’s some risk vs reward of bringing you closer to a health source I.e. an enemy, but you can’t regen as much because it was easier to get to them. Not to mention it opens up weapon ideas such as the screw driver which deals less damage than its alternatives, but makes an enemy a walking heal station as it slowly chips away at them cause if more blood to spur. To me, this feels like one of the best healing systems for a fast paced game. Not to mention there is a small element of explanation to it, as our robot protagonist V1, runs on “vampire pistons” which are fuelled by blood.

I wish I knew where to find a video like this about tabletop game healing that was as thoughtful

I've been thinking about the luck system for some years now, since I've always found the fact that you could get shot with a high caliber machine gun and just get back to tip top shape by bandaging your arm or cracking a dislocated joint, or just hiding behind a box for a few seconds very immersion breaking. When I was younger, and especially in the "hide behind a box to recover health" type of games I used to "role-play" these events so that my character would have a bullet just barely miss them. Being in the somewhat difficult intersection of enjoying fast-paced fps games and also realistic mechanics, this kind of a luck system would instantly make any game my favourite of the year! Thanks Yahtzee for voicing this out loud!

Fun fact, that idea with the luck is the canon explanation for the health system of the Uncharted games! The games' protagonist, Nathan Drake, is canonically very lucky when it comes to not getting hit by bullets. The "health" lowering is actually his luck running out, and once it does he gets fatally wounded.

That WW1 example is exactly what the introduction to Battlefield 1 did and while I’m not a huge fan of that game, that mission has still stuck with me to this day.

Point your hands out, wave your gun around, the jingle plays, the green number appears and everyone's less dead. Easy. Happy?

Alien Soldier has the best health mechanic. You recover health by parrying the enemies proyectiles, and when you reach your maximum health, you can do a super attack that shreds trough enemies and bosses.

That WW1 example was part of what made the Battlefield 1 intro mission so good. You hold as long as you can, but inevitably your position will get overrun and you die, and then you play as the guy at the defensive line behind him. I've also said and heard for years that this idea was criminally underused, because that's the one mission where it happens.

I like it when games treat health not just as a failure tracker but as a resource as is often the case in roguelite games where health can be exchanged for currency or something else of use. It's always satisfying when a gamble of short-term pain for long-term power pays off.

Cannon Fodder did the 'characters die after one hit and are replaced with someone different-but-not-really' back in the 90s.

I remember Resonance of Fate, which whilst it did have RPG style health and healing, your party members had this "Hero Point" system that as long as you had one left, you didn't follow the normal rules of damage, but as soon as you ran out, suddenly the music becomes more frantic, the insanely anime acrobatics and confidence your characters had whilst vaulting, somersaulting and diving whilst shooting their enemies vanishes, and all three start quivering, shaking and otherwise being acutely aware their plot armour is depleted and they are extremely close to death. (I think they even moved and attacked slower. Running out of hero points was bad) The game had a back and forth dynamic with the points, you wanted to keep enough to stay safe whilst strategically spending them to do big combo attacks.

the luck system described is actually technically what uncharted is, your health is just your insane luck causing the bullets to miss, until you push it too hard and boom.

The funny thing about the "luck bar" idea is that the Uncharted series actually uses it. I remember one of the developers, I think it was Druckmann, saying that Nate never takes any damage. His luck gets reduced with every shot that narrowly misses him until his luck runs out, and he gets killed by a bullet that actually hits him.

The luck thing was somewhat done in "westerado", where you have hats, and every time you got shot your hat flew off and you replaced it The military soldier replacement was, I think, done in Red Orchestra 2

That "Luck" is what Brothers in Arms does. You never get shot immediately, but if you're out in the open too long, you get hit and take an injury or just die outright.

I personally like how the healing in the Farcry games work in which you do something wild like unbreak all of your fingers or dig out a bullet with a knife or some shit.

The third Brothers in Arms game essentially had the 'luck' system described here. Functionally almost identical to health regen - just assume that, when you're out of cover, your health/luck is constantly draining. It's mainly a cosmetic change - instead of taking countless hits and impossibly healing from them, you're taking risk and if you take too much you get shot once and it's game over. It was pretty much perfect for a non-sim military shooter.

I’m pretty sure there was an old WW2 game that had its “health regeneration” being “danger”. When you’re spotted and being fired at in the open you’ll start being suppressed by fire, and if you don’t get to cover for too long eventually you get hit and it’s a one hit kill. But then it makes sense for the “health” to regenerate because the danger has now passed.

Convergence does something pretty interesting. Since you can rewind a set amount of times to cover your mistakes it basically acts like secondary life system. You can choose to avoid taking a single hit during combat, but if you run out a lot of the platforming becomes instant reset. This becomes a bit trivial when you get a lot of the upgrades but it at least forces you to keep track of how many rewinds and think about you're using and why you're using them.

Shields in sci-fi was originally created to avoid damaging physical models of ships before CGI, now it’s a kind of auto-regenerating health bar in video games on top of non-regenerating health bars.

The Star Wars tabletop RPG based on 3rd edition D&D actually did that "luck" suggestion with its splitting of your health pool into wounds and vitality, with the latter representing the conventional D20 system hit dice, and the former being a value equal to your constitution, and damage taken to it is much harder to regenerate. Vitality represents how much energy you have for all the fancy acrobatics that let you not be hit at all, and only once you run out of it do you start failing to block blaster shots with your fancy light sword and getting third degree burns from each one that connects.

I've been playing a bit of Cold War Zombies with some friends recently and tried out the Onslaught Survival mode, meaning no automatic healing, you gotta find food that enemies drop or find them in boxed. However, that one simple change made things infinitely more tense. Larger groups of enemies were seen as a much bigger threat now. Elite enemies that normally take half your health in one shot were to be avoided at all costs if you were stuck with a shorthair of health left. Everything is a mad dash to cram another can of corn in your gob and oh no! That only healed you for a quarter of your health and that Hellhound wants an exploding hug! It's great!

there's a tabletop RPG for star wars that used "luck health" that showed how far you were from getting a blaster to the face.

"Health as an abstraction of luck" is basically how D&D treats hit points in fifth edition. Tabletop game, not strictly a video game thing, but the basic rules explicitly state the HP is an abstract quantity that describes your ability to keep fighting, not actual bodily health, and that running out of HP means you can no longer fight, not necessarily that you actually die.

I once described the system in Uncharted to my little brother as "luck." As Drake gets shot at, the screen turns more and more grey, but if I remember correctly, it's not super clear that Drake has actually been shot. And so when he balked at the idea, I just said, that's you getting shot and being lucky not to get hit, and if you stay out of cover for too long, your luck will run out. For Uncharted's "health" system, it works really well.

The turn based SRPG Hard West uses a combined luck and health system. You have a luck percentage and depending on how close the hit was, your luck diminishes an according amount. Once it runs out, you can receive regular damage. Effectively it ends up being more akin to "ablative armour", but it suits the western theme quite well.

This reminds me of a 2.5D puzzle platformer game from a few years ago called Life Goes On. Every hazard is instantly fatal and you have to restart the level, but your corpse sticks around permanently as a physics object. For instance, it can block spikes so you can walk over them. Almost none of the levels are beatable without dying at least once, and how many times you die is your score.I liked it quite a bit but the last few levels got frustrating and I never finished it.

7:20 This was done before in Battlefield 2: Modern Combat (Thanks Raycevick!). You could basically take control of any allied unit on the battlefield that you had line of sight to, and if you died that just meant you had one fewer unit to rely on for subsequent fights, so skilled players lost fewer units and failure was defined by having all your troops be depleted.

I've seen that kind of luck based health in TTRPG's. Specifically off the top of my head, Dusk City Outlaws (heist game in fantasy Venice), your luck is your health, you start with a certain amount and either lose it from bad stuff happening, or you can spend it as a resource on failed rolls to instead succeed

On subject of weird healing mechanics, Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason. You get shot, torn apart by monsters, take fall damage and all you need to do after, is to hug a heat source for 5 seconds.

I remember a free to play called Spacelords (formerly known as Raiders of the Broken Planet) had a somewhat unique healing system, pretty much theres a super powerful fuel source called Aleph, and everyone now has it infused into their bloodstreams for superhuman abilities, including health regeneration, however there is a stress system where running around, shooting guns, using some characters' abilities and taking damage would raise your bodies stress, and if it exceeds a certain threshold, then you wouldn't be able to heal and your veins would glow through the environment and reveal your position. so you had to stop occasionally and let the stress lower to stop glowing and start regenerating. And once you hit 0hp you would go into a wounded state where you move very slowly and enemies Elites or players can finish you with a melee or a little more gunfire and you need to survive even longer without taking damage to recover. Also the characters are grouped into factions with different amounts of health and stress management capabilities. the alien locals have the lowest hp, but can easily do a lot of moving without raising stress. The cartel known as the Umbra Wardogs are unique because they so chock full of aleph compared to the others that they have the quickest regen delay and fastest running speed but are always stressed out so everyone knows where you are. The Hades Division Mercenary group have the highest health pool and the second best stress management and the Fifth Council cyborgs have heavy armor that makes them slow and stresses them out extremely quickly having to carry it around. but it does halve all damage from firearms. (but not melee which just as common as shooting)

Never been the biggest fps guy, but I remember really enjoying playing Goldeneye with the enemy accuracy cranked down & damage cranked up-- such that they missed a lot, but it was a one-hit kill when they did. Firefights felt more intense.

7:20 Battlefield 2: Modern Combat did something very similar to this. You could control any of your allies on the battlefield at any moment with a soldier-swap mechanic, but you had a finite amount of soldiers. When you get killed, you take control of the closest friendly unit you hed when you died. Once you run out of soldiers, you lose. The game wasn't exactly a masterpiece, and many people don't even know it existed, but with a more serious tone and some tweaking, that mechanic could be extremely fun and thought-provoking

Project moon’s library of ruina has a secondary health bar called a stagger gauge. It runs out, not only is the u it stunned next round, but turn all its resistances into fatal (2x), leaving that unit a sitting duck ripe for slaughter. You can redirect attacks to other units to try and spare that one a beating and get it back to normal next round, but it’s hard. This makes stagger healing and damaging abilities very important in the late game, as enemies get so powerful a stagger is a death sentence, while those enemies take 0 hp damage and need to be staggered first to get anywhere

XCOM 2 does casualties pretty well, imo. In War of the Chosen they even added a fatigue mechanic - unwounded soldiers can become "tired" or "shaken" and will need a few days off to recover. It's pretty clearly there to ensure more skilled players (who don't get their soldiers wounded as often) are still forced to rotate their squads. Once on a mission, it's back to literal HP bars; in terms of soldier *statuses*, though, there are only "available", "wounded", "tired", and "dead".

6:39 “meathead shooters”. Love it. 😂

Having healing powers like the T-1000 would be rad! Axelay is one of my favorite examples of this. In that game, if you get hit by a projectile, any current weapon (you can equip three at a time) that's currently active gets disabled. You'll die if either all three weapons are disabled or if you crash into a wall or enemy.

The discussion of "magically quantifiable luck" just gave me a thought: luck/health as an in-game resource you can expend to make things go your way. Got an armored brute coming your way? Spend some luck, fire wildly in his direction, and you'll somehow get five headshots at once, downing him instantly... but now you've got less health.

Weird west does the luck mechanic. It works, as a western, since that whole genre is built around "it only takes one bullet" yet so many characters can survive multiple firefights due to plot arm- i mean incredibly good fortune.

I've always been a fan of how in the Arkham games the amount if health you regain depends on how much XP you gained in a fight. And since you gain XP by fighting well and being varied, the game is basically telling you that the best way to make up for your previous mistakes is to just not repeat them