Why Bloodborne's Health System is Way Better Than Dark Souls'
/One of the stated goals in the design of Bloodborne was that, series creator Hidetaka Miyazaki wanted the game to be more aggressive than the games before it. Souls games tend to be very punishing, and this fact in turn tends to lead players towards a very slow and careful playstyle, spending a lot of time huddling behind shields and the likes. While not inherently a bad thing, Miyazaki seemed to think that the series was at it's best when the player is not quite so passive.
This concept of encouraging the player to engage enemies head on is something that manifests itself in a lot of different ways throughout the game's design. Some of the more subtle ones however, are in the changes Bloodborne made to it's health system.
What's impressive is that, despite how small the health changes may seem, they manage to have a pretty big impact on the way the player approaches what appears on the surface to be a fairly formulaic Souls style game. What's more, what I think is really impressive is that, despite the fact that the point of changing the system was to encourage the player to be more reckless, they still managed to actually improve the player's overall user experience.
So, lets take a look at just how From Software achieved this:
The Will to Keep Going
One of the first things people tend to point to on this topic, is a new mechanic added to Bloodborne called Rallying. Essentially, whenever the player takes damage, so long as they survive the attack, they have a few moments to try and regain some of their lost life. Because of this, Rally is often considered to be a replacement for the fact that the player can't really use shields in Bloodborne. Being unable to block, you're going to get hit a lot more, and so Rally offers a new healing method to compensate for more damage coming in. The effects of Rally go a lot deeper than that, though.
It all starts with the fact that, the way a player "Rallies", is by attacking enemies. In other Souls games, if the player gets hit, often the only reaction that really makes sense is to back off and take a moment to regroup. What the Rally system accomplishes though, is in manufacturing a new option in this (very frequent) scenario. Now the player can choose to keep going- to shrug off their injury and stay in their opponent's face. It's reckless, but a lot of the time, it just makes sense.
This is pretty interesting, because it opens up the game's possibility space a lot. Suddenly, every opening is worth considering, even if you have to get hit to take advantage of it. If the opening is good enough, you may even be able to earn back all of the health you just lost. Or maybe that opening wasn't actually that good, and now you got punished for being too greedy.
Rally encourages the player to be more cognizant of the current situation, because the risk/reward of basically everything you do is heightened.
This concept really worms it's way into your psyche the more you play, and I think that over time, it even encourages the player to go for openings they never would have befeore, even when Rally isn't currently on the table. Accepting the risks and just going for it becomes how you play Bloodborne, and the feeling of recognizing you have an opening you could exploit, and choosing to go for it instead of backing off and healing, is very satisfying.
Life is Full of Mistakes
Souls games are hard, and part of the reason they traditionally lead to very passive, defensive playstyles, is because mistakes are very costly. One of the biggest reasons why this is the case, is because of the Estus Flask mechanic they rely on.
Essentially, Estus Flasks are simply healing potions that refill whenever the player dies, and they make up the vast majority of a player's healing in the core Souls games. The issue is that, Estus Flasks, despite refilling infinitely, are a finite resource within a given life. If you have 600 health and 5 Flasks which heal you for 300 each, you are essentially spawning with 2100 health, and that number is only going to go down. As soon as you take any damage at all, that's health you won't have for the boss fight up ahead. Or maybe things don't go so hot and you use 2 flasks before you even reach the boss, and at that point, is it even worth trying the fight?
And it's things like this that cause the player to be overly cautious- because making any mistake at all before starting the fight is directly harming your ability to fight the boss.
But Bloodborne embraces the fact that, life is full of mistakes. The Rally mechanic is testament to this already, but it goes deeper than that. To begin with, the player can hold 20 blood vials at a time- which is more than you should ever need in 95% of situations. More importantly though, is that Blood Vials are a consumable. In other words, the player can only have so many Vials on hand- but you are constantly finding more. Enemies drop these things quite frequently, and in fact, it's often the big beefy enemies that are likely to knock you around a bit, who are the ones most likely to be dropping Vials.
The crucial difference here is that, it's not only possible, but expected, that the player will be gaining life as they go through an area. Getting beat up a bit isn't a big problem, because you will very likely find blood vials to replace the ones you use as you go. As a result, the player never really has to worry about being low on Vials going into a boss fight, which means they don't have to worry so much about taking damage as they are playing through the area, thus empowering them to play more aggressively.
Of course it can go the other way too, and you can just completely run out of vials and be forced to farm them for a bit. In my experience, this is pretty uncommon though. There are only a handful of boss fights where you're likely to be really chewing through vials, and even then, you can pretty easily farm 100+ vials in just a few minutes if you're looking in the right places / willing to buy them. If you're playing smart, there's a good chance you'll never even have to worry about running out in the first place, and end up with a reserve of several hundred.
Actual Health Management
Another knock-on effect of the Blood Vial system is simply that, it's a resource the player has to think about. Instead of just "You have x health and x Estus Flasks. Good luck", there is some amount of strategy to how you manage your health. There are options beyond just "don't get hit".
I mentioned above the idea of finding Blood Vials as drops from enemies, and this is where a lot of it comes from. As the player experiences the game, they will get a feel for what enemies will tend to drop Vials, and it's consistent enough that one can typically rely on it happening. So you can do things like say, "Well this Executioner beat me up a bit, and I'm at 18 Blood Vials. But I know this guy probably dropped 3". So you use a blood vial, pick up 3, and suddenly because you engaged your brain, both your health and your Vial count are back to full.
It's not exactly a complex interaction, but even a little bit of resource management adds some small amount of satisfaction in areas where there was none in Dark Souls.
Another interesting side-effect of this is that, areas can be balanced around this concept. For example, a lot of the game's earlier areas are full of things like Werewolves, Brick Giants, and humanoid enemies. These are all enemies who drop Blood Vials like candy, and as a result, there's a pretty healthy in those areas. Once the player starts to get deeper into the game though, they start to see areas with fewer of these types of enemies.
In the northern section of the Forbidden Woods, for example, almost every enemy is some sort of snake. These snakes aren't very difficult enemies, but they also don't drop Blood Vials, and so if the player gets a little too complacent while smashing snakes, they may start to see their Blood Vial count dwindle. They may be losing health at a much lower rate than in other areas, but the amount of healing items they find is a lot lower too, and so it creates a strange tension even despite the enemies themselves not being challenging. This is just another small detail that can't be achieved with the Estus Flask system.
Takeaways
Some of what Bloodborne does encourages aggression, some just makes for a better user experience, but it's impressive how big a difference some seemingly small changes makes. Realistically, the health system is a mechanic the player is interacting with constantly, and so maybe it's not so surprising that changing it even a little would have such sweeping effects on the moment-to-moment feel of the game.
Anyways, here are my takeaways:
Consider how your game mechanics reward the player, and what kind of play style those rewards might encourage
If a mechanic influences the way a player sees or plays the game, the mechanic can affect aspects of the game that it doesn't even directly touch
A system doesn't have to be unforgiving to be hard. Giving the player some room to recover from their mistakes doesn't inherently lessen the feeling of achievement
In fact, it feels really friggen good to pull a good outcome out of a bad mistake; handling bad situations is an important skill too
There is room for gameplay (and thus satisfaction) in every part of a resource management system. Chopping off a portion of that equation just means the player can't interact with that mechanic
Even small changes to a system that the player interacts with a lot can have a very big effect