How come /vr/ devs cared about cool looking, immersive user interfaces moreso than current ones?
>>12123002Because they didn't have suits breathing down their necks to appeal to normalfags
>>12123002they didn't have 20 focus test groups telling them to make their games more retarded
>abes oddysee>user interfaceVR DOESN'T PLAY GAMES
>>12123006>>12123012Both of these things are true but another factor we can't ignore is that the UI in modern games have to be much more scalable than they were in the past. A lot of the games in that pic were made with a max resolution in mind, like 640x480. When you know the exact dimensions and resolution that your players will realistically be viewing the UI at, it gives you a lot more freedom to go nuts with nicely detailed pre-rendered images. It didn't matter if those same images might look blurry at 2-3x times the resolution, because very few people were going to be seeing your game at a res higher than what you tailor made it for anyway. Now every game has to be legible at 720p, 1080p, 1440p and 4K. Forget nice little bespoke images and fonts, just use some vector shit that will scale easily to fit the user's screen. There are plenty of modern games with nice UI's, like Persona 5, but they're the exception, not the rule.Comparing Oblivion's UI to Skyrim's is basically a case study in where it all went wrong. There was absolutely no fucking reason for that nordic viking fantasy game to have the UI of an Apple product. But Bethesda wanted something sleek, "timeless", and again, scalable so they wouldn't have to re-do the interface every time they ported it.
>>12123039They're interfacing with the main menu.
>>12123039it's called a menu, you wet butt
More computing power means less UI in the way of the fancy graphics.
>>12123002Single player games: devs just have less soul nowadaysMultiplayer games: competitive gamers ruined it by demanding unobtrusive UI, they only care about winning not immersionI remember back in Age of Mythology people were already using addons to show health bars above all units and things like that (and these addons were accepted by the tournaments etc)Recently I saw some AoE2 youtube videos and apparently players use this addon to make the trees tiny so they can see better
>>12123002Skeuomorphism in computer UI design generally went out of fashion with users becoming more acceptable of abstract interfaces with rising computer literacy.
>>12123572That's kinda rude innit
>>12123002Yeah, I love old games UIs too.
>>12123002my pet theory is that it's all zune's faultzune and windows phone and the whole metro UI on windows 8 were a commercial failure, but I was in university at a time doing a master thesis on interface design adjacent stuff and I can tell you that metro ui was very influential, at least academically and I suspect also on the wider professional design spacescynically, I believe it was a way to just avoid designing stuff by pretty much just leaning on strong typography>everything looks "clean" and "aesthetic" and "minimalist", not "empty" or "boring", we didn't put more stuff there on purpose. the fact that is so much easier to design is a minor bonus. trust me broI certainly leaned on that shit HARD for my own work
Revolting
>>12123675I just thought that everyone wanted to make their own skyrim like ui, because that piece of shit got popular as fuck amongst the normies, and it devolved into the modern minimalist shit we have nowadays.
>>12123002You can blame Apple, and their huge "sleak, simple, and modern" design, where now everything looks the same, nothing has personality, all because a fruitarian faggot had autism over the one thing he was borderline intelligent enough to design; buttons and menus.
>>12123798>You can blame AppleNo, people forget that back then even Apple was very into "skeuomorphic" design with their UIs themed to look more tactile and similar to real life stuff, like the notes app looking like a legal pad, the books app looking like a book shelf, etc. They just hopped on the minimalist trend after it became big.
>>12123046Then use high-resolution textures. It's not hard.
>>12123557>Recently I saw some AoE2 youtube videos and apparently players use this addon to make the trees tiny so they can see betterPros and most people do. To the point small trees are now an in-game option, no mod required. Meanwhile the clinically insane Finnish people:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OAFThcJpPg
>>12123979The simplest explanation is that they are not scalable and are extremely time-consuming to make.Not only do you have to make those highly-detailed assets, you need to manually place each element for each possible resolution and make sure that it actually functions. Scaling raster graphics is surprisingly GPU intensive too, even a pure pixel-art game like Blasphemous or Bloodstained Curse of the Moon will put heavy load on a GPU if it's scaled up to 4k with zero benefit. That and if the interface needs a redesign to accommodate new content, then you might end up having to deal with the possibility of having to redraw entire parts of it from scratch if it's designed as one big artwork rather than something modular.Look at the OP image for instance, the God of War (row 3, column 1) one would have to resize all the assets if just one more spell was added. The Oddworld (top right) main menu would need to redraw the frontmost parts if a new option was added to it.This kind of UI is often done in tandem with the game design, the inventories up there are limited and the game is designed around it, and some of them are so visually large it would be impossible to expand it without having to resize every single element or adding entirely new systems such as scrolling or inventory tabs.
>>12124539Yep. Old game UIs had ZERO regard for modularity.
Tales of the Abyss had a pretty great paper journal feel to the entire UI. There's an article about it and everything.https://champicky.com/2020/08/14/tales-of-the-abyss-menu-screen-design-analysis/
>>12125218Holy fuck that's incredible.
>>12124539>we can't make it look good it's too expensive >that will be 89.99 shekles + tip >ships game in beta stage with the final chapter locked behind 24.99 a month subscription plus lootboxes
>>12125218Lmao my gay friend loves that game Ngl its a pretty good jarpigor
because when you have an unconventional weird interface, people call it ugly
>>12125286i have no idea how you can say /vr/ games had more cool huds.
>>12125291
>>12125286"people" call it ugly
>>12124539>you need to manually place each elementno you don't, you can use simple maths to make it scale and reposition based on your screen sizelike you do with any website ever you fucking retard
>>12125303Not for the pixel-perfect UI he's talking about, not unless you want a blurry mess
>>12125393>Not for the pixel-perfect UI he's talking aboutwhy, what's the issue
>>12125393There's nothing magically different between a UI element, a sprite or a texture. They're often implemented differently depending on the engine but with the right approach you could get any type of visual to scale decently well. There isn't some magical reason that intricate UI's aren't feasible even with different aspect ratios. It just takes a bit of extra effort to accommodate them and there are ways to cut corners there too.
>>12123002Have you even seen modern Atlus? Don't give me your opinion about the games themselves, I couldn't give less of a fuck about how you feel about them, but the UIs themselves are usually very stylish and very good gameplay wise as well.
>>12123720Beyond grim
>>12125415Alignment issues, stretching, blurring, it's a nightmare. Generally the way you handle it without unexpected problems appearing is to redraw your elements to match several resolutions.
>>12125286This is straight up disturbing
>>12123569>rising computer literacyAHAHAHAH
>>12123979>It's not hardFor the stuff shown in OP it's 100 more effort for something that will only get praise from 1% of the playerbase because normalfaggots don't care about UI as long as it works
>>12123002They look like shit though.
>>12125303Then you end up with a screen that's too large and empty blank spots, and the UI is too small to use comfortably. See pic related, I will admit that this is an extreme example but the UI for HOMM3 does not scale at all, leaving a truly staggering amount of it empty, and town/battle scenes will be in quite a small window. This results in the UI being less legible and more awkward to use.
>>12125419If Pokemon took even a single UI/UX note from a modern SMT game it would be the biggest QOL upgrade in the franchise history.
