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Do maps and minimaps count for the purposes of this thread? I have a couple standout examples.
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Oct 15, 2022 18:37
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc9e6Y5jzPI Every aspect of this game looks like a nightmare but the UI is an unending parade of failure. Discendo Vox posted:Do maps and minimaps count for the purposes of this thread? I have a couple standout examples. Someone already called out the SMT 1 map.
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Oct 15, 2022 18:44
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Discendo Vox posted:Do maps and minimaps count for the purposes of this thread? I have a couple standout examples. 
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Oct 15, 2022 20:38
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GloomMouse posted:Also you can only split stacks of resources in half to put in the machines, so if you just want to put in 60 pure ferrite or w/e it's a huge pain in the rear end. you can press down & up on dpad (idk the kb equivalent) to pick up/put down items 10 at a time still a pretty poo poo ux, admittedly
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Oct 15, 2022 21:15
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Hitman as a series has struggled with map and interface elements for a long time before reaching near maturity in the recent "world of assassination" trilogy. For those not familiar, this is a stealth-focused assassination franchise that emphasizes "social" stealth, disguises, etc. There are a lot of things I can discuss from the series, but let's start with maps, which are a key part of the interface for this sort of game. Early games in the series had no minimap, instead using a map, accessible at one button press, that provides minimal level geometry information, sometimes including place names. Depending on difficulty, this map would also info on either the location and facing direction of all NPCs, or only the targets.  This was a pain point because players had only the map to rely on for spaces they could not directly see into. A player navigating a level for the first time would rely on either a lot of waiting or pulling the map open to tell who was where- blind corners and getting surprised by NPCs was basically how players learned the game. Maps would often have many separate floors, requiring the player to swap between them to see who was where, and it did a poor job of keeping scale. All the same, the map was essential for learning and navigating spaces for the first time, and it often provided valuable clues about routes that weren't apparent. This hit its nadir in Hitman Absolution, which tried to rectify the situation by using an "instinct" button that would let the player see things through walls to compensate (among other features). The instinct function was used to justify doing away with level maps entirely. Instead, players got a corner minimap:  This minimap shows all non-crowd NPCs and targets and icons in the level, compressing them at the edge of the compass when outside its (necessarily very short) range. It does not show level geometry of any kind. NPCs on different Z-levels are still shown, but are greyed out when they hit arbitrary Z distances. The large arrows routinely overlap and make parsing what is happening even more of a mess. The compass also gets colored filters depending on enemy alert status, a system with its own failures. The net effect is the minimap is almost totally useless. This post from the lead UI designer summarizes some of their development activities (and you can see other interface problems there). To be clear, I don't fully blame the problems with Absolution's map, or its other interface elements- Absolution was such a remarkable clusterfuck that blame needs to go every which way, especially to the directors. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Oct 15, 2022 |
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Oct 15, 2022 21:32
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good news everyone i checked last night and snes smt2 immediately has a 1000% better comp map than snes smt1 you can just hit L to immediately bring up the map (of course, you can still go through the menu the old fashioned way) And theres actual config! and its set to Fixed by default!! 💃   
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Oct 15, 2022 22:07
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Any game that uses a controller thumbstick as a menu cursor can go straight into the trash (think Destiny, No Man's Sky). Especially when they make you to hold a button to confirm. Just take the time to create a menu flow like every other game!! gently caress!!!!
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Oct 16, 2022 00:10
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Operation: Tango is a cute lil co-op game with friends but there is a puzzle early on where you have to input numbers another player gives you under a timer. The way you put the numbers in is by manipulating a free swinging dial and it does not snap cleanly between marked intervals and demands precision at what your pointing at. What pushes it over the top is eventually you have to manipulate multiple dials on one interface and dials you need to move can be fully covered up and thus ungrabable by other dials now locked to the correct position. Now, for the piece de resistance, imagine doing this on a controller instead of a PC with mouse
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Oct 16, 2022 02:19
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TES_IV_Oblivion_UI.jpg TES_V_Skyrim_UI.jpg Both of these games have atrocious UI design. Skyrim in particular does that especially awful thing with your resources where like mana is on the bottom left of the screen and drains from right to left, stamina is on the bottom right of the screen and drains from left to right, and the worst offender of all, health, is on the bottom middle of the screen and drains from outside to inside, so at a glance it’s almost impossible to see what percentage you have remaining. Just because those elements are kinda-sorta “symmetrical” doesn’t mean The design looks good or is useful whatsoever. Also, as much as I’d love to, I don’t have time to write a dissertation on how dogshit the inventory interfaces are in these games. Suffice it to say they’re even worse.
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Oct 16, 2022 02:58
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Just hopped on Phasmaphobia for the first time in a while and they made the UI more "sleek" during the buy phase, but I feel really fractured it and it doesn't feel intuitive at all. Good game tho
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Oct 16, 2022 03:16
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Barudak posted:Operation: Tango is a cute lil co-op game with friends but there is a puzzle early on where you have to input numbers another player gives you under a timer. The way you put the numbers in is by manipulating a free swinging dial and it does not snap cleanly between marked intervals and demands precision at what your pointing at. What pushes it over the top is eventually you have to manipulate multiple dials on one interface and dials you need to move can be fully covered up and thus ungrabable by other dials now locked to the correct position. I just played through that, fwiw they fixed it up...a little, though it still doesn't snap cleanly, they adjusted the detection to be more forgiving and correct dials no longer block unsolved ones.
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Oct 16, 2022 03:43
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GreatGreen posted:TES_IV_Oblivion_UI.jpg In all honesty I've played skyrim with like skyUI through 90% of my playthroughs and I forgot how bad the original UI is but oblivions is way worse mostly because you gotta balance a bit more stuff.
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Oct 16, 2022 04:51
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I don't think I even remember Skyrims original UI... Does anyone remember Too Human on Xbox? That cyber-viking game with the dog poo poo laggy inventory UI? I don't know how that game passed Xbox certification.. publisher must have bribed Ms to pass it. There was some other game(s) I forget the names of that had a pulldown listing all the keyboard keys to rebind... Instead of doing key input detection you had to scroll through a huge list to set a single key bind. But at least you COULD rebind, so I guess that's cool.
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Oct 16, 2022 09:52
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Oblivion's UI is at least a decent attempt at wrangling all the disparate Elder Scrolls stuff in a somewhat sensible way that can still be read on a TV across the room. Skyrim's by comparison is like they wildly overcompensated trying to respond to complaints about Oblivion's UI and minimalized everything to hell. Though to be honest, I never minded either game's interface all that much. (I used one mod to increase the number of items on screen for Oblivion, Skyrim was completely vanilla). And frankly I find SkyUI and its Oblivion counterpart to have their own problems. On a separate note, surprised Mass Effect hasn't come up. Rare case of a game where the console interface gave people nightmares but on PC was never really an issue.
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Oct 16, 2022 12:27
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QekxZL7e_w
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Oct 16, 2022 12:57
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loving starbound had a lovely UI. Popup windows that would often be in a location where you could move or resize them while also not being able to see what was in half of the window. On the plus side the game is boring dogshit so it does prevent you from experiencing it further at least.
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Oct 16, 2022 15:12
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Civ 6 isn't exactly the worst thing I've ever seen, but... C'mon, how do you gently caress up Civ?
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Oct 16, 2022 23:40
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haldolium posted:almost all multiplatform games before scalable and easily interchangable UI tech (I think Scaleform was the first step yet also sucked for its own reasons) came to life and no one put in effort to design for non-main-platform (so PC most of the time) Rainbow Six was another example of this. On Playstation, it was not even close to the original version. You could not set up a pre-mission plan with any degree of precision, only vaguely indicate one of a small number of pre-set spots where you wanted your forces to go. It was also rather difficult to actually coordinate with teams when the mission was active. So instead of being about constructing a detailed plan that might require improvisation on-the-fly, the best you could manage was calling your forces in to hold an area you cleared yourself. It more or less turned it into Spec Ops with some slight ability to rely on back-up and breach buildings.
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Oct 16, 2022 23:53
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gently caress SNEEP posted:Any game that uses a controller thumbstick as a menu cursor can go straight into the trash (think Destiny, No Man's Sky). Especially when they make you to hold a button to confirm. I think holding a button can be a useful function if it's in the context of being some kind of permanent, non-reversible decision, like trashing an item or interacting with a very important object that marks a point of no return (like if there's two right next to each other). But devs do like to use this for the most pointless poo poo, like looting resources in a game or picking menu options.
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Oct 17, 2022 00:52
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What about games that don't bother explaining how to do anything, thus forcing you to go outside the game and open the fandom wiki instead? Warframe and Terraria are guilty of this.
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Oct 17, 2022 01:10
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Depending on what part of the UI, Terraria is both terrible and interesting. The Guide has forever been useful and loving pointless. I like that you can show them an item and it will tell you what you can make out of it. But gently caress you if you don't know what the hell that other item you need is, cause he's not going to tell you if it's a crafted item or a drop, and if it's a drop who and what drops it. worm girl posted:
The fact that NEO Scav runs at all is wizardry, mmmm Adobe Flash Player in 2022. The demo is still technically up: https://bluebottlegames.com/src/nsDemoFullscreen.html
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Oct 17, 2022 03:40
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Drinkslinger posted:What about games that don't bother explaining how to do anything, thus forcing you to go outside the game and open the fandom wiki instead? I actually got a second monitor for home (cheap 1080p that I can flip to portrait mode) mostly so I could keep something like a Minecraft Modpack wiki open for when I inevitably need to go look up the inbetween steps that everybody apparently knows to do in any given Modpack that I never knew about, or the stuff that's supposed to be base-level knowledge for a particular mod but never gets explained. I got introduced by a buddy to the whole concept of "We can build an computer that stores all of our items which are generated from an automated mining system situated on sky islands" and step 0 of the whole thing is "build an infinite water source, infinite stone generator, and mob killing farm" before you can even touch the neat stuff. I don't think I've found a single good modpack for the purpose of advancing through objectives in order to build more complex machines, and that's after specifically seeking out and playing the ones who advertise "Follow our 
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Oct 17, 2022 03:42
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Drinkslinger posted:What about games that don't bother explaining how to do anything, thus forcing you to go outside the game and open the fandom wiki instead? Terraria starts you next to a guy that will tell you what to do at all stages of the game in plain language (minus a very few bits like throwing a voodoo doll in lava), and even those are at least hinted at Minecraft, however, doesn't do jack all. I doubt a new unguided player could even get a crafting table together, let alone a tool of any sort, let alone anything resembling progression
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Oct 17, 2022 03:47
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I just tried Minecraft not in creative for the first time and its a brutal start. I had absolutely no idea what if anything I should be doing and until you make the crafting table and figure out how to actually use it and that it can show you things you don't have the pieces to make yet you're not actually doing anything.
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Oct 17, 2022 04:00
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Gotta find diamond
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Oct 17, 2022 04:01
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Animal-Mother posted:Civ 6 isn't exactly the worst thing I've ever seen, but... C'mon, how do you gently caress up Civ? What did you find wrong with Civ 6’s UI? Not disagreeing, just curious about your thoughts on it.
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Oct 17, 2022 05:43
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Barudak posted:I just tried Minecraft not in creative for the first time and its a brutal start. I had absolutely no idea what if anything I should be doing and until you make the crafting table and figure out how to actually use it and that it can show you things you don't have the pieces to make yet you're not actually doing anything. back in my day the crafting table didn't even show you the recipes, you just had to memorize them or get them from the wiki
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Oct 17, 2022 08:06
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:back in my day the crafting table didn't even show you the recipes, you just had to memorize them or get them from the wiki back in my day, the items didn't even have names and we had to jump back and forth up hills so green it'd blind ya you kids and yer new fangled easy modes 
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Oct 17, 2022 15:27
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Assuming it does in fact come out I'm sure Skull and Bones will qualify
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Oct 17, 2022 15:52
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RPATDO_LAMD posted:back in my day the crafting table didn't even show you the recipes, you just had to memorize them or get them from the wiki I will admit that I forgot Minecraft added the recipe book and a notification system that says things like "open the inventory with [key]". I will note that the 'crafting grid' of the default inventory still isn't labeled as such [or rather, at all] and until *very* recently, there was simply no hope for someone to figure out how to progress in the game (go to the Nether). Now there are at least ruined portals around to give you an idea, but the difficulties involved in working with Obsidian makes trial-and-error to repair a portal or build one from scratch renders the blind-playthough-er hopeless. And how does one open a legit portal? And if you repaired a world-spawn ruined portal, why isn't it working now? [Probably because you didn't replace the crying-obsidian blocks they generate with] It's kinda amazing to me that all this is just sort of institutional knowledge at this point and it's very easy to forget that people don't come to the game knowing these things.
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Oct 17, 2022 16:13
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For more recent games, the newly-out Marauders has a grid-type inventory that we have been seeing since at least Diablo 1, but you can't drag-replace items (drag item A to item B and they swap places). Come the HECK on
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Oct 17, 2022 16:15
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Thompsons posted:Assuming it does in fact come out I'm sure Skull and Bones will qualify I miss the days when there was framing around the actual visual part of the game that was set aside for UI stuff. It's not the worst of this design's problems but ugh stop pouring sacks of words on top of the viewport
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Oct 17, 2022 21:00
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My Brother's friend bought a game for us called "Gangsters 2" and nobody could figure out how to play it, no matter how many times we played the tutorial nothing stuck. It was almost as if the game resisted our every attempt to make it do anything, and it never gave us any explanation as to what we were doing wrong. The interface itself was essentially the main cause of this, it gave us all of these buttons and actions but none of them seemed to work.
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Oct 17, 2022 21:28
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It's not quite a whole interface issue, but any game that has you loot enemies/crates whatever and there's a popup likequote:□ Herb  every time.
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Oct 18, 2022 03:53
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Shrecknet posted:It's not quite a whole interface issue, but any game that has you loot enemies/crates whatever and there's a popup like This was actually one of my favorite parts of Fallout 4 because you could mark certain materials as Always Want (Adhesive, looking at you) so even though I'm always hitting Take All on everything, in the 0.5 seconds it takes me to glance at a list of things in a cabinet before my brain slams the Take All button, I can see that Wonderglue happened to be one of those things. Did I ever use the metric fuckton of Adhesive? Who knows! But I did get the opportunity to see that I was, in fact, picking up Adhesive while slamming that button. 
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Oct 18, 2022 03:58
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Drinkslinger posted:What about games that don't bother explaining how to do anything, thus forcing you to go outside the game and open the fandom wiki instead? Warframe's interface is nuts, there are some fun immersion-through-menu-design aspects and it's the only game I know that lets me use MOUSE4 to go back in menus... ...but a lot of screens are total clusterfucks, there are inconsistent designs throughout as a result of a decade of added-then-forgotten systems and as you pointed out nothing is sufficiently explained. Credit to the devs, they have been doing passes on some stuff to standardize menus and fix QoL.
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Oct 18, 2022 04:17
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Also, Cruelty Squad deserves an honorable mention because its interface is utterly wretched, but it's entirely by design and also an integral part of the experience. Although there were a couple of parts where the interface was actually so obscure and awkward that it was hard to figure certain things out, but that's... also possibly intentional. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHm2d3wf8EU
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Oct 18, 2022 04:22
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My least favorite UI design choice is when they show your selected choice by either a highlight or changing the text color, such that in a dialog with only 2 choices you have no idea which one you have selected It happens frustratingly often in games
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Oct 18, 2022 04:34
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I played Warframe during the beta but not for very long, and then went back and played it years later when the entire progression structure had been completely reworked. It threw me into my spaceship and I just had random planets unlocked all over the place but not in the same order that other people did, huge amounts of game content were locked off to me with no indication that they existed anywhere or that I should do specific missions to unlock them, I didn't even know that a majority of the game existed at all until people told me about it. I'm sure it's more comprehensible if you go through it start-to-finish as a new player today but I doubt it's, well, comprehensible. That game is utterly mind-boggling, it's very, very hard to organically find things in.
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Oct 18, 2022 04:39
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warframe is very much not comprehensible, there's a very good reason goons encourage every new player to join the goon clan and ask questions in chat
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Oct 18, 2022 04:41
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