I don't know which game it was where I first encountered a stamina meter. Magic meters, tracking how much you could cast spells before you ran out and were unable to, are pretty standard in nearly any game that involves spellcasting in any way.
I'm trying to remember of King's Quest: Mask of Eternity had one, which was a bizarre spin-off to the old-school point-and-click (and earlier, text-based-but-with-images) adventure game, transposing it into a super-dark first-person action-adventure game. Likely, instead, it was probably when I first played The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (which is of course getting a lot of attention now with its remake. Insane that we had so many Skyrim re-releases and that after all this time, they went back to do a re-release of the previous game rather than coming out with VI).
But I also remember as a lowly level 16 or 17 Tauren Shaman in World of Warcraft during Vanilla, long before there was any kind of automated group-finding for dungeons, and having a high-level Rogue (of all classes) run us through Ragefire Chasm. Looking at their yellow Energy Bar, I was baffled - I knew that Rogues were sneaky, so initially I thought it was like a "stealth meter."
Action-oriented video games, especially in those early arcade days, often rewarded button-mashing, hitting your attack button as fast as you possibly could. When I went to summer camp, there was a cabin with a few old arcade games, including Galaga, and I remember one of the counselors (I think the son-in-law of the camp's owners) demonstrated his prowess by firing far faster than I even thought possible in that game, and thus wiping out the incoming alien ships far more effectively.
So, my initial reaction to seeing this bar that could run out and force you to pause before acting again was negative. It was so limiting on what I could do?
Of course, knowing a lot more about the whys of game design, I've got a much greater appreciation for it.
It's probably documented on this blog somewhere (I'd guess around 2015) when I first tried out Dark Souls. While that game might not be the best example (I remember that bosses, at least, still took a lot of hits to take down) the thing that I think might surprise people who haven't played those games is how few hits you actually need to land to take down an enemy. Naturally, this depends a little on your build (if you're dual-wielding smaller weapons, probably more, for example) but these games are built around the idea that you really need to carefully time your attacks if you don't want to be punished for them.
However, because that is the case, it means that, to balance it, your attacks need to do a higher proportion of the enemy's HP. I was playing some Bloodborne earlier today, with a character that uses the Boom Hammer weapon (which is really fun,) and as I was traversing the Nightmare Frontier, I found that just a single charged L2 attack on a Winter Lantern (by far the scariest enemy in the game) I could take them down (full disclosure, this is an over-leveled character - I've beaten that game enough that I don't feel any qualms about using the "cummmfpk" chalice dungeon that hands you tens of thousands of blood echoes just for walking forward a few feet - but even when overleveled, most non-boss enemies go down in like 5 hits at maximum).
I think it's a key to what makes the combat feel so satisfying in those games. Just as the enemies take off a big chunk of your HP when they hit you, when you land your hit, it really feels like you've made progress. Landing a hit is a rarer (not super-rare, but rarer) event, and so each successful strike feels more important.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I just beat Final Fantasy XVI, and something I find a little frustrating about that game's combat is how my sword feels like it hits about as hard as a wooden ruler. My attacks feel like they're only there to fill time between the special "Eikon" abilities.
Souls-like combat doesn't feel like anything you do is filler. In fact, abilities don't actually have cooldowns, only resource costs and time required to get them off (with some spells, for example, you really need to get a moment of uninterrupted casting before you can cast them).
You could argue that a stamina bar effectively creates cooldowns to abilities, which is fine, but it's such a flexible resource that it feels a little more under your control.
Now, here's the thing: I do think that if you're going to build a game with this sort of resource limitation, the counterbalance is that you do need to make hits land harder. In an RPG-style game with stats and such, that's of course something that is partially under the player's control (as in, the better your build, the harder you'll hit,) but I think giving your enemies mountains of hit points (relative to a player's damage output) on top of making it hard to hit them can be kind of brutally crushing.
I remember that when I made many attempts on Promised Consort Radahn, the final boss of Elden Ring's Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, I found myself kind of frustrated that my build, using two greatswords and jumping attacks to do massive damage on each one, was barely chipping away at his health bar. That fight was intended to be the hardest in the entire game, of course, but even FromSoft decided eventually that it was a little too hard, and gave it a nerf (and I very quickly took him down).
But anyway, it reminds me a bit of some of my commentary on the playtests for the Monk in D&D's 2024 rules revision. My argument was that they should nerf or get rid of the Monk's most powerful ability, Stunning Strike, in order to make room to buff the rest of the class. Ultimately, that's actually what happened, and while I have yet to play it (I haven't actually had a chance to play in a new campaign with 2024 rules yet, though I was able to convert my Wizard to the 2024 version) I get the sense that the Monk is way better off now.
The point is, by imposing a limitation (their Stunning Strike can only be used once per turn and ends a little bit earlier) they could then give the Monk a ton of buffs, much as the Stamina Meter, by limiting how frequently you can attack, allows the game's designers to let your attacks have greater impact.
It's a balance to be sure - you don't want someone getting totally winded after a single attack (which is kind of how Secret of Mana, my first ever action-RPG, worked) but you can help make things feel more deliberate and less spammy when there's some limitation.
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