Enemy Health Bars And Immersion

Wicked Feedback
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1

I love playing games like this without health bars, especially when the flat red and white rectangular box sits in stark contrast to the painted look of the world it’s in.

However, because some non-boss enemies have pretty chunky health bars, it is nice to know when they’re getting low, especially if you’re facing more than one at a time.

Suggestion 1:

A simple traffic light system is added to the target dot.

Green target = 100 -75% health
Yellow target = 75-25% health
Red target = 25-0% health

Suggestion 2:

Visual and even animation effects are added to enemies to reflect the extent of damage they’ve received at the same thresholds as the traffic light system.

100-75% - Enemy looks and behaves normally.
75-25% - Enemy is bloodied and slightly hunched between attacks.
25-0% - Enemy breathing is visibly heavy between attacks. There are open wounds all over them and perhaps they’re clutching a part of their body.

This is obviously far more work and unnecessary, but worth suggesting because it would be amazing and Moon Studio may like the idea haha.

Honestly, I’d love it if suggestion 1 could be implemented. A way to retain immersion while getting basic but useful feedback about the state of enemies.

2

If im not mistaken Badurs Gate 1 had a similar system, but when you hovered the mouse over the enemy it just described how bad he was hurt hehehe, it was a nice system.

Im all for immersion, but its gonna be tough to balance that and the info we need against many enemies, BG1 was a RTWP game after all, and you had a party.

If i had to choose the first suggestion is better, it requires no more animations for every enemy in the game to give us clues, it would be a lot of work for the devs to implement all of this, but traffic lights imo would be even worse for the immersion than a health bar.