What is good UI design in RPGs?

[Necroscope]

Good UI is grid-based, bad UI is list-based.

 

[Absinthe]

A rigorous argument, I stand corrected.

The default WoW UI does not explain shit like how much spell damage you have. Spell damage coefficients on your abillities. AP scaling. Threat output. Aggro meters. How many soul shards you're carrying. Durations of debuffs you applied on enemies. Swing timers. It splits inventory across multiple bags without a decent sorting or filter system. Even for shit like hotkeys and action bars people will mod WoW UI. Spotting vendor price and potential disenchant rewards ahead of time also requires a UI mod. If you want to use the Auction House, Auctioneer mod is strongly recommended if only to navigate that shit.

There is a lot of shit that WoW's UI doesn't do that well. It is opaque, unnecessarily cumbersome, and alt-tabbing to figure shit out is a regular experience.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

A rigorous argument, I stand corrected.

The default WoW UI does not explain shit like how much spell damage you have. Spell damage coefficients on your abillities. AP scaling. Threat output. Aggro meters. How many soulstones you're carrying. Durations of debuffs you applied on enemies. Swing timers. It splits inventory across multiple bags without a decent sorting or filter system. Even for shit like hotkeys and action bars people will mod WoW UI. Spotting vendor price and potential disenchant rewards ahead of time also requires a UI mod. If you want to use the Auction House, Auctioneer mod is strongly recommended if only to navigate that shit.

There is a lot of shit that WoW's UI doesn't do that well. It is opaque, cumbersome, and does not always respond efficiently to players' needs.

many of these are done by WoW's default UI, at least last I played(~wotlk)

 

[Absinthe]

Eh, I'm only familiar with vanilla UI, which was a mess. They started incorporating improvements later on. I assumed we were talking about Classic shit.

 

[Gregz]

A rigorous argument, I stand corrected.

The default WoW UI does not explain shit like how much spell damage you have. Spell damage coefficients on your abillities. AP scaling. Threat output. Aggro meters. How many soulstones you're carrying. Durations of debuffs you applied on enemies. Swing timers. It splits inventory across multiple bags without a decent sorting or filter system. Even for shit like hotkeys and action bars people will mod WoW UI. Spotting vendor price and potential disenchant rewards ahead of time also requires a UI mod.

Yeah, but they want to be sure not to overwhelm new players, which is smart. Imagine a rando who wants to fly sitting in the cockpit of an SR-71, it would never get off the ground.

The elegance of addons is that each user can decide what's important to them, and adapt the UI to match the status info/controls they want to work with to expand their capabilities and efficiency. An arena rogue PvP regular wants a very different setup from, say, a node farmer who needs maps and a clock for picking herbs. They are both playing the same 'game', but there are dozens of mini-games inside of WoW, all of which are best executed with custom controls.

 

[Atchodas]

Eh, I'm only familiar with vanilla UI, which was a mess. They started incorporating improvement later on. I assumed we were talking about Classic shit.

WoW always had Addons so you could customise your UI in the way you like

 

[Absinthe]

Yeah, but they want to be sure not to overwhelm new players, which is smart. Imagine a rando who wants to fly sitting in the cockpit of an SR-71, it would never get off the ground.

Threat meters, spell damage count, AP scaling, and spell damage coefficients are pretty much must-have knowledge for newbies though. A lot of shit I listed hurts newbies much more than people who are good at the game.

 

[Gregz]

Yeah, but they want to be sure not to overwhelm new players, which is smart. Imagine a rando who wants to fly sitting in the cockpit of an SR-71, it would never get off the ground.

Threat meters, spell damage count, AP scaling, and spell damage coefficients are pretty much must-have knowledge for newbies though. A lot of shit I listed hurts newbies much more than people who are good at the game.

I disagree, the leveling process is very gentle, and eventually you learn how to improve your performance. Then you can just ask in /1 or /g what mod is best for monitoring/controlling that metric. The social element of the game + Google + modding community + Blizzard's great team (during that era) makes for a perfect storm.

Another genius element of a great UI, which WoW does, is to give the player a mandatory tutorial mode in the form of the actual game. Blizzard did that almost perfectly. Experts move through the newbie content extremely fast, whereas new players aren't punished and enjoy learning the game. The difficulty ramps up gradually, as players are introduced to 5-mans to understand their role, then from there to raiding. Ofc, a lot of that they borrowed from Everquest, but if it works, it works.

 

[Sigourn]

Good interface design is like good film editing. If it is good, you don't notice it. If it is bad, you do. And it isn't a pleasant thing. That's because good UI design is about functionality. UI is just an intermediary between you and the good stuff (the actual game).

 

[Absinthe]

I disagree, the leveling process is very gentle, and eventually you learn how to improve your performance.

If you're solo leveling it's not rare for you to not understand mechanics like threat management at all, let alone obscure shit like the finer points of crushing blows, glancing blows, and weapon and defense skill. Understanding how much you get out of spell damage is always a moment to do a lovely math equation: Don't worry, it's just 2x(seconds)x(spell damage)/7, assuming no modifiers. Perfectly doable, but most people aren't fond of the mental arithmetic and will start switching over to punch numbers into calculators if they've tallied up their spell damage correctly.

WoW has a lot of players who are still complete and utter noobs at 60. Because the leveling process is indeed gentle, and learning is not a requirement to progress. Then endgame hits and people start shitting on noobs for being walking disasters and it's a process of weeding out the incompetents who don't understand shit and won't learn.

Then you can just ask in /1 or /g what mod is best for monitoring/controlling that metric. The social element of the game + Google + modding community + Blizzard's great team (during that era) makes for a perfect storm.

Blizzard's team wasn't great during that era. Broken promises and shitty balance typified most of the vanilla experience. CM hate was also huge. Leaning on google, chat, and the modding community to clue you in on shit because the game won't is not the hallmark of a good UI.

Another genius element of a great UI, which WoW does, is to give the player a mandatory tutorial mode in the form of the actual game. Blizzard did that almost perfectly. Experts move through the newbie content extremely fast, whereas new players aren't punished and enjoy learning the game. The difficulty ramps up gradually, as players are introduced to 5-mans to understand their role, then from there to raiding. Ofc, a lot of that they borrowed from Everquest, but if it works, it works.

That's not genius. Keeping your starting zones simple is basic as fuck. Raiding wasn't so much designed as a natural progression from partying as much as it was designed as a form of hardcore endgame, and raiding will frequently challenge players on all sorts of points they hadn't learned during partying, and a lot of people would rather take a good 5-man dungeon over another massive raid. The starting raids are pretty much jokes though, so there is somewhat of a soft transition, but the amount of guilds back then who would hit a wall because they couldn't grasp the later raids was not a joke.

 

[Gregz]

Absinthe

Yeah, I agree with 95% of that or so.

 

[Cat Dude]

Mass Effect 2

 

[Bad Sector]

Wasn't Morrowind's UI static or something? I mean unless you install Code Patch iirc, you can't resize or drag the UI.

No, the vanilla UI has windows that you can resize and overlap. This last part...

I think Morrowind like UI looks good if you have big monitor, which I guess it kinda works now since its modern tech for old game kinda of thing or something. But if I played it in small monitor, I probably would hate it, since I like seeing everything without scrolling too much.

...can also solve the small resolution (assuming you want to have all windows visible when in GUI mode - you can simply have the most used ones, like inventory and map and use hotkeys for the rest). You can arrange the windows so that they overlap each other just enough so that with a glance you can see what you are looking for (useful especially for your stats window that you almost never interact with) and then click on to interact with.

Also I am pro listing more than icons kinda of guy since its easier to go thru fast if you have tons of items.

Generally i agree, but it also depends on the game. If you can pick up a lot of stuff (especially arbitrary stuff) like in Morrowind, i think a list mode (even if not default) helps, as long as there are also sorting and filtering modes too. Alternatively, a search option like in the UI mod that i mentioned before - and if weight matters, a way to quickly see what is heavy and their price (if i can sell stuff) so i can get rid of cheap heavy stuff.

If the game doesn't expect you to collect many things (that expectation should be backed by mechanics - e.g. if you can pick up garbage and sell it -> the game does expect you to pick many things, even if the developers wouldn't like it) then i do not mind much about the inventory's layout and presentation. As long as it isn't inhumanly unusable, of course.

 

[Merry Christmas!]

Bad would be Skyrim (sans the Perk Chart, which is actually pretty cool.) It's bad because, while you can easily see each item in 3D, it's just a boring black and white list. No item descriptions, no real lore, minimum stats, boring list. It's functional but it's not inspiring.

A good UI would be, I dunno, Arcanum? I like the character sheet, I love the inventory, the bottom bar of the main screen UI could be better but it works. Best of all the entire UI fits thematically with the rest of the game, matching it to a tee. I like when the UIs have soul and aren't just boring lists.

 

[Butter]

Bad would be Skyrim (sans the Perk Chart, which is actually pretty cool.) It's bad because, while you can easily see each item in 3D, it's just a boring black and white list. No item descriptions, no real lore, minimum stats, boring list. It's functional but it's not inspiring.

A good UI would be, I dunno, Arcanum? I like the character sheet, I love the inventory, the bottom bar of the main screen UI could be better but it works. Best of all the entire UI fits thematically with the rest of the game, matching it to a tee. I like when the UIs have soul and aren't just boring lists.

Without exaggeration, Skyrim probably has the worst UI of any AAA game in the past 10 years.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Bad would be Skyrim (sans the Perk Chart, which is actually pretty cool.) It's bad because, while you can easily see each item in 3D, it's just a boring black and white list. No item descriptions, no real lore, minimum stats, boring list. It's functional but it's not inspiring.

A good UI would be, I dunno, Arcanum? I like the character sheet, I love the inventory, the bottom bar of the main screen UI could be better but it works. Best of all the entire UI fits thematically with the rest of the game, matching it to a tee. I like when the UIs have soul and aren't just boring lists.

Without exaggeration, Skyrim probably has the worst UI of any AAA game in the past 10 years.

There's a reason skyui is the most downloaded mod

 

[Yosharian]

What is good UI design in RPGs?

Anything not designed for a fucking console

 

[rusty_shackleford]

What is good UI design in RPGs?

Anything not designed for a fucking console

Good example of this is ME1->ME2
ME1 didn't have a great UI, but ME2 is fucking awful. Barely usable UI designed to be navigated with a gamepad. Scroll wheel doesn't even work on menus.

 

[Butter]

Bad would be Skyrim (sans the Perk Chart, which is actually pretty cool.) It's bad because, while you can easily see each item in 3D, it's just a boring black and white list. No item descriptions, no real lore, minimum stats, boring list. It's functional but it's not inspiring.

A good UI would be, I dunno, Arcanum? I like the character sheet, I love the inventory, the bottom bar of the main screen UI could be better but it works. Best of all the entire UI fits thematically with the rest of the game, matching it to a tee. I like when the UIs have soul and aren't just boring lists.

Without exaggeration, Skyrim probably has the worst UI of any AAA game in the past 10 years.

There's a reason skyui is the most downloaded mod

SkyUI goes a long way to fixing the functionality of Skyrim's UI, but it's still incredibly bland. Bethesda seemed to appreciate skeuomorphic UI when they were making Oblivion, and then 5 years later threw that all out the window.

 

[Excommunicator]

I didn't like the morrowind interface. Apart from being generally ugly, it:

1. Had too many items with the same or similar icon. It made finding things a chore
2. The icons themselves were poor, basically low res versions of 3d models. Couldn't really differentiate anything from a glance.
3. The autosorting meant you couldn't memorise what an item was based on its location in the pack. This is a trick I often use in games to find things easier, reserving a certain corner of the bag for items I use a lot

The resizeability of the windows while nice, isn't something you would need if the windows were the optimal size to begin with

 

[DalekFlay]

Morrowind has the best UI ever. Basically we want games to feel like they had a UI designed around keyboard and mouse, while most games get a UI designed around a gamepad and then quickly made to work with a mouse. With PC being a pretty healthy share of the market now, we really deserve more effort. Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a rare modern games I thought had a pretty good PC interface.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The resizeability of the windows while nice, isn't something you would need if the windows were the optimal size to begin with

yeah, I'm sure devs thought that when they were designing games for 240p screens too
even the UI in games made only 10 years ago look like shit on 4k screens

 

[Harthwain]

A lot of people already said it, but I will add my own points:

- The less clicks you need to do something you want, the better.

- The more customizable the UI, the better (re-bindable hotkeys and keybindings are the bare minimum).

- Make it make sense, so you aren't wondering where you can find what you need.

- Keep the most needed stuff immediately available.

- The ability to sort items (this includes auto-fitting everything, so you don't need to play tetris. Unless you want to).

- Have tooltips for everything. It's never a good idea to have an effect in game that you can't read about right away.

- Make gameplay aspects apparent via audio or visual aids (weapon/armor damage, low health, etc.), if possible. This, combined with tooltips, will take less screen space when playing, while still providing key information. And it's always possible to go to a dedicated screen for more detail.

 

[Momock]

If an UI needs customization, then it's shit. If it needs more thant one screen to show everything, then your game is bloated with shit.

 

[DraQ]

If an UI needs customization, then it's shit. If it needs more thant one screen to show everything, then your game is bloated with shit.

If a poster posts shit, then it's...?