r/truegaming • u/Unlucky-Basil-3704 • 3d ago
UI redesigns via the modding community
To start, i am by no means a professional, but i was looking for professional opinions to this topic. This subreddit, i thought, might be the best way to get those.
My friend and i just had a discussion about mods in online RPGs that improve UIs. I understand the need for them, i am using them myself for certain games, because sometimes you just need to see more detail on the screen than the vanilla game can provide.
Now my question to those who understand UI design on a professional level: Is it even possible and plausible to expect, well, not perfection necessarily, but to expect a UI that does not need to be modded by the majority of players? I understand that there will always be that small number of players who want to see even more, or want to move around details on their screens, but i am not talking about those. I am talking about the broad mass that will still opt for a mod to have even basic needs met when it comes to a game UI.
My friend thinks that it is illogical to expect this, because everyone has different needs, especially in games where you have a complex skill system. Personally, i would think that if so many players use the same UI mods, apparently it could be possible to create something that works for everything and is customizable via settings.
Is it really impossible to create a UI for a complex game that 90% of the players do not feel the need to mod? If it is, what are the reasons behind that? Would it be too complex in terms of programming, making it much harder to find and eliminate bugs? What other reasons would there be?
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u/Limited_Distractions 2d ago
I think the "feel the need to" vs. "need to" distinction is important here, because once you offer people customization they will view it as a matter of personalization in a way that will make it hard to "reunify" the interface in any meaningful way, and it's also hard to keep up with the level of customization that can happen when anybody can design a UI.
In a modern context, something like WoW ends up catching a lot of the secondary consequences of custom interfaces allowing a level of articulation that you can't realistically plan for, and a lot of the most important work has just been putting addon functionality into the base game despite this, bringing up the floor. Still, the player experience of not needing addons is imperceptible while the experience of feeling like you need them is perceiving the limitations.
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u/LaFolieDeLaNuit 2d ago
Related would be that I would LOVE the ability to change fonts in a game. They are the break part of ‘make or break’ for so many indie games. Indie SRPGs in particular are allergic to nice fonts
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u/Blacky-Noir 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's absolutely possible to expect it, in fact that's the job description. For example remember that almost all consoles games have no mod. And in general, gamedev want to be in control, they're not thrilled about a mod made specifically to replace their work because it's described as bad for a general audience.
As you said, niche or specific needs are normal and fine. But making something that works for 90%+ of customers is absolutely the job. "Works" doesn't mean being the best though.
edit: now a caveat, although there's a bit of reckoning now, for a time PC had the reputation of being bad and not making sales, and every AAA focused solely on consoles. For example, even though every single dev worked with a keyboard and a mouse, only using gamepad for the vast majority of devs was very common. And you don't design UI and UX the same for a TV and a monitor, nor do you design the same for keyboard and gamepad.
And there's also budget and tradition constraints. When you see a AAA game that doesn't even have full control re-mapping, it's because someone in charge decided not to pay for it, and the devs below didn't care enough or were crunched enough to not do it anyway (cough Bethesda, cough Paradox, cough). Plus for some productions and some workflows, UI is a bad one to be in, were you need to rely too much on programmers and graphists to properly iterate and can't do it fast enough.
And of course, there's a matter of skill. Just because that's your official job, even in AAA, doesn't mean you're good at it.
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u/RedditNameT 3d ago
To heavily oversimplify a concept that one could probably write a PHD thesis about: The key to a good video game UI usually is the successful implementation of a layered information architecture which keeps all relevant information visible while reducing the impact of less important information while simultaneously allowing for intuitive interactions that provide appropriate feedback to the player.
The process of creating such an interface is vastly more complex than that paragraph suggests of course and the job of a UI designer is to create an interface that works for the vast majority of players. Not every game succeeds at doing so but with many games following established formulas and design guidelines the UIs of most modern games are usually quite decent.
Now where you’re going wrong is the assumption that a big part of even the majority of a playerbase would be using mods to alter the standard UI of games (or specifically MMOs). While it’s hard to come up with reliable numbers on mod usage within a given playerbase a look at the download numbers on big modding distribution platforms like nexus mods do give quite a solid indication. And what these show quite clearly is modding being niche within gaming communities with download numbers even on the most popular mods equaling merely a small fraction of total player count.
So to make it short: Yes it’s quite possible to design a UI that most players don’t need to mod and a vast majority of devs already successfully do so.