939 Way Too Much UI

In general, in my opinion, there is “too much” UI in most modern games.

System design is easier to facilitate through UI, so it makes sense. Leveling up, skill trees, and inventories all work better through UI design.

And because of that, we can be a little bit lazier with design… one might be more likely to use skill trees and leveling up in my RPG development because these are the systems that can be commonly interacted with via standard UI design.

It’s a personal goal of mine to try and find ways around this default tendency. UI has a massively important role in the interaction with games, but that doesn’t mean we have to use it in every case where it has been used in the past.

I don’t have specific takeaways from this thought, yet. There are dozens of examples in both directions, of games that reduce UI use (Dead Space, Evil Within 2, many action-horror games…), and plenty that overuse UI to their detriment. My goal is to make sure it’s a fluid conversation during the game design process; that the existence of “menus” systems in a design isn’t such an immediate assumption.

[ Today I Was Playing: nothing… ]

#game-opinion, #interface-game-design