gamedesign.dev: Healing

I touched on this issue last post, but I don't think I covered it enough. As I mentioned, the classical adventuring group has among it a benevolent and pious healer, usually a cleric or a person chosen by the setting's chief religion. I might be wrong in thinking this, but as gamers usually don't have much interest either in religion or healing, this role doesn't see a lot of focus as the starring role of a game. And yet, healing is almost completely required in games nowadays, to the point where FPS games let your character regenerate instantly when behind cover or RPGs assume that you have a healer regularly keeping your team safe.

Let's get right to business: healing is really, really, really powerful. In real life, the reason wars and violent crime and so forth are so effective is because recovering from these things is ridiculously tough (if not impossible). In games, however, healing is as effortless and instant as picking up a powerup or selecting the Cure spell. This is all well and good from one perspective, i.e. it's not fun to play as a character who's crippled to the point of uselessness, but it also tends to either eliminate the challenge of anything when you can instantly recover from their attacks, turn battles into drawn-out slogs while you alternate between chipping away at their ten-thousand hit points while repeatedly recovering your meager five hundred, or both.

The first issue, that healing is usually both easy and powerful, is probably the most prevalent one. Most encounters in games are designed so that you only have to expend a perfunctory amount of resources to survive it, but these encounters are spaced out across the course of a level, so you may have to expend these same resources ten or more times through the level. Which is all well and good, except that the level also resupplies you, through looting fallen enemies, finding items throughout, and purchasing items if the option becomes available. And as anyone who's studied basic algebra knows, adding something to both sides of the equation means nothing has changed. Oh sure, you might have more, say, shotgun ammo and less sniper rifle ammo, but on the whole you're no worse off than when you began. Healing is especially important, because it is possible that you might handle encounters without taking any hits at all, and if you should happen to have a way to regenerate health automatically, then encounters become a net gain, letting you save consumable healing for whatever end-of-area boss might be waiting.

Secondly, the problem of healing being required simply to outlast a difficult foe. When I play games, I tend to regard defense as an afterthought, usually charging headfirst into a fight and hoping to seize victory within the first few turns or whatever. In some games (Devil Survivor, Battle for Wesnoth) this tactic can have amazing results. It can just as easily lead to an early loss, but if I get a chance to retry, then I'll do so, using what I learned to cover my weaknesses for the next assault. Most games, however, have bosses that simply can't be blitzkrieged in this way because they have too much health. The idea developers have for these battles is that it's a give and take, where you chip away at their health and then recover what they do to you. The problem with this is that most boss fights usually don't have interesting enough tactics to last for a ten-minute fight. The worst of these is when they do vary their tactics depending on health (usually quite sharply) but it takes a hefty amount of time to whittle them down to the point where you do have to change tactics, and you usually only get the barest of indications. The Shin Megami Tensei titles are especially guilty of this one, which is a shame since they can usually make their fights very challenging. What's even worse is if these bosses have healing moves of their own, because as you should know by that point in the game, usually a single healing move can undo the efforts of the enemy over a good few turns/minutes.

There's two games which I think have come close to dealing with the problem of healing with any degree of effectiveness. The first of these is Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup. The most basic method of healing is through resting, which is balanced out by your character's need for food. Granted, food is usually quite plentiful for most characters, but being both hungry and wounded is still a very vulnerable position (especially for casters, who also use hunger for their spells). The next method of healing is through consumable items. These are fairly infrequent, and the strongest of them, the wand of healing, is especially rare (and dependent on your skill in Evocations). There are methods of healing aside from this, but they require specific spell schools (usually Necromancy) which have downright terrifying miscast effects and usually an additional cost aside from the spell itself, and the various gods, which are usually a risk/reward all on their own. The god of healing, Elyvilon, is the biggest cost, because in addition to trying to be as peaceful to others as you can and the healing invocations costing a lot of hunger, Elyvilon rewards you for destroying weapons, the deadlier the better.

The other game is Cave Story. You have an initially small life bar, but you can upgrade it through hidden capsules, which may be easy or difficult to find. Recovering from attacks completely requires you to find a server, which is usually (but not always) found next to a save point. Enemies do drop health, but it's very infrequent and only heals about 6 or so health with the highest powerup (your health can reach a maximum of 55). Lastly, every time you get hit, your weapons degrade a bit, although you can repair them by collecting energy from enemies, which is far more frequent find than health. This emphasizes avoiding hits more than taking them outright, because if you do take a hit, it's very hard, although not extremely so, to recover from it. Contrast with other games, in which you can take as many hits as you like, provided they don't cross over the threshold of "u dai" before your regeneration can kick in.