Excuses For Verisimilitude

Far Cry 2 was, as far as I know, the first video game to have healing animations. When you’re below 20%-ish health, you can press a button and your character will stop what they’re doing and pull some piece of shrapnel out of their body or pull some broken bone back into place or otherwise spend 3-5 seconds doing some gruesome first aid, and it pulls you back up to 20% health. You still need a health kit or whatever for proper healing, but you can get yourself off of death’s door (barely) with just a few seconds. Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction had something similar mechanically, where you automatically heal up to 20% health if you’re knocked below it, but any further requires a health kit, but it didn’t have any animations. Your health score just slowly climbed up to 20 whenever it was below that number. And a lot of older FPS games, like the WW2 era Calls of Duty or Medals of Honor, didn’t give you any automatic healing at all. Your health is recovered if and only if you find a health kit.

What’s weird is that Far Cry’s mechanic is called “more realistic.” Even granting that it’s called “more realistic” and nobody’s trying to claim that a real human being could pull their own bones back into alignment as a regular response to injury, this still isn’t true. Effective healing of combat injuries in the field is almost never possible. Stories of people who pull their broken finger bones straight or pull a piece of shrapnel out of their leg, wrap some bandages around it, and then keep going, these stories get retold because they’re rare. A lot of combat wounds render you permanently incapable of effective combat duty, and even when you can be stitched back together as good as new, you aren’t generally in any condition to fight for hours or days afterwards. It’s not just a matter of gritting your teeth and toughing it out – you will tear your wound back open and when your body runs out of blood you will die no matter how many push-ups you can do.

The most realistic healing system of these is the one from the old late 90s to early 00s WW2 shooters, where once you were injured, you remained at exactly that level of injury until you found medical supplies. Sure, it’s unrealistic that your injury doesn’t get any worse no matter how long it takes to get treatment, and it’s unrealistic that you can always be healed back to full health no matter how bad the injury was, and it’s very unrealistic that the recovery is an instantaneous exchange of medical supplies for hit points with the battlefield situation changing not at all rather than the situation shifting radically as you’re laid up for six weeks. But the “realistic” healing animations allowing you to claw your way back to 20% health with no healing supplies at all only make this process less realistic.

Partly, this is because the system of partial recovery used in Mercenaries is good for gameplay, and Far Cry 2’s healing animations add an appearance of realism to that mechanic. Being able to recover to 20% health means you will never be in a situation where a single errant bullet can kill you, which means one plain old grunt of a bad guy with a half-functional assault rifle can never finish you off from fifty yards away because of pure dumb luck and the fact that you have exactly one hit point left. Provided weapon damage is balanced properly, that one guy with an AK that last saw maintenance under the Kim Il-Sung regime can take you from 20% to nothing if he unloads an entire magazine at close enough range that most of the bullets hit you, but that’ll only happen if you stare slack-jawed at him for the 2-3 seconds it takes to unload. You have time to dive for cover or shoot him first or something, and if you don’t, it feels like you still could’ve won if you were better at the game, as opposed to feeling like you really lost back when you got reduced down to 3% health in the previous gunfight, and everything after that was just marking time. Recovery to 20% is a good mechanic.

But Far Cry 2’s healing animations don’t just feel more realistic than Mercenary’s regenerating health. It feels more realistic than the Medal of Honor health kits. And I think that’s because the best way to make a video game feel verisimilitudinous is not to effectively simulate the thing the game is about, but to find excuses to show off things that happen in that situation. When someone is fighting in a third-world war zone (or, it turns out, the zero line of a peer conflict between advanced militaries, but we didn’t have any personal accounts to base video games off of that until recently), pulling shrapnel out of their own leg because there’s no medics nearby and then having to carry on the fight because the enemy will not stop shooting at you just because you’re having a bad time is a real thing that happens.

The actual effects of that are terrible for gameplay: You move at a frustratingly slow speed for the remainder of the fight, you will need days if not weeks to recover from the wound, and you may not be combat capable ever again. Pulling the shrapnel out and bandaging up the wound doesn’t usually recover your wound at all, it just stops it from getting worse. In fact, pulling the shrapnel out will probably cause more damage, and deciding when to take a spike of damage removing the shrapnel so you can apply bandages to stop the bleeding is much closer to the decision that you’d actually make in that situation. The bloodloss will kill you quickly so you still want to remove the shrapnel and bandage the wound ASAP, but the reasons for that have basically nothing to do with recovering health.

But all of that would be terrible gameplay. The healing animations instead take self-administered field first aid, a real thing that is a compelling part of the experience Far Cry (especially Far Cry 2) was selling, and add it into the gameplay in a way that makes it unmissable.

Something similar from the Yakuza games: In Yakuza games, you eat food to recover. You’re on a small, walkable map of a specific neighborhood of Tokyo (or sometimes another location of similar scale in a different part of Japan), and there are a few restaurants scattered around. There is an achievement for eating every restaurant meal available in the game, and the interface for ordering food keeps track of which ones you’ve had. You can’t order food when you’re at full health. So, whenever you’re low on health, you pop open your map and figure out where to eat, and the process for doing so feels exactly like finding a nearby restaurant in real life, despite the fact that the system for getting you here was a bunch of 100% completionist achievements and recovering from stab wounds by eating shrimp tempura. Yakuza wanted to add restaurants into the game in a way that felt like eating at restaurants in a real neighborhood of real Tokyo, and they made it work not with a constantly depleting hunger bar and satiation penalties that discourage or prevent you from eating the same thing too many times in a row, but with a bunch of mechanics that are totally unhinged from reality but which are nevertheless fun to play and still deliver the experience of saying “nah, I don’t want to eat at Akaushimaru, I’ve been there like six times already. I don’t think I’ve ever been to Fuji Soba, though, I’ll go try them out.”

When you’re trying to deliver an immersive experience, I think it’s best to take this approach: Focus on the experience you want the player to be immersed in, and don’t worry if the mechanics you use to set that experience up involve pulling your fingerbones straight because you got shot three times in the chest or deciding you need a big dinner tonight because you just got clobbered with a baseball bat.