Open Letter to the Gaming Industry: Real Swordfighting

 "You stab me and I'll stab you. Then you can stab me again. It'll be way more fun than actually swordfighting!"

Ladies and gentlemen,

Hit points are an outdated nonsense, a holdover Dungeons and Dragons-style games from the 70's, when hits were determined by rolling dice and consulting charts, and marking off numbers on a piece of paper was the only way to keep track of how much of the blood your character started her day with she still had sloshing around inside her arrow-riddled, sword-sliced body. It's a vague solution to measure injuries that makes up for earlier wargames having two modes for a character who just got hit by something: "dead" and "not dead." Hit points have nothing to do with combat, and they ruin any sense of immersion and realism. I refuse to believe that in an age when you can perfectly animate every hair in the flowing locks on the mane of the griffin I'm flying through a photo-realistic fantasy forest the size of Rhode Island, you can't do better than having a sword magically pass through someone's gut while a shower of blood covers up the two objects clipping through each other, while somewhere a health bar goes down a little bit. You can practically smell the Cheetos as a geek in someone's basement smudges the hit points on his character sheet and writes down a smaller number.

By 'health bars,' I don't just mean graphical representations of health, though that's part of the problem. I mean the assumption that the best way to hurt something is to hit it over and over again the same way, because after a certain number of the same hits, that something will magically fall over. A fight to the death is so much less exciting when the hero can take a sword through the face and keep on swinging. That kind of thing throws realism and immersion right out the window. It takes the dynamic, dramatic, wild excitement of a crazed melee and reduces it to politely trading stabs at the other person's torso, whittling down each other's lives like a synthetic Bloody Knuckles.

"Synthetic Bloody Knuckles" being the title for an awesome cyberpunk band.

There was a time games attempted to re-create a real-life experience in a virtual setting. Sports games still do that: they struggle to be as true-to-life as possible, even including things like weather, exhaustion, and injuries. Battle games, on the other hand, have moved into a world where fights have become more and more removed from reality. Instead of the smell of fresh turf plowed up by the hooves of heavy cavalry, the sound of jangling armor and shouts of fury and pain, the feel of  a leather-wrapped hilt sweaty under the warrior's palm, a game is filled with colorful flashes, swirls, and floating pictures. One weapon does ten times as many damage-points as another just because the game says so. A wound that would kill a newbie doesn't even affect a "high-level" player. None of this is meant to feel like actually going to war. The game doesn't represent anything any more. The game just represents the game.

"We shall see battle axes and swords, a-battering colored haumes and a-hacking through shields at entering melee; and many vassals smiting together, whence there run free the horses of the dead and wrecked. And when each man of prowess shall be come into the fray he thinks no more of (merely) breaking heads and arms, for a dead man is worth more than one taken alive." Or not.

I understand why some games, like modern shooters, have unrealistic amounts of health for the main character. You don't want to end up writhing in your own entrails when you get hit by the first dozen Nazis you come across. But that's a fundamentally different kind of experience from a real fight: you're simulating what it's like to be an unstoppable, virtually bulletproof juggernaut, a superhuman with Wolverine-like recuperative powers if he or she stays out of the crossfire for seven seconds. But that's not what I'm looking for from a swordfighting game.

Many a long year ago, Bushido Blade on the PS1 gave us a fighting game which attempted to provide a more realistic swordfighting experience. A hit from a weapon could cripple a leg or an arm, and a single good body or head blow would mean death. You had to plan and time each exchange of attacks, and a miscalculation would mean your character's doom. It felt kind of like a real swordfight! Unfortunately, since this was 1997 and therefore the era in which characters looked like papercraft dolls, the simulation left something to be desired. Attacks were slow and ponderous, and you only had a very limited number of ways to swing each weapon.

We've come a long way.

I know I, for one, would give up having every one of my character's nose hairs individually reacting to her breathing just to be able to get something as simple as having her sword clang off my opponent's sword or armor. Every attack would matter as clashing swords would mean the difference between life and death, and my shield might be all that stands in the way of the evil dark lord's massive mace and my squishy internal organs. Imagine how much more interesting it would be if taking a dagger to the stomach caused my character to stumble around, slowly bleeding out, fighting on with the last of his strength, instead of shrugging it off and continuing as normal with a bit missing from his life score.

"I'll just go sit in the hall until my health regenerates."

After a fight, we could incorporate a system of wound treatment that might open up a whole new side of the gaming experience. If this causes a higher mortality among players, I'm okay with that. Maybe less-skilled players will be fairly easy to conquer for a talented player who knows the fighting system better, just like a skilled warrior can overcome a less experienced opponent--while still giving the underdog a fighting chance to score that lucky hit. Maybe it will force players to learn blocks, dodges, and counters to avoid those mortal blows, turning a fight into a series of strikes and blocks and ripostes just like a real fight. Who knows? The player might actually get better at the game by learning new skills, instead of the game arbitrarily giving him or her 'skill points' to represent the character growing stronger while the player just keeps doing the same old moves over and over.

But that's a letter for another day.

Your pal,

blue

PS You might say it's not in the "spirit of a game" for a character to spend weeks convalescing, or to have a shriveled arm or a missing eye from a grievous wound in battle. You might say that gets in the way of killing monsters and taking their loot. Maybe I'm just speaking for myself, but I'm not as interested in getting weapons with numbers attached to them or in 'leveling up.' I just want a good fight. And who knows? A character with a crippling injury might be cool....

PPS If you argue that the game is in a fantasy setting anyway, so life doesn't work the same way, I have two answers. First, can you name a fantasy novel in which a character gets run through a dozen times, shrugs it off, and keeps fighting without being the worse for it, without the novel explaining that this character is remarkable in some way? Second, in cut scenes in that same kind of game, getting stabbed or shot is suddenly treated realistically. No character gets his throat slit in a cut scene only to say, "It's fine! I still have half my life left!" Nobody walks up to you and says, "You look like you have lots of numbers in your points!" Even the game world doesn't acknowledge its own silly mechanics.


EDIT: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/260688528/clang I would totally trust Neal Stephenson with making a badass swordfighting game. He's totally going to do a great... wait a second. What's that I see in the video? Hit point bars? BAH! Still, it's worth checking out.