i hate modern game user interfaces
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- Опубліковано 16 лис 2022
- Play Old School RuneScape's Fresh Start Worlds today: bit.ly/3SngUa5
Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs Legion, and Horizon Forbidden West gameplay are from @theRadBrad
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Chinese (Simplified) subtitles courtesy of Barnett Wong: space.bilibili.com/816198
Ironically this video ballooned in scope the more I scripted it lol, hope you guys enjoy.
JJJreact - Ігри
Play Old School RuneScape's Fresh Start Worlds today: bit.ly/3SngUa5
No
cool
Hey I can't remember if you mentioned it, be have you got a steam deck yet? And if so what do you think?
Hey the guy that locked you in a room in twitch con got sponsored by them too
bro really? RUNESCAPE??
When any JRPG menu is less complicated than your multiplayer fps your doing something very wrong
Japanese games in general tend to have a peculiar and complicated UI Design.
Dark Souls for exampled managed to be simple and complicated at the same time with its outdated menu structure.
@@nerdius8204 dark souls 1 yes, dark souls 3 is perfection
@@nullphaAgreed.
@@RepentandbelieveinJesusChrist5 Shut up.
@@RepentandbelieveinJesusChrist5Stop advertising for your channel bro. Greed is a sin.
As a veteran casual gamer... new interfaces make me feel like my grandma trying to figure out her smartphone
Same
Bro it’s so frustrating. I feel like I’m having a stroke when I look at the mw2 2022 menu
@@HieronymousLex playing warzone 2 it isn't as bad but base mw2 shud have the mw2 battle pass
Dude I thought I was the only one who had this problem in the past 3 years with cod. Is like dude, am I already that old? I not even in my 30s and yet I still feel like the good old days of mw1 all the way to BO2 feel like just a lifetime ago which is very strange
@@HieronymousLex Dude, yes like you can't breathe. Having to read every single information to not missing out anything is just freaking annoying you know? I just straight up want to know the basics and play the game. My friend said I should just change my configs but I honestly can't do that because I literally can't bring myself to work my head so hard to understand something of the UI.
You're missing the most important reason for failing UI design in modern games: the live service model. The moneymongers standing over the shoulders of devs are demanding that they push people's eyeballs on to the stuff they're trying to sell in game. A clear UI that neatly labels store items versus actual content would make it easier for players to ignore those battlepasses and bundles they want to sell and you can't have that.
Definitely this. AAA games are quickly following after mobile game ad models by forcing you to sift through ads for in-game purchase before you can play the game.
Crazy how they expect you to pay $70 for a game, and then still bombard you with frustrating ads. Not long before pay to win is a mainstream model being forced on devs.
It’s really no surprise games are getting so buggy. I can only imagine how frustrating it must be to be a game dev who is asked to prioritize monetization efforts over making the game work as intended.
Its over, either quit gaming altogether or just stick with old games. It's only going to get worse.
Bungie actually does this. The store is completely out of the way - you have to deliberately go to that menu to buy anything.
However, said menu also contains the stuff purchased with earnable in-game currency. So if you care about vanity, you'd check it out anyway.
However, the game has shitty monetization practices nonetheless to line the pockets of the shitty executives.
@@Skumtomten1there's plenty great newer games that don't have this trash. But it's common that the ad-riddled money-hungry options will be more visible. Probably bc they have more money for marketing, or with games like CoD & Halo, bc they have an existing fan base.
@@Skumtomten1disagree. There are so many amazing multiplayer and single player experiences coming out today, it’s only super big triple A companies with these problems imo. Doom Eternal, TF2, Elden Ring, Armored Core 6, Black Mesa(remake of HL1), Cyberpunk, Deep Rock Galactic, Dead Link, and so many other games, and these are just the shooters/action games.
I’ve been playing COD for 10+ years and it took me 15-20 minutes to figure out how to create a class and then join the game mode I wanted to. Insanity
That's gotta suck playing the same damn game for 10+ years. Cod it so outdated for what I expect from games in 2023. It's not 2007 anymore
@@J.Wolf90 that is true that cod is outdated but it’s not going anywhere because people are literally addicted to buying this game every year and activision knows that.
Fr. After not playing cod for the past 5-6 years, I got in MW3 and it also took me 15 minutes to figure out how to just play TDM. for some reason you can ONLY quick play. So if you want tdm, you have to filter out everything in the search results except tdm… why not just click tdm, ffa, s&d, etc..
have played MW2 2009 and then MW 2019 and MW2 2022, this honestly not difficult to understand, i don't know how it is possible to be lost in MW2 2022 menu
@@J.Wolf90 Funny enough, the best games that I've played were fairly old and "outdated."
Fun fact: They hired people who worked on Hulu's UI to work on MWII's, so the Netflix reference makes even more sense now.
Edit: It’s been 8 months I come back why are there 107 replies??? What are y’all doing???
@@4QuatroZ ...re-thinked??? bro....
@@shyguy85 lol im not native speaker but i guess you got what i meant
Bro Hulu's UI isn't good why did they hire them 💀
Was about to mention that. Instead of hiring people who do video games HUDs, they go and hire people who do HUDs...FOR TV streaming services. And hulus design is shit
No wonder why I hated looking at it so damn much
The reason we have lobby screens that show the people playing instead of just a universal image representing the multiplayer network: they want you to buy cosmetic items, and lobby screens are one of the few ways to force you stare at other player’s characters, since otherwise you’d barely look because you’ve to focus on shooting them.
Black ops 3 really didn't do that bad of a job with that, now that I think about it.
You'd have to click on player names to see the characters with their showcase guns, along with emblems and calling cards.
Also the "winners circle" at the end showing emotes as well.
@@sircuffington plus you didn’t really need to spend actually money in Black Ops 3 aside from dlc. You could get all those cosmetics and extra guns through the black market.
@@sircuffington Bro BO3 was the last great CoD. I mean don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed MW19, at least a little bit. But it’s nothing past a 6/10. Even the fucking maps in BO3 shit all over the ones we’ve had in recent years 😂 CoD is just a dead franchise to play now, especially with the addition of Warzone. MW2 is the last CoD I ever buy (unless they remaster the old ones and they do end up on PS). Because I wasted £70 on a game that I ain’t even going to play anymore now that Warzone is out. The gunplay is great, everything else is fucking awful 😂
Thats so true
@@Luke-ym7hdI feel like most good game franchises lost their grip in the past years... Halo infinite was a disappointment too. I still play BO2 though, just played some Mob of The Dead 😎
Old games are the bestest!
"There'll be no CoD for 2023" oof, that does not age well.
I was gonna say, that didn't pan out 💀
I was going to say.
Im just pretending it doesn’t exist. Its working out pretty well
💀
He's right there's only a 70 bucks standalone DLC
I don’t understand how ONE person can perfectly relay the UI that everyone wants, but the hundreds of people working in these companies somehow don’t get that right, at all. It’s almost like they live on an entirely different planet and they just came here trying to develop games.
Don’t they have feedback? Statistics? They have so much information but somehow still screw everything up.
It really makes 0 sense to me.
It's weird how they claim to "value user feedback" yet the SAME mistakes keep being made over and over
It's too difficult to improve it if everyone wants different things but I still agree
probably also doesn't help when managers and such make decisions which screw the people actually working on these systems over
i doubt the stuff about advertisements being shoved down your throat is their fault. there are certainly others to blame for that
They only care about fitting more micro transactions on screen when youre in the menu
Something else you didn’t mention, is verticality. Many older menus use vertical lists far more than horizontal rows and boxes. And the vertical list format is so much easier to read through.
Yes! I remember Disco Elysium's dialogue window following a similar principle. The team's reasoning was that a lot of reading is actually done vertically to be comfortable, as seen in newspaper columns, blogs, so on so forth. Compare that to reading in old message boards and forums and you'd notice the difference in ease of reading.
@@TheR6R6R Brilliant game btw
I can see horizontal menus being useful on widescreen monitors, since we have so much horizontal screen space. But I agree that a vertical list makes it much easier to compare and choose options. We write text horizontally, so putting multiple rows of text stacked vertically, each with a function, seems like a perfect solution.
@@HappyBeezerStudios Honestly I don't really care much for ultra wides after using a 16:10 display. I prefer the verticality for reading or observing HUD elements. Maybe I have too much tunnel vision, but I find it much easier to see stuff in my lower and upper peripheral vision instead of my horizontal peripheral.
Vertical Powers vs Horizontal Entente
"The user NEEDS to know this exists" applied to literally every single UI element
Funny cause it makes me ignore most things. Games like Valorant have clean UI that’s never confusing. It makes it easier to explore/find everything (before they fucked up the UI)
@@Methos_yeah I hate Valorant UI, in game things like “press again to dash” and “press F to activate” are so unnecessary and clutter the screen
@@RepentandbelieveinJesusChrist5 Are you lost?
Not even jesus could fix this@@RepentandbelieveinJesusChrist5
Navigating through modern COD's UI is so challenging it should become a game mode
"i'm playing cod" doesn't sound stupid anymore
With current COD HQ thing it's even worse, i literally need to open a launcher that takes same load time as the actual game itself, and why the heck i need to go back to COD HQ if i want to play DMZ, the gamemode exclusive to MWII, and guess what, it launches MWII again
I think that another great example of proper UI is Ghost of Tsushima, since the game wants you to be immersed in the environment first, so at most your screen will only display basic information (health & resolve) and will only display things like amount of items you have if you’re holding the certain button that lets you select said items. Hitting the pause menu takes you to a seamless menu that you can quickly breeze through for what you’re looking for, with a sleek, yet fitting look that fits with the feudal Japan style and the sound design that pairs with it. When in-game, the hud gives you lots of room to breathe to take in the environment, not to mention within theme the guiding wind mechanic that nicely works to usher you in the direction you want to go. All of this and more is what makes Ghost of Tsushima’s interface work so well with the game as a whole
yeah I love that game. very well designed
I really hate when they think: -Yes, make the microtransaction shop cover 80% of the menu.
Tbh the mw2019 menu wasn't that bad in comparison.
@@blacktemplar2377 bro the menu literally lagged and barely showed gun and was loading way too long . And the constant changing of the main menu to help me get to other cod games I dont own. Like yeah u can show me the other games but put that shi to the side where I have to actually press on something to see the list of games I dont even own
@@blacktemplar2377 Just as bad.
@@blacktemplar2377that menu was horrible
Something something half baked game with a fully functional store
all modern ui designers are just that guy from tiktok who fits all the shapes in the square hole
That’s right!… The square hole!
Where does all this crap fit? Oh right in the square hole!
The female student : anguished
wish more games tried to be real thematic like Paper Cut Mansion's HUD its insanely cool
Where does this reply go?
That's right.
🔳
It goes in the square hole.
Valve actually continues to be the best at this - Half-Life Alyx, despite being a VR game, keeps the simplicity of the old menus and uses the extra depth to show the previous menu, and a preview of the next menu. The in-game UI is also entirely in-universe and hence kept out of the way until you need it. Also Russel's voice lines about things like almost falling to your death or being eaten by a headcrab are set to only happen the first time so they don't get repetitive or irritating.
Excellent video, dude. Its insane how tedious UI navigation and screen clutter has gotten.
Literally every interface is the same now, it's honestly sad
Honestly no problem being the same. Problem is being the same while being bad
yeah that's super true, I play war thunder a lot and it has one of the worst user interfaces for a new player, only good thing about it is the fact that its small, theres like 20 different things to click on in the main menu where you see your vehicles.
@@racoonooo I agree and disagre. Its bad for seeing achivments understanding more complext stuff, stats, etc. But for casually playing and grinding the gsme its honestly very cool.
In few clickss you chose your vehicle, activated your boosters and its now playing. Inventory is simple, the tech tree is understandable. Vehicle customization tho kinda bad, in a ui sense is very good and easy to get, etc
@@4QuatroZ i super agree, i more meant it for a new player, but i feel thats how it is for most games and new players
Who cares if it's the same I just want it to be decent at least
Something this video reminds me is how Dead Space organized their UI! For example, the heath indicator being ON the character, made it simple and clean, while being very in theme!
Yeah, damn!! I always love these creative UI things!!!
Yeah, damn!! I always love these creative UI things!!!
I really liked how all of the menus were an in-game hologram
Agreed. Dietetic ui's and HUD's work. If you're wearing armor with some sort of modified eye covering that has an uplink, like a holographic display, then yea. Makes sense why you can see your hud. Minus if you enter a sniper scope. Then it vanishes fully.
Metro exodus also does a good job of this type of UI space as well making to were it’s something your character wears on his wrist or it’s something u have to pull up as a physical object(the map) hardly ever breaking me out of immersion.
Finally someone mentioned it! Main menus in old games used to be laconic, precise, but most importantly comprehensive. Nowadays my eyes and brain start to hurt when I try to find something I need. In old games everything was intuitively understandable, in new games it looks like everything was randomly placed.
Similar situation with the modern websites.
It seems like they follow the orders of some guy in a suit, some manager or “jacket” in other words, who never played games but wants it all to look cool so bad.
Halo 1 had such a futuristic charm. And totally loved how each difficulty had a badge under each mission, so you had to play the mission 3 times to get all the badges. Collectors dream.
yea then halo 2 removed the badges :( you could just beat ENTIRE game on easy, then beat last level ONLY on leagendary and it would report you beat the game on legendary. altho its fun to use the halo hacker tools gravemind and mr mowhawk on the halo 1 and 2. can make throw away cool mods in an hour or less. like one i had you spawn as a covnant on pillar of autunm and the humans were attacking the ship and the covnant were allies. sometimes these mods swap the diffculty and "easy" is the HARDEST and
leadgendary" is the EASIEST, this typicaly applys when you turn yourself into a covnant of flood.
@@NightmareRex6 Oh huh cool! Never knew it was like that. But my collector sense had me make a save file for every skull since going to the main menu doesn't wipe the skull effect.
Somehow. On my first legendary run. I was able to get to the scarab gun. Less hard then in all my future attempts. Prob since the banshees kept blowing up on easier difficulties or they avoided that tunnel to lure.
Prob made a save on my OG box but doubt I tried that hard for the 360/One back compat saves.
One thing you haven't mentioned in this that might be one of the biggest problems is the animation in the menus. Moving from one section of the menu to another can actually take time to load and it slows everything down so much!
I hate having to wait 10 minutes to render a whole as fucking hanger when a Playermodel only is needed to represent what I need
i think the animated menu's are great on PC because it allows me to see what kind of performance im getting without having to start a match or run a benchmark
Oh god you gonna hate early 2000 games (they got all animation and shits)
@@DOZDDMGator But couldn’t that just be determined by the fact that there is already a minimum and recommended spec list that the game automatically adjusts and gauges for maximum quality and performance? For example I can run a small well lit room at 60 fps but can I run the whole map? No, it’s 20-30 because most of the menu is half textures and perspective hiding noticeable blemishes within the area.
@@cj-3810 yeah nah, the auto specs are always awful for me and I have to run customised setting to get a consistant FPS
One of my favorite UI's was Black Ops 1. It was so dang creative. Selecting the zombies mode just feels scary man!
Bo1 was my first cod game and when I selected zombies and saw Hudson come back as a zombie I shit my pants
Damn the first time actually caught me off guard and i sat there staring at the tvs and the zombie for a couple minutes... I even thoguht that maybe if you wait long enough he would come down and eat you
Waw is just scary in itself, let alone when you are chilling doing campaign then suddenly hear those screams as a kid
and the best part is if you thought the chair and tv menu was gimmicky you could just set it to take you straight to mp if you boot the game
Getting out of the chair in the BO1 menu to play Dead Ops Arcade was a really nice touch too.
"now that there isn't a COD game for 2023 - god, I wish you were right
If I have to watch one more loading screen fade away and show me the main character standing in the middle of the screen surrounded by clolorful boxes Im going to burn my whole setup
Back in the day the main thing was the game itself and its menu was just a means to get there.
Now it's reversed, the game itself is an addition to the shop, and needed mostly to let you try out your newly bought stuff.
It's not just the UI, it's everything about AAA games that is being over complicated, and I bet it's to hide the fact that the games aren't any fun on their own so the devs have to find a million ways to stimulate your brain so you don't immediately get bored.
Yep. It's pretty fuckin stupid. I remember playing Ratchet and Clank up your arsenal a long, LONG time ago. I remember specifically that the menus worked well BECAUSE they were simple, because the menus weren't the focus, it was the gameplay. That game is old and is fallout 3 levels of beef jerky sometimes, but God if that game wasnt just bursting at the seams with content, but the menus were so beautifully simplistic.
Definitely true
Agreed!
Don't forget all the back and forth and crashes it causes, artificially keeping you on the game longer because you can't get to the one place you're trying to get to.
@@MartinWalkeringTime EXACTLY
One thing I can give to Cyberpunk for example is that it has a solid UI that doesn't fill my screen. Games shouldn't need 500 boxes up in my face. Why cant they just have maybe a few tabs for different things. In CoD's case, whole separate tabs for DLC/battlepass, loadout/weapons, gamemodes, etc. would literally solve all the issues.
COD Black Ops Cold War's main menu was absurd in how bad it was. Right off the bat, the first 2 options you see are:
To the right, a link to buy another COD, which was MW at first, then Vanguard, now it's MWII
In the middle, a link to launch Warzone, an entirely separate game. And on PC, this option didn't even work properly for me and would always crash either BOCW or MW.
And tucked away to the right are the actual options to launch BOCW's own campaign, multiplayer and zombies modes. At least the actual menus there are a bit better with good theming.
I can see COD has really earned its reputation as a cash cow, trying to milk the player. Not even pretending they are not trying to get you buy more immediately
12:52 that aged like milk
Maybe we will get them next year
i absolutley love CoD: Black Ops's main menu, it isnt comlicated and it feels well with the theme of the game, god damn it that game's main menu litterally has gameplay if you do the easter egg
Yes, definitely one of my favorites. The immersion of being able to look around the room with the actual menu navigation being very simple.
@@aboveaveragebayleaf9216 yeah, tho more simpler things like MW2/MW3 are good in theyre own right, new interfaces are just crap for the sake of being crap
@@Cloaker86 the thing is, the actual menu was layed out very similarly, it just had the added element of the interrogation room.
@@aboveaveragebayleaf9216 yeah, evn the Zombie mode menu with the interrogator becoming a zombie and banging on the window, man i would love if modern menus were like that
BO1 has the best menu in cod's history
what i noticed is that game interfaces are not only going boxy, but horizontal
what made Reach's UI work so well with all of its options was that it was based on simple, vertical lists so that you can use the other side or 2/3s of the screen for important things like seeing your spartan.
all these horizontal UI's remind me of one thing when I look at them. Mobile games. Giant boxy buttons for your thumbs to hit on a small screen. I have a giant monitor in front of me, i dont need my game's buttons taking up literal inches of space.
Something tells me it's not much better for a gamepad
Horizontal UI exists for widescreen and multi-monitor users; the wider the screen, the more options you can see at once. Personally, I find it a dreadful design decision and miss vertical menus. Sure we had to scroll, but it was pleasant to look at.
@@Mega-Brick I think what would be a good balance would just be using the whole width of the screen, but limit it to like, the bottom or top of the screen or something.
For instance, here's a screenshot of rimworld. cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/810358370363768873/1044775091923320832/rimworld_demo.jpg
obviously it's a different genre of game, but the UI is so unobtrusive! It's all just tucked out of the way in a ribbon like ms office. But it also manages to use the whole screen width!
@@Mega-Brick As an ultrawide user, it usually sucks because devs usually don't make things scale to where this would actually make sense (assuming they actually give support for ultrawide at all, *cough cough* MGSV)
Thank god I made everything vertical in my game
Old UI made the most of the space while being simple. These days they make it all over complicated to try and make it all seem advanced and modern. Never once in an old cod game did I feel lost and didn't know where something was. These days everything has to have a huge picture but all that does it take up space that you could use for something useful.
they all look like smart phone menus. the worst is the font is all capital letters
Props to Naughty Dog for being one of the few AAA developers that still makes incredibly intuitive and simple UIs.
@@justgot5109 When were you born, son?
is does naughty dog make FPS ?
@charlescabbage2933 Not really
The problem is the modern art style that’s crept in and dominated the world. There’s a UA-cam short guy who does UI design and all his UIs end up looking the same - oversimplified to look “clean”. It feels they never consider just the usability of the UI anymore
Exactly. Surface level Simplicity chosen at the cost of actual understandability.
I know exactly who you’re talking about. I swear that’s the same clown who changed every desktop icon into fisher price.
Windows 11 UI is screaming for help. It looks so good but they always make shit convuluted. If they just took the 7 UI and pasted the 11 design on top it would work. Oversizing the size of the boxes around the settings is a major issue too.
Who is the guy?
who is the guy i wanna cringe at it
I miss when most games would have thematic and aesthetic UI :(
Point an Click Adventure games an just old PC games UI please come back your horror atmosphere an adorable charms knows no bounds
Looking at old vs new UI setups across all electronics I now know why my dad who was an IT expert takes ten minutes to navigate menus nowadays. It's like driving on the freeway vs going into foreign subway systems.
It's because he is old. Or you are just lying. It's a known fact that uis are better now. Coming from an UI designer who was actually alive back then, kid. But nostalgia goes a long way
@@JohnMarston-sf1vk How the hell are ui's better? That's like saying fifteen seperate map that are objectively harder to read are better than a singular simple map that shows you all the info you need in a digestible manner.
@@Thelisreal-sh3tz it's obviously better. But retar ds like to take one or two game as an example and pretend that all games are like this. I have been playing games for 15 years. Never once have I been confused about UI. MW3 fumbled with the design. Doesn't make them the rule just makes them the exception. Also if you were alive back then you would know how bad ui was.
@@JohnMarston-sf1vk Assassins creed, R6, the minecraft launcher right now, MW3, There's more than one example. Yes, not every game is this bad, Helldivers 2 is a great example of a simple and good UI, but a majority of mainstream games that most people will see are this bad, these games that are being shown are supposed to be market standard. We have a right to critique them.
@@Thelisreal-sh3tz yep... Named two new games . Good work. You have to go that deep that you now have to bring up launchere where all you do is click start then surely you can understand how your points don't hold any weight. And assassin's creeds games are clean compared to how many features they provide.
My eyes almost orgasmed when ypu showed the difference between the modern and old school UIs. So simple and elegant, no clutter no nonsense just a list of options for you to click with a nice background
I remember when I could identify a cod game just by the menu. It could be a game I'd never seen footage of and I could still recognize it because of the cod style of ui.
now I could very easily mistake it for a FIFA game (if it didn't have all the guns lol)
@@iceran9822 just wait 'til FIFA 24, EA got crazy with that one
It reminds me of those 4096 youtube videos, where they swap through various logos and we all recognize them
@@mootwo_ there's only gonna be a FIFA 23 then no more
Reading top down helps separate the information easier instead of the horizontal lists they try to use now.
1.2.3
Or
1.
2.
3.
One is obviously more intuitive
I think a lot of the time, someone is given the job to create a UI and feels the need to justify their job by making it flashy and overcomplicated out of fear that they'd be fired or replaced if they just turned in a simple UI design
Nah it’s just late stage capitalism
My main complaint with God Of War Ragnarök is how different and confusing the menus are.
@@hypocriticalgrammarnazi they just made it different so it looks new. We already learned the old menu so why not just keep it and improve on it..
I mean, I don't blame them. The people who fund these projects get their hands in games so much. They give so much feedback in a field they have no fucking clue about.
Imagine you're getting surgery and you tell the surgeon that he should use a butcher knife instead of a scaple because it cuts better. Thats what the executives are doing constantly. If *they* don't see your work as useful or profitable, you're worthless. They'll outsource or force some other person to work doubletime to do the job instead. It doesn't matter if you actually know what you are doing. It just has to look flashy and like you're doing something.
Theres a reason IT people "sit around all day", because if they were shit at their job or not there, the systems they work on would be causing problems and not working constantly.
Over complexity in UI and gameplay is a huge defining characteristic of modern game development.
13:50 No cod for 2023? Yeah. Haha. Ha...
Very very good video :)
In art there are Rules of Thirds, whether you deal with it vertically or horizontally, the rule of thirds still crease a beautiful and clean aesthetic. Something old games used to incorporate very nicely, which you will never see in a modern game these days.
Just googled rule of thirds, thanks for sharing that pretty interesting concept and I see it in The old menus.
And you'll see it in almost every professional photograph, movie, TV show, etc. Either that or go with horizontal/vertical symmetry (think Stanley Kubrick). Or the golden ratio (used especially in architecture). It does concern me that modern designers don't know how these things work...or why.
@@bretton_woodsI think it’s because not all game designers are trained at University, it is possible to start working in the industry with no Uni degree. Not only that, I don’t think the rule of thirds is that prevalent in the industry as you would think, as I studied at two different Universities, and only one of them ever mentioned about the Rule of Thirds or the Golden Ratio during my studies, and that was in general design, where I studied along side Interior designers as well, where the first place I studied was more Virtual Entertainment Industry focused. But being a UI/UX designer is a particular role in the games industry, so you maybe able to take a more focused study on the subject of UI/UX Design.
a really great feature of Elden Ring is the option to have the hud hide everything besides the compass when not in-use.
it gives the game a super cinematic and clean feel, with no more information than is necessary
i also really love it's use of very simple gray gradients for menus- far more readable than the more saturated colours of pretty much every other game
FromSoft did this since Dark Souls II to I believe. It's a great feature, it lets you create better screenshots, have a better feel when exploring and actually see what's around you without having to go through 6 menus and 5 slidebars just to turn the hud off completely
It’s really nice. Forbidden west has something similar where you can choose what ui is on or not and when. Love forbidden west but dynamic ui is necessary to enjoy it
i agree with this cutie
Literally every game with a hud allows you to do that
@@AiffyAU you anime virgins are so embarrassing when it comes to basically everything
Little did we know we did not escape the annual cod cycle 😢
I liked the menus of bo1 the most it was so simple and I could find what I needed and the zombies menu was extremely simple and seeing the zombies in the background hitting the window was just perfect
A common theme I’ve noticed between most older UIs with great “usability and accessibility”: they are mostly comprised of a basic list/table view with a single level of navigation. You move up and down through rows of text, and use A/X to drill inward. Sometimes it means going one too many layers deep, but it’s a simple mental modal that everyone can wrap their head around with ease.
I think about the Windows XP start menu. The most frequenst things are pinned directly there, and the rest is a set of menus and submenus. Which could be organized manually. So you could have one point "games" that opens and shows you all your games. You can see their icons and read their names and immediately see which is which.
A less deep menu structure would be nice, but nowadays we have a search function and don't have to go through the menus at all.
Now if games would have a search button in their menu so you can just type in what you want to go to.
Yep, it’s literally as simple as turning a page.
All the info in one place, arranged that communicate as simply as possible.
Modern menus are like pop-up books with fold-out subsections, because weee colours.
Then it all went downhill in 2020
Halo Reach's interface was so damn good. The art in the back that changes with each menu section, hovering over someone's name would display their full profile and Spartan or even elite.
It was so cool seeing your team's Spartans. I wish they still had it in MCC
Anybody who was an Elite skin was instantly an Opp Lmfao
it was sooo clean
I like to think you can usually tell how much thought went into a game just with its menu.
I felt stressed whenever you were navigating the new MW2 menu. I haven't played the game and it really felt like you were taking me on a ride through hell.
The whole bloated UI menu feels like a remnant from the era of tablet UIs, where everything needed to be a big fat box so you wouldn't struggle to tap it. Fortnite BR had an update to its game mode menus a while back that turned it into a streaming service setup, which for the longest time made it a pain in the ass to play core gamemodes. Great for browsing creative maps, not if I just wanna quickly boot it up and hop in.
Dude i hate the fortnite menu shit i actually loved how easy it was to get into a game and now its just extra menus
I can’t believe how bad things have really gotten. I used to be so excited for the future of games. Thanks for the video, it made me feel a little less crazy in my pedantry and cynicism towards all modern UI
I feel the same way; if I'm being brutally honest I think the beginning of the rot was when the Xbox 360 deprecated the Blades UI, and it's been downhill ever since.
Flip it around. I'm excited about the past of games, and finding new games I have never played or heard of before. The "future" can F off for all I care!
@@bretton_woods it’s capitalism
@@bretton_woods This tbh though plenty of great indie games still around.
I quit gaming a few weeks ago. One of the best decisions of my life
“There won’t be a cod for 2023” ummm about that…
Why did any of us believe it
I’m so glad I saw this video. I’ve been studying UX/ UI to work in the field as a UI researcher/ designer and like many of you, I have a passion for gaming. I never really thought about working on games until now. I hope I can have some impact in improving these UI nightmares
Wait until you work for a giant greedy corporation and your bosses tell you to do the literal opposite of everything you learned with your fancy degree because they WANT to design this garbage to annoy people into buying microtransactions
I think we could all use an “inside voice” to understand how these things get made. It would be great to hear some (anonymous?) content about why simplicity gets shot down
I honestly thought I was just getting older but I'm glad to find other people think game UI's are confusing 😂😂
I think an interesting case study is the difference between the original Overwatch menus and the new menus introduced in Overwatch 2 regarding the battle pass and shop. I think for the most part OW has had crisp and clean menus, but some of the changes in OW2 take after the “box” style that Stryxo has pointed out in this video
They're still very descriptive and useful tbh, only box design is in the play menus, and it's not confusing at all imo, in all, it only has 15 boxes in all, out of which 9 are nested within other boxes
@@alternatecheems8145 No I’m talking about the battle pass menu. The tiers are just a single line of boxes that you have to scroll through sideways. At least since it is a linear progression, it makes sense, but still shows that boxy design. The standard menus have always been clear and I don’t mind the boxes used for those. That’s my point, highlighting the differences between the original and the new menus
@@dallasjhaws That's how it is in every battle. pass since their existence on purpose to better showcase the cosmetics from what i understand
@@alternatecheems8145 yeah and Stryxo’s point is that that’s boring and lacks theming. They all look the same
8:39 might be the greatest instance of the word "fuck" ever spoken. I don't know why exactly, but it was truly beautiful.
Watching this after MW3 came out is crazy
2002: We let the game developers make the UI.
2022: We let a diverse team of art major college graduate interns design a focus group tested in development prototype for our early access games as a service game beta test.
I agree black people and women have no space in the work field
It’s so they can productize everything. Putting every little thing in its own unique, equally sized box gives it a sense of value and importance that translates into dumb whales/collectors just buying everything for no reason. They view the opening screen as an entrance to a department store, so they shove a bunch of bullshit that’ll catch the eyes.
Those micro transactions are worth the needless development time and slightly off putting everyone else with the menus and hud, I guess.
holy shit. this is on point
Masterpiece.
Cringe, lol. Game developers have already been Left leaning anyway. As has most college grads, historically speaking. Look it up, the more educated you are the more likely you are to be on the Left. The problem is corporations, which are usually Right Leaning, masquerading as diverse to pull in normie Liberals and moderates. The people that makes them the most money. Real Leftists even complain about this and how poorly it is sometimes done.
This is so true, something like a simple user interface will make such a difference. I remember back in the day when someone’s rank and prestige was so much more bold and easier to identify than it is now smh
Now they hide stats to as to not shame people who suck
While you’re right, I feel like the reason they’re not as noticeable now is because of cosmetic monetisation and not bad UI design. The best items need to be locked behind a pay wall for the methods to work so what’s achievable in game has a purposefully lower quality than say in BO2.
@@domp2729 so prestige rank and name are less visible so the payed stuff (ie skins) are more noticeable in ore game lobbies? Guess makes sense, just a shame it’s gone that way
Would love a new video discussing MWIII UI since it is leaning towards this older style while still holding onto the frustrating “Hulu” UI. Great video.
I was getting ticked off at OW2 recently because when I went into a menu I could not tell what I was actually selecting.
BAD UI IS MY MAIN PET PEEVE
pongon?
Wow this is the last place I’d expect to see you here
@@LanieMae we stan stryxo
I think your issue isn't "boxes" it's padding and margins, which are definitely too big on many modern games.
Edit: I am a game developer, and I would just like to thank Stryxo for making this video. I was having trouble figuring out what the best way to style my game's UI would be, and I think making options smaller yet clearer is the way to go for my game. I'll definetly take this video into consideration. I'm not gonna list my game here because I don't like using UA-cam comments as ad space.
There is straight up too much information, so the eyes don't know what to jump to.
It’s for tvs
@@WybremGaming almost like the older games were played on tvs too.
@@aboveaveragebayleaf9216 Yeah but the older tvs weren't as big as the modern ones so they had to think twice about boosting the scale of a object to 200%
@@Crow-lz7et My man doesn't know how big old CRTs got
Oh boy I sure do love living in 2023 in which a new cod released and people hate it
“Just now breaking out of the cycle of yearly COD releases…”
Yeah…about that…
Thank you for making this.
Ever since Halo 5 I've had a great hate toward horizontal menus. I miss Halo Reach's simple vertical menu. I should never have to scroll off screen if everything can be presented if you zoom out.
Funny you should mention Halo 5, since the halo 5 beta menu was great if I remember correctly.
@@backisgabbeYT yeah it was
Hell, ever since Netflix implemented them I've had a great hate towards horizontal menus.
Halo 5 has a good UI apart from the lobby menu
When you said that there's no room to breathe i finally understood why i get anxiety just by looking at some of these games menus
I remember when I could fully configure a load out before a game started and now I can barely put an attachment on
"With Cod being the main offender for this video and getting more development time now that there isn't one for 2023"
guess not lmao
I feel like they purposefully cluster the UI so that a new player is forced to explore and end up in their store which creates an impulse of buying things out.
For CoD, that's absolutely part of it. Well, live services in general. I'm also convinced that they're all going for the "netflix" look because that makes your brain associate the menu with spending monthly money.
Yup. Microtransactions are unfortunately a part of gaming now.
Yup ,every tine theres something free in cod shop ,its always located next to most expensive stuff just to keep you tempted to buy mtx
As a first time player of a Cod game, seeing the UI in COD:MW2 was so confusing and claustrophobic, barely any negative space. I definitely got lost in the ui lol.
I feel so bad for you that the fake MW2 was your first.
As a veteran cod player i can say that “””MW2””” isn’t even a cod game
@@coochie8670ikr
Play the original MW2 or some of the older games for an actually good experience. You won’t get that from modern CoD
I think one of the main problems with UI interfaces these days is everything is catering around touch screens. They could easily make a clean UI, but a clean UI is harder to navigate on a touch screen where your fat fingers act as the cursor and the screen is generally smaller (although tablets nowadays are bigger than the average RGB tv screens we used to game on).
I love the Portal menus I'm ngl. They're so elegant and simple it's like a zen experience; easy to access and calm/ easy to navigate. The modern menu's are obsessed with giving the ILUSION of having ton's of content to explore. Like you have to travel to Antarctica just to see this shotgun model to customize it. It's so cluttered and awful. I'd litterally just rather a blank white portal menu that's boring but easy to navigate.
The word you were looking for is elegant not eloquent
The Gaming industry (as well as the gaming community) never ceases to amaze me. 😂
Crazy how things have only gotten worse with the MWIII menu and battle pass UI
As an OSRS player I am so happy to see an advert for it, even if this video was posted over a year ago.
This is a topic that makes a game feel bland but you can’t exactly put your finger on it. UI effects how a game feels so much more than anyone really thinks.
You basically summarised what ive been noticing over the past 5ish years. My brain simply cant fathom these modern UIs, compared to the days of Halo 3 and Cod 4.
after playing simpler games for a long time i tried to play siege with my buddy for the first time the menus had me raging before ever getting into a match.
Welcome back, its now 2023 and theres a new rushed cod for this year thats debateably a DLC with almost 50% recycled content
13:50 - Ohhh, if only you knew... We got what was supposed to be a game DLC, an expansion at best was turned into its own game. Cue in MW3.
I remembered my first night playing warzone 2,
My friend and I spent like 20 minutes trying to fight the f***ing menu. It was literally a maze where we didn't know where one click will take you. I remembered the "social" button would either take me to my friends list or the playlist selection screen. Once we finally got onto a lobby together, I pressed one button to change my loadout and it booted everyone from the lobby, so we had to do the WHOLE THING AGAIN.
I can forgive UIs that look boring or cluttered, but not menus that are literally f***ing broken.
I also remember November 16, 2022.
I haven't even played that game but your comment still made me so angry lol. Seriously, most modern games are a nightmare from the moment you boot them.
The devolution of the modern UI:
It works well! --> It works --> Eh, just ship it
That sounds like AAA game development in general.
Games these days seem to lack passion. Money, money, money.
I think UI is a huge part of a game's identity and presentation, everything from the visual look of menus to the sound effects and music leaves an impression on you. Good UI is more than being easy to read and use, it also needs to have an identity of its own. Most new big games dont seem to care about that part of the UI anymore.
What I'm saying is, I am so tired of menus being simple boxes with black or white text. Give me something else....PLEASE
I went to chili's a few days ago and was blown away with how similar the menu looks compared to the MWII interface
Titanfall 2 came out just 6-7 years ago, and it's UI is pretty great. The main focus, with a lot of open space, is mainly on the Pilot and the Titan with the squares used being limited to the top left edge of the screen, with special cards (abilities) and short and concise details for the playlist selection being the exception. Whenever you picked a weapon, you were shown it in your Pilot's hands with no clunky gun deets. Just you, the gun in-hand, and the others to be selected with your Titan in the background waiting it's turn.
Yes
343i's excuse for the UI's design is that it's supposed to be UNSC themed
They're so drunk on their human-spartan only story fantasies that they basically just neglected anything that isn't human-centric, from their games stories, to the art style of Infinite's ui
I think it's really fucking cool and unique how Halo 2's ui is designed. Forerunner themed which compliments the "ancient" parts of Halo (and its theme, and lore)
Loading screens are always in motion with amazing art that serves as eye candy and a status to determine if the game's working or not.
And then there's Halo Infinite.. Absolutely devoid of any past UI aesthetics that would've AT LEAST Infinite feel like Halo first-thing when opening up the game.
Hilarious how they literally could've just went with Reach's ui design for their intended UNSC-theme ui, considering Reach's militaristic theme.
Spot on.
Halo Infinite’s UI looks like almost everybody else’s.
They think spartans are supposed to be Power Ranger Marvel Superheroes who deserve 90% of the story’s focus. It’s been 10 years, and it still feels like they never played the original games themselves.
Halo infinite feels entirely devoid of anything alien. The brutes are just buff dudes in armor with the most boring utilitarian buildings ever designed.
Ok there is that one harbinger gal i guess but she hardly shows up at all.
It's the most human space game I've ever played :(
@@mythhead2688 Random comment, but y'know who was responsible for Halo 4's dreadful Covenant designs? ... The same guy who worked on ODST and Reach's Covenant designs. Some of them _have_ played (and worked on) the original games, they just either lost their touch or got too caught-up in thematic stuff.
5:28 hearing "Gusty Garden Galaxy" on top of FF7 gameplay is a hard double hit in the feels
Seeing the elden ring main menu just be a simple list of options gave me the biggest chub I've had all year
I'm a solo dev still in college and I think your absolutely right.
I actually just made a short game that was purely marked on its UI. We had to develop and present UI but I used alot of boxes and stuff you pointed out and now I'm thinking that I should've done something different.
Mine wasn't crowed like some of these examples but I'll definitely be taking your points into consideration whenever I'm making a game in the future from now on.
Finally someone is talking about this!!
I love how old main menus look, they are simpler and in consequence, more efective. Those menus had static or simpler backgrounds, with all the text and important thing using the middle/side of the screen. Now games use to have things like your character there using all the screen and doing boring stuff while all the important things are relegated to just a small portion of the screen.
I will never forget how impactful halo menus where and other games like transformers fall of cybertron where you can see cybertron in the background with epic music and the options to play campaign, multiplayer and other things just in front of you.
Absolutely loved the black ops 1 UI and menu. Also the OG 2005 battlefront 2 UI
Thank you! It's great to hear someone else talking about the real impact menu design has. It is an accessibility issue. And they are universally getting worse.
MW2 is the first game that made me feel old. I genuinely get lost trying to customize things like my calling card and emblem (not that it matters since I don’t think they’re displayed in game anyway)
the game never works how its supposed but the micro transaction store works 100% flawlessly.
I feel like calling cards and emblems in newer cod games are kinda irrelevant. We have so many thinks to "look at" and so many options for calling cards, that people don't even care about them. I remember grinding to unlock a calling card in mw3 after getting like 1000 kills with the intervention and having that over my name, it felt like an accomplishment. Now calling cards are so irrelevant
@@kontrah2681 it’s because they wanna advertise a million bullshit to you
I’ve never understood why I hated so much about modern, post 2012 games and you just put it into words perfectly.
There’s so much bullshit ALL over the screen AT ALL TIMES. I guess that’s why I find myself returning to older titles so much
This is a problem with UIs in general now
I was used to using Windows 7
Anyway I install 10 and was like "finally"
I was bombarded with ads and tiles all over the screen
The flat look and boxes, I hate it
@@RowanBird779 the minimalistic wave is the worst thing in history
@@BaysideTub217 it really, like who thought it would be funny to put my apps in massive boxes making them harder to see
@@RowanBird779 i wanna say iOS is at fault for this trend
@@BaysideTub217 No, I think it was Windows 8
Morrowind’s UI is amazing, it’s so simple yet you can adjust the size of all of them and move them anywhere on the screen, you can have the whole map up and click the button on the top right to have it stay on your screen at all times, and this is for all the UI’s.
6:27, someone ranting angrily with vivaldi's winter in the background will always be funny
That transition from portal 2 to Halo is just perfect
Now that you mention it, the UI should play a huge role in a game’s overall reputation. 90% of “open world” games feel more like scripted journeys or something on rails because of the constant clutter. It actively takes away from the experience when you’re having to mentally prepare yourself to navigate the menus.
He mentioned Horizon forbidden West, and how it was too cluttered but he must have missed the option to customise your HUD the way you want. And honestly they nailed it. Everything can be customised to be either on, off, or 'dynamic,' meaning that health only appears when you get hurt, weapon and ammo only appear when you bring out your weapon or enter combat etc. It's fully customisable and it's perfect
@@wumbosaurus9121 And that’s a great feature that should be standard. However the point is why does the clutter exist in the first place? Why is every UI starting to look the same? It’s madness. Elden is a great example of less is more in the UI department. Same with something like RDR2, which you change the size and visibility on the fly without having to pause the experience.
6:09 That was a beautiful transition!
Hey man just dropping in to tell you that this video could easily have a small follow-up based 100% on CoD HQ. If you were mad a year ago, you ain't upset enough yet.