What to steal: From Destiny’s UI

Colour bar flashes on in game UI - white is standard ammo, green is secondary, purple is heavy, yellow is super charge. That’s a pretty common way to do visual language in a game.. colour coding for the win. One aspect that is cute in Destiny is that events are signposted in the UI by big block colours flashing over the entire lower interface. This uses peripheral vision to help the player stay on top of ‘things happening’ with multiple timers and ammos. More complex information is conveyed if the player takes their eye off the reticule (recharge bars, ammo count etc).. but these big colour flashes are a clever way to yell at the player without being too noisy.

Elective waypointing (flawed, but a cool idea) - A frustrating aspect of AAA games is the ever present waypoint.. it kills the illusion of choice in a number of games.. turning it off made the latest Thief 10x better. That said, in big or visually repetitive spaces, these signposts are useful. Destiny goes for a halfway house of a pointer on a map, and in world markers when we summon Dinklage. This is spoiled for me by a couple of niggles (although admittedly, you get used to it eventually:

Immediacy of action - in menus, count the clicks to do anything.. compare that to other action RPGs. Yeah. Destiny’s UI owes a lot to web design here, and a lot of that speed is down to the cursor (more thoughts on cursor later).. but yeah, if you let the player point, that gives you hover, and hover = speed of information and nested interfaces.

Object / character / planet metaphor simplicity - this isn’t a new idea, but I thought Destiny did it well enough to point out: everything is tied to a logical realworld metaphor, usually an object. Messages received must be picked up from the postmaster on Tower, bounties are carried in the inventory, not held as sub objectives. Part of this is to create busy work and force regular returns to the social hub, sure, but it goes a long way to simplifying and better communicating interactions. We understand the idea of collecting a slip of paper and taking it to a man, we understand ‘going to a specific place on the moon’ better than ‘going to the moon and selecting mission 4’.. this gives the game a sense of bedded reality, and breaks understanding into little chunks, preventing the player from feeling overwhelmed.

Parallax menu, movement responsive to input - A nice little layer of aesthetic feedback.. your cursor’s position moves a number of parallax layers across all screens. This makes the game feel more responsive, and indeed, makes the act of moving around the cursor absentmindedly fun. There’s a big caveat though: Don’t overdo this. If every scroll through a menu flips the screen, or causes an explosion, or plays a fanfare, your menu will get very old, very fast. Brevity is the soul of wit here, but having interaction trigger aesthetic ripples in a subtle way sure does make things feel good.

High res menu assets - Something that RPGs have been quietly doing for years, but doesn’t get pointed out often: It is exceptionally cheap (performance wise) to render a menu on modern games hardware. This frees up a whole lot of graphics elves to do one job very well. In Destiny, high res assets of in game objects are used, with a presumably reasonably expensive (again, performance wise) depth of field effect. If you render a gun, rather than a gun being held by a character in a rolling landscape, you can throw a lot more polys at that gun. Bear this all in mind, menus let you show off assets in their best light. Volume does closeups of the hero character with nice DOF and lighting effects, if you have high res versions of game assets that you’ve modelled for normal maps, try throwing them in to menus.. you’d be surprised how far you can push stuff when you’re not trying to run AI / world art at same time :) If your game isn’t poly heavy, maybe there’s an incredibly wasteful effect you can use on menus? Something you wanted to use in game but couldn’t run without killing framerate.. there may be a place for it in the menu.

Cursor - I’ve mentioned the cursor above, but yeah.. cursor on a console game is a brave move. The team at bungie did some smart things to make it work well though:

Hierarchy of information - across the board, the menu uses colour and scale to convey hierarchical information. The bigger the text, the more important the information stated. Colour equals expandability or more info. Day one of graphic design school for magazines, cool to see it find its way into a videogame menu.

Potential issue - does a super simple menu imply shallowness? - more of a question.. It feels like a lot of the claims I’m seeing that the game is shallow may be in part a side effect of menu simplicity? Would a more convoluted interface make the game feel more complex? Probably.. we see this a lot in other action RPG games. Not saying this is the only reason for these criticisms, but this may be a problem exacerbated by such smooth and streamlined interface design. Games are, after all, fun convolution of ‘press x to win the game and see the credits’.. maybe this interface strips too much back.

Intent for play defined on map screen, not in world - I like this part. I can’t land on a planet without defining what kind of a mission I’ll do. This is an open world game where we decide intent before arriving.. meaning that you don’t need a big convoluted map with icons for side quests, story missions or events ala GTA. For me, this streamlines multiplayer (everyone knows exactly where they’re going) and adds to a sense of wonder and awe (the environment isn’t being constantly quantified by frequent visits to a map screen) also, vitally for a multiplayer game with no pause button, it lowers your need to pull up a fullscreen menu in hazardous environments.