Modern game has a "minimalistic" UI with a stock white font and black/white translucent rectangles

Grim

yup

It fucking sucks man

Is the ironic part of the post supposed to be that all the games in the top row were fucking terrible?

kill yourself dumb zoomer

This thread makes zoomers seethe kek

Resident Evil Zero

Sixth gen MK

God of War 2

Everyone agreed these games were bad when they came out.

high resolution was a mistake
you can't make good looking stylized ui anything greater than ~360p

You should make a little cardboard sword and tape it to your TV so you can have your "unique UI" experience.

seething zoomzoom

kekus

Yeah.

A lot of brainlet takes in this thread

UI and information architecture in games has gone up in complexity in a way that the end user doesn't fully understand. Nowadays there are constraints in the name of accessibility, tech requirements by the different platforms, limitations of the engine, need for scalability, localization to languages with different script... Choosing to keep things simple is a necessity, specially in teams where UX/UI is not prioritized over tech art or gameplay programming. In any case, AA and AAA UIs have never looked and had better user experience than they do now, greedy monetization practices aside.

Some games go above and beyond and dedicate plenty of resources to make UIs that look and move amazingly, but the general consensus is that as long as it works and doesn't look out of place, the ROI of polishing the UI is almost never considered to be worth it.

t. UI artist that has worked in everything, from mobile to AA console/pc GAMES.

UIs have never looked and had better user experience than they do now

t. UI artist

just say that you like to smell your own farts in one line and move on. no need to make a blog post

based

the soulless UI design in deadlock was my top 3 gripes with it

AA and AAA UIs have never looked ... better

C'mon now son.

Amazing how you can pull out an excuse to justify any sort of incompetence or lack of creativity.

nothing I said is wrong, though. Stay salty

Skyrim and Apple killed soul

OH I KNEW IT! ITS THE SAME GUY hes the one with the thread crying about horses and horizons
hes literally an autistic fucking piece of shit who has been here for literally YEARS crying and complaining every few weeks about UI screens now hes crying about horses and mountains LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLLLLLL !!!!! so good, never change dude, you are fucking mental

this is the same schizo:

anti-soul gas fag/contrast fag

modern UI bad fag

pap pap pap pap pap

Are you saying all the hundreds of soul gas and UI threads Anon Babble has had over the last 10+ years with hundreds of posts each have all been just one guy replying to himself, I haven't even considered that as an option

nostalgia is one hell of a drug. I invite you to replay many of the games you think looked amazing back then and in many of them you'll see absolutely no hierarchy in the layouts, blown up, and badly stretched 9-slice textures, unreadable fonts, cramped text...

schizos make hundreds of threads and many thousands of posts. Every bg3 thread has that schizo who posts the ochre jelly webm. He has hundreds of posts in each thread. He posts in every bg3 thread. So yes, hundreds of posts a day isn't unrealistic, nor is a schizo creating hundreds or even thousands of threads a year. Every forced meme is forced by a schizo. How new are you to the internet?

NOOOOO MY MEME JOB IS REAL DON'T GET ME FIRED PLEEEEASE

Nigger.

Sneed and feed is a forced meme, anti-soul gas and UI degeneration are real observable phenomena, the increased amount of threads about those is no different to the increased amount of threads noticing how e.g writing in games plummeted ever since devs started hiring tumblrinas with no real writing experience, or how microtransactions became more common

do the math if you don't believe me
even if you don't abuse the pass and multiple IPs (which is easy) you can make 1 post every minute, 60 posts an hour, 480 posts in 8 hours. In one day. In a year that's more than 100k posts. Schizos are on gibs so they basically post on Anon Babble 8h+ a day fishing for (You)s.

It looks like shit and it's because it's all diversity hires now, there's no one with any talent left in the industry. Might as well just switch over to AI immediately and save the costs of paying faggots that don't know what they are doing.

It's not that complicated. It's the same thing that happened to every other UI. Most "nice" UI was just another form of skeuomorphism to make it stand out, and it was no longer needed. UI is regarded as pure info now and it can be simple, so they make it simple.

i think dmcv has a really nice hud. theres no retarded shit like the health bar being a big sword or anything. it keeps it simple but stylish with the colors and the broken glass effect

Replaying FF9 reminded me of how good UIs used to be. It has a custom typeset which helps bring the world to life. What the hell happened to custom typesets?
I also replayed FF6, which has a more generic typeset, but still looks great, and you can set a marble texture to the UI, which actually meshes perfectly with the slab-like appearance of the boxes.

UI is regarded as pure info now and it can be simple, so they make it simple.

You can apply the same principle to visuals in general, every game should look like its prototype since that's all the info you need for the actual gameplay, art and graphics are just distractions and no longer needed

Yes, and then there are the great ones like Abe's Oddysee, Fallout 1 & 2, Metroid Prime and a slew of others that lean on having a lot going on in their UI and make it work while being beautiful.
Surely you don't think that the modern day minimalism-in-everything actually LOOKS better, right? I understand if you feel like you HAVE to go with it with the suits breathing down your neck while reminding you of a deadline and a budget.

UI are graphics. If a game has an ugly UI, it has bad graphics. There's no excuse.

You could, but a game is split into different design areas and UI is just the part people think is unimportant compared to textures, lighting and resolution. People just want no nonsense and to them UI is nonsense. That goes for operating systems too. 3DS/Wii U/PS Vita/PS3/Xbox 360/Windows 7 were the last of their kind, everything after rapidly became lists and grids with pure information. Video games are a special case though, devs and gamers REALLY don't give a shit about anything but fancy lighting. Most games don't even have binaural audio despite it having massive implications for gameplay.

and UI is just the part people think is unimportant compared to textures, lighting and resolution

Well devs considered UI important once, there's nothing saying the same won't happen to textures, lighting, and resolution

Good UI was considered paramount once, and so could the rest of the visuals become nonsense not essential to the gameplay

sure but these terms are memes that schizos forced. I will not allow the forcing of memes on Anon Babble. Simple as.
That's not to say those things aren't decently accurate observations.

It's whites who introduced

And pajeets decided it's the only way to do ui
It's that simple, they can only copy, no creative agency whatsoever

I could add onto this image endlessly but it's just depressing

anti-soul gas

The guy who spammed this term into catching on literally said he did it to prove how easy it is to force a meme here

I mean I dislike the current visuals too, but "good" UI is directly linked to good UX and there are simple rulesets for that. In the case of developers they are simply doing their job and as long as UI does its intended job it's good in their eyes.
And to be fair the same DOES happen to textures, lighting and resolution. Take a look at fidelity of textures and models. Even in the last eyecandy COD game faces and wet concrete are the priority. Bodies get less detailed the more you move away from the face, and environment is extremely different in amount of detail it has. The JRPG's with amazing anime character models have PS2 tier flat blurry grasslands. Raytracing looks fancy at first sight but in many cases it looks less nice than manual lighting. They will do as little work as possible. They'll even rely on shit like framegen.

truth

I am against the contrarianism of old=soul=better.
I have been playing games since the mid 90s and I can tell you that every game is a product of their time. The people who make them are mostly doing the best they can with what they have at the time. In some cases the designers and artists got the balance right and created beautiful interfaces that we can still appreciate today, like the ones from your examples. But it is idiotic to think that UX principles and UI/graphic design hasn't improved massively in the last 25 years or so. A good interface is first of all one that works well through good information architecture, hierarchy of content and intuitive visuals, then the polish and other aesthetics come into play.

The suits (mostly non-game dev people) just care about getting the game out the door on time and on budget. They delegate on other creative leads to make the most out of those constraints (some of them among the greatest in the industry, some of them clowns that prioritize politics and a narrow culture over everything else).

It's not that I think that minimalism looks better, but it's a better baseline for having things WORK better. This poster is partially right. The more complex the gameplay/content assets, the simpler the UI needs to be. Cognitive overload is a thing and it can ruin your experience. UI should be stylized to the theme of the game and in some cases that means flying under the radas as much as possible,

This is just the optimization of a design pattern. If you need to add equipment to your character, and you need to make it visible for the players (the decision might not be just functional, but aesthetic), then you need to show a real-time model of the character. There's no way around it.

Reinventing the wheel also makes it harder for players to navigate your game. In an industry where the smallest inconvenience makes someone abandon a game (and ask for a refund), you need to keep the lowest common denominator of your audience happy. It leaves less room for innovation and progress, but it is sometimes necessary.

But it is idiotic to think that UX principles and UI/graphic design hasn't improved massively in the last 25 years or so.

They haven't, Appleshit only regressed us and created a generation of morons

A good interface is first of all one that works well through good information architecture, hierarchy of content and intuitive visuals, then the polish and other aesthetics come into play.

First off, this sort of efficiency is not necessary for trivial entertainment media such as games, leave utilitarianism for real world utilities and practicalities, what you're saying is like claiming you don't need music in games since all it does is drown out sound cues for the enemies, traps etc

Secondly intuitive visuals have ALSO declined, I remember instantly grasping Oblivion's UI as a 12 year old ESL kid but playing the """"improved"""" remaster keeps tripping me up with how retarded the menu layout is for no goddamn reason, and they had some sort of UI/UX expert to do it when the original was done by an ESL Russian costume designer working on her first game ever

I'm not spouting any soul nonsense. I'm saying that I prefer the way AA and AAA UIs used to look on average compare to modern day. If you would've read the comment thread you could have gathered that much.
Being more beautiful =/= good UX or a well working UI
The bloating of studio sizes. more platforms and other game dev restrictions of course have an effect on the end product, which is why a lot of the time the UI ends up more minimalistic and boring.

Idiotic to think that UI/Graphic design hasn't improved massively in the last 25 years

I prefer the older, experimental stuff and the wild successes that came with it. Art doesn't get better on a linear timeline. THAT'S idiotic to think.

old=soul=better

Always true.
Didn't read anything after that. Go dilate you zoomer troon faggot.

I will not allow the forcing of memes on Anon Babble. Simple as.

Is this triple irony or are you actually so blindingly retarded that you don't understand the image you're posting or the words you're using?

This. Most of the things happening in vidya, movies, commercials anything sellable really makes sense if you think from a "shareholder value" mega corporation perspective. Consumers are nothing but cattle eating the slop they feed us

To elaborate further:

normal thinking: wow these cows eats a certain type of grass and diet from this mountain region and they are healthier than the average cow

shareholder value: ok but can we make a cheap slop out of it that can be mass produced and used everywhere and eaten by every cow in the world? No? Ok then we'll keep feeding them grounded bones with corn syrup

Anon Babble has a large quantity of graphics designers who work on aaa games I guess.

modders mod old soulful game's UI into complete slop horseshit

What type of mental illness is this?

nexusmods.com/oblivion/mods/48577

old soulful game's UI

oblivion

Where do you people come from? Have you just not played Oblivion, or even seen a screenshot? Oblivion's UI was atrocious even for consoles thanks to how blown up everything was. Papyrus.tiff instead of a blank grey background doesn't make it good!

Aren't we strictly criticizing the art design? If you want to argue about the functionality ALL old games fucking sucked, and you dumb faggots feel very smart for pointing it out

Don't even fucking try it faggot, Oblivion's UI is infinitely less usable than Morrowind's

usable

Again you retards just have to immediately go to the functionality of the UI when people who complain about minimalist UI are obviously talking about the ART design faggot. We KNOW old games were fucking retarded, you're not a fucking genius for pointing out the obvious

If you want to argue about the functionality ALL old games fucking sucked

My point being that the game directly preceding Oblivion did not suck and that your claim is not only wrong in general but specifically wrong too

art and design have taken a dive because the implementation takes a lot of time and resources. Minimalist, scalable UIs can be easily made to fit a theme well enough with typography and small decorative elements, so that's the usual solution if you don't want to sink too much dev time in UI.

You're wrong though, Morrowind was only good if you played on a computer

And oblivion was bad on computer as well as console, yes

What would you consider a good equipment screen?

The reason they do that is because .. well actually the EXCUSE is that they are all crossplatform games targetting different hardware, resolution ratios and resolutions and frame rates and color profiles and so on.

An RPG without a good textured, responsive, animated menu with special effects and sound effects is like playing an fps with no guns

90s game with nice soulful UI

remake copies every single aspect

the only things that are 100% new are the SOULLESS UI text windows in the battle screen

it's incredible, young developers can only copy good stuff or create boring/derivative stuff. Gaming has no soul now.

fuck modern gayming

At least this is a somewhat nice looking example of a soulless menu, they can get much much worse

SOVL vs soulless.

Art is being devoured by technology and cultural apathy and we're watching it slowly erode the quality of all media works.

30 years ago, a designer working in games or film or whatever, knew how to draw. Knew the basics of composition. Color theory. Design language. Anatomy. Calligraphy. Typology. I found a 1930s art tutorial book and there was a whole section on how to lay out and paint signs for your local butcher or baker, with lots of cool ornate text and clever use of shapes and pattern. None of today's artists have any sort of multi-disciplinary mastery of art... they hyper specialize in just FONTS or just "user experience".

Today technology does most of the work. Nobody is painting signs, or hand drawing lettering. People specialize in "graphic design" and never learn to draw people, or how to make patterns by hand, they just copy templates and paste in pre made patterns and follow whatever norms the rest of the design world is currently into. Thus we have come to today's graphic design landscape of extremely basic, simple, minimalist art.

This also comes from a cultural decline. The art of a people reflects their spirit. Look at the ornamentation of ancient churches, or the dense and delicate patterns of clothing from the 1960s, and compare it to today... our art is of a people exhausted, with no passion, just the simple basic minimum, because they don't have the fire in their hearts to create wondrous and beautiful things anymore.

based and true