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And then, there is Control
I wish ALL games did this.
No wait I like this. Kinda. Less UI in games please!
My thoughts too. I often try to remove some/most of the UI if the game allows it just for realism and so that I have less distractions
It’s fine so long as they don’t just move it into some pause menu I’m then forced in and out of constantly to get information.
I love it. I mod out my UIs to be as minimal as possible. Especially games like Skyrim. No map, press button to pull up compass. No numbers or letters on screen. A small health, mana, or stam bar comes up only when not full.
Nearly every game I’ve worked on since the mid 2000s has started with someone saying “this time it’ll be hudless” We do a bunch of work on some kind of HUD replacement, and then testers and focus groups come back with “I couldn’t figure out where to go,” “I couldn’t see the enemies,” “it’s very confusing.”
You need to do the art very differently to make a modern game readable without UI. To a lot of art directors and focus groups, UI is less immersion breaking than the art changes that readability without it requires. Not saying it’s impossible. Just requires a mind shift that AAA appears unwilling to take.
The only game I can even think of that’s hudless is Astroneer and it took me like 30 hours to notice. Can’t imagine how hard that is to do well
The only game I’ve played that really managed to pull of HUD-less was Dead Space. They really thought through the game design and interactions, it’s just a masterfully crafted game. I believe Dead Space 2 is almost entirely in a single continuous camera shot as well, kinda bonkers.
Yeah … can UI be overdone? Sure. But in most cases, I still want a HUD-type UI, at least a little bit.
The best games out there give the player granular options to enable or disable specific UI elements, so you can have as much or as little UI as you want, and if some particular element is annoying you, you can disable it.
No ambitions for a hudless, waypoint-less gameplay system survive playtesting. There’s friction and then there’s watching someone do the same loop around for 30 minutes. I once watched a streamer play a game I worked on. The level artists had meticulously and organically sign posted where to go - like pulled out all the stops with lighting and directionality of the environment. Stopping just short of putting any yellow paint anywhere. The streamer still fucked it up.
Why would you watch DSP?!?
(Sorry, couldn’t resist)
Dyson Sphere Program?
darksydephil
He… is not very good at games. Or being entertaining.
On the flipside a game with a well made HUD nowadays immediately grabs my attention. As soon s I saw the blue butterfly select indicator in the Lies of P demo I knew these people were cooking.
On a side note this also convinced me to play Eternal Strands another game I love dearly.
Really it should be Epic Steampunk Adventure Remastered Edition*
*
*We unlisted the original game from every platform and every shill YouTuber will do the marketing for us of convincing people this is definitely the superior product.
Generally I find it’s the opposite?
The start of the franchise is a minimalist work of art. The 5th entry is a bloated completionist campaign with a million ways to burn time and zero ways to enjoy doing so
Mirror’s Edge (2008) looks like the one on the right, and is an absolute work of art IMO. The sequel sucks tho
Mirror’s Edge is not steampunk. It was futuristic with strong primary colors, and the aesthetic was consistent throughout the entire game including the HUD and menus. That’s why it looks like the image on the right.
doesn’t have to be steampunk, the meme was playing on the fact that games used to have really over-the-top HUDs back in the 2000s
get wooshed
Wooshed? It’s pretty obvious that the image on the right is not only minimalist, it’s also “modern” with the sans-serif font. You assume you could do a minimalist steampunk HUD.
Man I feel like mirrors edge was a cult classic, my firat game on ps3 and one of my favorites. It was such a different game and the art and music were amazing.
Also, we dulled the color palette.
Be happy it’s not Holywood style TEAL AND ORANGE EVERYWHEREEEEE!!!
Lmao, we remember 2008 games waaaay differently XD
Fallout 3 GTA IV
The piss colored pile of afterbirth that is the Gears of War series….
The one on the left is BioShock. For the parts where you play as the Big Daddy you even see the insides of your diving helmet.
BioShock was 2007 /reeeee
Also it doesn’t fit because they thoroughly shit that franchise to death more than a decade ago
The whole meme is contrived to begin with, so I doesn’t merit deep analysis, but it just rubs me the wrong way when someone tries to twist the past to fit their narrative, I was there dog, you can’t fool me
Piss coloured? It was gray / brown. And those are good games!
Hey man, if you get your jimmies off from a bunch of roid rage NFL wannabes running around a blurry construction site full of waist high walls whilst shooting at the same half dozen bug creatures be my guest
But I draw the line at insulting my piss, I worked hard for that glorious cinereal hue
But joking aside, I just fundamentally disagree that this fascination with sucking all the color out of games is a recent thing.
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.
I like what they do with Monster Hunter Wilds UI but ohh boy, it’s one hell of an uncharismatic UI.
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.
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
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.
“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”
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. 🙄
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.
did we get a new bioshock or dishonored this year?
