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Usually it’s the reverse, so that would be a welcome change.
What with the color palette? That’s a 2010ish thing.
one of the things I like about vr games is generally less ui and if you really need stats you’ll probbly have some watch type thing or even a tablet you can hold up to look at. you can count the bullets you shoot and load and if you fuck up the number it would probably happen in real life too.
you can count the bullets you shoot and load
But in real life, you’re probably (rather painstakingly) loading magazines yourself, so you’re more familiar with how many rounds are in each one. Most video games skip such mundanities, which makes things a lot less tedious, but it does mean you’re not automatically familiar with the magazine capacity of the gun you’re using, especially when switching to a different gun. So it can be helpful to have a reminder of magazine capacity, at least.
Or, if you’ve picked up a gun from a recently deceased enemy… In real life, if you had time, you’d pull the mag and check to see how many rounds it had left. But few if any games have a mechanic allowing you to do that. (Maybe some more realistic VR ones?) So in lieu of that, it’s helpful to simply have a number on screen telling you that important information.
Many mags do have a little view windows to answer this question. For pistols this generally means removing the mag, for rifles, would involve turning the rifle on it’s side briefly.
This is actually an interesting debuff for pistols in a game, as the same action inherently takes longer for them.
Yeah, it’s really different for every gun, though, and some magazines don’t have witness holes (or transparent sections) at all, so the best you can do is to look in through the top of the mag and try to guess how many rows you can see – at least that will usually tell you whether there’s a lot of ammo or only a little in the mag.
My favourite gun handling mechanics are currently found in into the radius 2. Loose bullets were annoying at first but really grew on me. Also the most fun I’ve had with shotguns and bolt action rifles in a game. The realization I could grab 2 mags, or loose rounds for the shotguns or bolt action in one hand was one of those moments where I just stopped to play with the mechanics. Now I’m just waiting for anyone to come up with a good feeling input for quad loading.
When you accidentally grab your main menu item instead of your sidearm mid fight…
games that don’t support at least an optional torso tracker you unfortunately have to just look at what you grab
I wish ALL games did this.
did we get a new bioshock or dishonored this year?
Hey, make your menus as colorful as you want, but hardcore gamers, as in those who are vocal about their opions, completionists, and gamers who use mods, will pretty much always take the ingame HUD in the newer version.
Also, we dulled the color palette.
Be happy it’s not Holywood style TEAL AND ORANGE EVERYWHEREEEEE!!!
And then, there is Control
I like what they do with Monster Hunter Wilds UI but ohh boy, it’s one hell of an uncharismatic UI.
Edit: add in rise for modern comparison
One downside in Rise is the switch skill, it just slapped right at the middle of the bottom screen.
“Gotta find that item”
30 seconds later
“Hmm, that items gotta be around here somewhere”
30 seconds later
“I can’t be messing around right now, gotta find that item.”
5 seconds later
“Hmm, I wonder if the item is in the location it’s in”
Also, include these dialogues in a game where there are hidden collectibles, so you have to hear that fuckass dialogue repeat while trying to make sure you don’t miss anything, only to accidentally take the correct path instead of the secret path with the collectible because the secret path was more obvious than the main path so you guessed that the most hidden one was for the collectible…
I’M COMPLETELY FINE
Exactly, lol.
I want my games to have very obvious in-game or UI elements showing me which way is the ‘correct’ storyline path to take. Not because I want it to be easy to find the correct path – because I want to make sure I avoid the correct path while I explore elsewhere, and I don’t accidentally trigger the next storyline event before collecting all the loot in this stage.
This is easily my biggest pet peeve in modern games. At some point major game devs decided players couldn’t be trusted in any way and have to be pushed, cajoled, and hand-held through the game. Nevermind that those same devs spent untold hours and days filling in the game environments and world with details that are well worth admiring - it’s clearly better for players to be nagged at incessantly to keep to the path allotted for the prescribed experience. And if they are on that path, they better be reminded what they’re doing a million times anyhow. Uggghh. 🙄
And THANK FUCK for that, if you can have a minimal UI and still make the game ergonomically playable, then I love you and shall worship you till the death of the universe.
I remember people were literally praising Elden ring for it’s minimal UI while clowning on other companies with memes like “If Elden ring was made by Ubisoft”
And the right is way better. Minus the color thing.
If I wanted a menu simulator, I’d play an RTS or MMO.
Bonus points when left still displays everything in the same number of pixels on your 4k screen as it did on a 480 CRT.
4K monitors are a bad idea. Beyond half a million pixels, there are diminishing returns, new video games don’t look that much better and it makes older games look worse. By the time you get to 8 million pixels, only eagles and fighter pilots might sorta notice a difference.
I noticed this trend when I went from 800x600 to 1024x768 to 1080p. I ain’t touching 4K. It’ll just ruin your life.
I respect your opinion, but 1080p upscales better on a 4k monitor than a 2k (1440p) one.
No, you can absolutely notice a difference. Especially if you need to emulate a CRT. Having 15 LCD pixels to mimic the smearing of each CRT pixel from a 256x192 display looks way better than having fewer than 9.
4K and 8K monitors are the new Monster cables.
Monster cables literally didn’t make a difference, you can immediately see the difference on a 4K vs 2K vs 1080.
Especially if you need to read a bunch of small text.
They said the same type of things about Monsters cables.
It was visibly false with Monster cables, do you know anyone with a 1080p+4K monitor setup you can look at? The difference is really obvious with multi-monitor setups. Hell just try reading small text, it has to be way bigger on the 1080 before your eyes are straining to read it.
Also again, emulation, look really closely at a pixel on a CRT. Trying to copy the depth effects with 9 or fewer LCD pixels just isn’t possible.
While I do wish they’d keep the visual styling, I personally feel we should aim for a less cluttered HUD in games. There are so many games where it feels insanely satisfying to rock HUDless and just feel like you’re in direct control of the action.
If you can integrate your HUD into the lore to make it part of the story, you get bonus points.
I really like that about a lot of Helldivers 2. There are screens on workstations that you need to control and the screens show what you need to do. Not a popup in your HUD. Also, there are ammo counters on a lot of weapons visible in first person mode, and a lot of other details to give you hints about your status without having it in the HUD.
The other part of it is that it’s much easier now to dynamically render UI elements when necessary, which removes much of the need for a HUD with dedicated portions of the screen for information.
I’d be interested to see a demake of a modern game on the PS1 or something that packs as many modern QoL improvements as possible into it.
Mirror’s Edge Catalyst does this by using an eye contact based system called BeatLink, which is the Runner’s version of the Conglomerate’s Gridlink. The game lets you disable most or all of the HUD features, and mods allow you to hide the rest. They also have options to adjust the amount of handholding it does. I’m a huge fan!
I don’t get it. 2008 was the time where most games had a puss filter and i don’t think bloated ui has ever been a plus.
Real YMMV situation.
Some UIs added a lot of flavor and atmosphere. Others got in the way of the action or garbled the display in a way that felt distracting.
WoW famously had an interface that could easily consume most of the screen during raids. Elder Scrolls IV: PC port’s interface was notoriously text heavy.
I like the mini debate here about UI. I think less UI is winning, and for good reason in FPS games where visual real estate matters more than status info. I kind of feel we’ve gone too far in 3rd person ARPGs, though-- specially in removing minimaps and to a lesser extent quest log stuff for games with side quests and collectables.
At the end of the day, how important is that visual real estate? MMOs and RTS, yeah, not important. FPS and some other 3D games? Important. But there’s definitely a middle ground I want explored more for ARPGs and any other game with info that goes beyond ammo counts and health.
I’m fine with less info in RPGs as well as ARPGs. In particular I’m kinda happy if there’s no minimap to constantly be glancing at and even moreso if there are no quest markers. Put me in the world and make me learn it! Usually there’s still the big map for when you’re lost.
Kinda depends on if there’s visual cues and how linear things are, too, I suppose. No minimaps and terrible visual cues as to where to go make for an annoying experience, but use of lighting and stuff can do just fine otherwise.
Though I’m a bit of a completionist so missing any little thing bugs me, haha. But that’s a personal taste.
One thing ubisoft does right is the hud options. Can go from crazy everything to minimal/ nothing and all between.
I remember when I was in college for game development. At the time Mirrors Edge was in development. My instructor for UI made us study it as the perfect example of a good UI. The dot wasn’t so much a reticle as an anti nausea measure.
This was also a time where UI layers were occasionally just made in Adobe Flash (I think it was just after Adobe bought out Macromedia) so having a UI with crazy out of theme colours and issues syncing with the rest of the game was a real problem.
Designers felt the UI layers were often clunky, mechanical and in the way damaging the immersive experiences that had been becoming increasingly more “life like”. It also saves a lot of localization cost.
I didn’t end up in that industry but it seems like this became the norm for quite a while. Though I am starting to see better accessibility in game UI’s games depending less on audio or visual only feedback. Which is good as we are all getting older.
This was also a time where UI layers were occasionally just made in Adobe Flash (I think it was just after Adobe bought out Macromedia) so having a UI with crazy out of theme colours and issues syncing with the rest of the game was a real problem.
This was the reason early Skyrim mods rarely had custom UI*. Skyrim’s user interface is done in Flash and making even minor changes is a huge pain in the ass.
I believe Skywind and Skyblivion both ran into problems implementing features from the old games due to this. Skywind actually had to scrap an entire feature set (their original implementation of enchanting, IIRC?) very late in development because the feature’s developer left long ago and didn’t share their Flash project files, meaning the team couldn’t change it to work with later mod builds.
* I think there are modder-created UI libraries to make it easier now, but it was a huge problem back in the day.
Skyrim’s user interface is done in Flash
Still true for starfield, mind you.
Ugh, of course it is. What’s one more outdated component in an engine that’s just a quarter century of hacks duct-taped together? I wouldn’t be surprised if Bethesda are still battling technical debt from its NetImmerse/Gamebryo days.
Fallout 4 does have a bug that I first encountered in Morrowind.
