11 thoughts on “Thought for the day.

  1. Melmoth Post author

    It seems to me that this would allow the healer to watch the field of play and actually enjoy what’s going on while healing.

    It keeps healing challenging because the healer has to watch the field of battle, but also allows them to watch the fight and use their peripheral vision to monitor group mates in their field of view, which combined with the fact that players might run out of line of sight, thus encourages good group communication and coordination.

    I don’t imagine you could do this in WoW raids as they stand, but LotRO raids might be feasible, and a new game could develop their combat system with the idea in mind, using systems such as non-targeted cone and PBAoE healing, as in AoC, to make healing an experience where the player is engaged in the game world as much as other classes, rather than standing still and playing health bar whack-a-mole before shifting to a different standing spot when the pool of fire/green goo/ice/dark matter appears near them.

    And if nothing else it will lead to a whole new area of MMO slang:

    “I’m down to my bum in health!”
    “I’ve got a foot’s worth of health left!”
    “Oh stop complaining, I don’t need to heal you, you haven’t lost more than your head so far.”

  2. xbevisx

    I dont think it would have to be a cartoony game to do this.

    You could have it so only healers can see these shifts in colour, like a filter you can switch on and off.

    With fantasy games you could explain it away saying that a certain ability/training/magic enables the healer to visualise their friends “health auras/life signals”.

    The modern/sci-fi equivalent could be some kinda of headgearHUD/augment that does something similar.

  3. Jason

    Of course you can do it for anything… but a cartoon practically begs for this as “the ink is draining right out of them”.

  4. Klepsacovic

    This wouldn’t work in WoW, but then again, WoW would have a much different style of damage and healing if health was displayed in a format other than plain green bars.

  5. Hirvox

    Dead Space actually does this by strapping the health bar into the main character’s back. Also, the Tron lines in Zone of the Enders mechas change color according to damage sustained.

    I doubt it’ll work in an MMO like WoW where the special effect inflation guarantees that you won’t even see your own character amidst all of that eye candy, let alone other players’ characters.

  6. Tesh

    And if you’re color blind?

    Maybe have some sort of twinklie about the height of the depletion? Say, a +1 sparkly belt of “I’m dying over here!”?

  7. Melmoth Post author

    I’d imagine that you could have the ’empty’ colour be configurable, as I’m sure colour blind people manage to deal with health bars doing the same sort of thing. Either that or have characters turn translucent as the colour drains out of them.

    I fear that with twinkling we’d be accused of attempting to Twilightify MMOs. Or is that sparkling? No, no, that was ponies wasn’t it?

    Lordy, imagine the Twighlight-vampire-sparkling-pony, if you dare.

  8. Tesh

    Yeah, it need not be twinklies. Just something to help someone who might be colorblind. Color as indicator alone can be troublesome.

Comments are closed.