Why has UI in AAA games gotten so bad?

• UI is about interacting with the game and getting information you need with minimal effort
• A throbber is a UI element that moves just to show that something is happening, like on a loading screen
• Interaction costs
  • Adding steps to get to something fatigues the player; it should only take 1-2 clicks to play the game in its main mode
  • Interaction costs is a measure of how many interactions the player needs to do to achieve their goal
• UI should act how the player expects

JM8. (January 17th, 2023). Why Has the UI in AAA Games Gotten So Bad? | Design Delve. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEoKnvncTpM

Video Game HUDs

• HUDs can be broken into 2 parts: gauges and previews
• Gauges:
  • Shows the player important information that would otherwise be imperceptible and brings it to the surface, such as health or ammo
• Previews:
  • Indicator that pops up to tell the player information that they need in the moment
  • Examples include button prompts, grenade trajectories, a lock on and parry indicators
  • Allow players to act with confidence
• Sometimes better to hide information
  • Cognitive load
    • The amount of information that the player can take in and keep track of
    • Do not overload the player with information
  • Only show information when it is relevant
    • Such as a health bar only appearing during combat
• Use UI to track difficult elements that the player may not be able to track, like ammo
• Use visual hierarchy to highlight some elements over others
  • This can be with different colours, fonts or making specific components bigger than others
  • The three reads
    • Rank information in order of importance and place in higher reads for more important info, less important info should go in lower reads
    • Make elements in the higher reads more visually distinctive than those in lower reads
• Using a diegetic HUD can add interesting mechanics by making the player have to choose to see the information
  • Eg a map that the player character can hold, at the cost of a weapon
• Enemy or character callouts are UI elements, they are diegetic audio UI
  • Can be changed to be clearer, like military callouts, to make the game easier; or distorted and even in another language, or whistles like in TLoU 2, to make the encounter harder and more threatening
• Preview components that show far into the future make the game more analytical, whereas showing less of the information encourages the player to learn
• UI can influence game design as it has limits of how much information it can show

Brown, M. (April 29th, 2021). The Power of Video Game HUDs. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bv45aPMGyI.