Floating Healthbars Are Broken

Floating healthbars are a very simple concept, but the implementation is very complicated as well. If you’re familiar with the games made for the Xbox Live Arcade, then you’ll probably recall that there was an X beside an actor’s portrait. If you looked at that portrait, you would be able to see that actor’s health bar. This was the only way to tell what kind of damage the actor had taken during battle, and it was incredibly difficult to judge damage done to specific body parts. However, a healthbar for a player can be made to look just like the healthbar of the actor, making it easier to gauge the damage done by any given actor.

Floating healthcare were first made for the original Baldur’s Gate game, but they have been made for every major game since then. Since most games have skill points, it makes little sense to have the health bar that shows how much of your health has been depleted if you’re not going to level up soon. A simpler solution was introduced with the implementation of mana, since it made it much easier to judge the amount of health a player had left. It’s much easier for a player to level up in Baldur’s Gate than it is in other games with many bars, so something had to be done about the healthbars that showed how low a player’s health was.

This solution wasn’t perfect though, and many people suggested that the health bar in the game deserved more than just a single look. When I first considered this, I made a game mod for the game itself, where any healthcare could be replaced with an animated model. I think that this might have been the best idea ever implemented in an RPG game. It was way cooler than the normal health bar and I am very happy that I got to use this mod, because it totally changed the way I perceived my characters in the game.