'God of War Ragnarök': Building the UI for a AAA Sequel
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 31 ก.ค. 2024
- In this GDC 2023 session, Zach Bohn, Sr. Staff Technical Designer at Santa Monica Studio, discusses the development of God of War Ragnarök's User Interface (UI) and, more broadly, the role of a UI team/individual on a project.
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The menus in Ragnarok feel so claustrophobic to me. I understand the font size change, which ultimately contributes to it. If you had good data from the playtesters of course go for it. But still, the rest is so crammed onto each other, there is no breathing space. The color adds to it as well, going from grey to dark blue really shrinks the place visually. Again, the changes made are positive, but visually, the 2018 menus are way more eloquent to my eye. I didn't want to spend any time at all in the Ragnarok menus because of how intrusive they felt.
The loot system and by consequence the gear menus are absolutely terrifying, straight out of a mobile game.
When I played Ragnarok, straight away you could see the design objectives of the UI were accessibility and readability. I think, the reality is those goals put constraints on the 'cool' factor of any UI. Found this talk pretty interesting. Thanks.
Idk lol I liked the UI of 2018 one.
45:55 What in the world is that UI?! Sidebar - List - Half book - book - scribbled page - book - half book - tabs at the bottom - back to half book - book -
If you had just flipped the page it would've been fine! The flipping is not your issue. Everything else is.
Agreed, this is cluttered as hell
For the amulet enchantment screen:
Why does it force me to choose a slot while there are empty slots? Just fill the first empty slot and only force me to manually choose when I have to replace one. Have the option of choosing a slot, don't make it the default.
Also, why do you start the cursor at the top? That gives the maximum average DPad presses to get to your slot. Start the cursor in the middle, especially because the eye is already in the middle due to where you come from in the left menu.
Also, why are you showing only 5 enchantments to choose from? The least amount of space in this UI is reserved for the huge library of available enchantments in your inventory. Why?
It's leagues better than what came before but at first glance there's a lot wrong with it.
Damn, an interesting gamedev-related talk from an AAA studio on GDC channel in 2023? Sign me up!
I thought the ui change was actually the worst part of the game behind angbroda. The ui looks like it was made for a tablet mobile game. The font is way too huge, and the colors of the backgrounds and box edges along with font make it look super cheap and mobile game-esque.
In there first game I couldn't read or understand anything in the menus. It was a great improvement for me
@@PedroAppThey need a scaling slider, and you need a bigger TV.
Not everyone can get a bigger tv though. Yeah I admit the menu looked cleaner in the old one but if the goal was to make a menu that is more readable and accessible to more people than perhaps they preferred that over a cleaner menu
Kind of interesting because I couldn't understand some parts of the UI and hated others.
This is by far the most valuable talk covered. THANK YOU
But this UI looks horrid, I just don't understand how this is the result of months of work. It looks cluttered, claustrophobic and overwhelming. Thank god the game didn't force me to interact with it too much on lower difficulties.
Interesting to see because I think it's really not a great UI.
the Q and A at the end some how felt like it had Good UI...you know what I mean? great talk
god of war 2018 had a nice ui imo
that was a great ui.Congrats!
Such a great talk! Thanks for sharing this!
As far as time in the pause menu and immersion, it'd be great if we could have a few custom builds for gear and stuff. So we could swap the entire build at once, instead of going peace by piece.
Just here to show some love for LUA
"AAA"
I've a question to all the UI devs watching this talk. I'm a web UI developer, and I really want to explore working on games UI. Do you think those skills are transferable, and if companies would hire a web UI developer for a games UI development role?
Hi, I'm a UI programmer in games.
Honestly yeah! A lot of skills are quite transferable, but it will vary greatly on the technology used at whatever studio you're at.
Some studios do actually use HTML and Javascript directly within their engines, others use a totally custom system, or UMG in Unreal engine, Unity's out of the box UI system... etc.
There are so many different technologies that you could be using, but the core ideas are the same. The same principles, design patterns and architecture is still relevant in game UI.
Generally speaking, you may need to have a greater focus on low level concepts since we obviously care a lot about memory footprint and speed.
@@kae2018 thanks a lot! Yeah that makes sense.
42:10 - 42:25 I think you learned the wrong lesson here. The system was perfectly fine and made it a lot more fun for me to make builds. I know most players didn't interact with it but that wasn't because there was anything wrong with the system but instead you were incapable of giving the player scenarios where it was necessary.
What if some of your minigame side content like Muspelheim trials or Nifelheim randomly generated content depended on the player having something unique that was exclusively unlocked through such abilities?
What if you created excessively powerful unique effects for abilities unlocked in this way that also had a visual element. Lets say if you had enough cooldown and luck you'd be able to activate an Axe effect that summons 2 super strong friendly Draugr to fight for you. And then in a Muspelheim trial or somewhere else in the game, its necessary to have those summoned in order to complete the challenge.
Or maybe if you have enough Vitality a charge up chain whip would create an area on the ground where Kratos recieves healing over time.
You know totally unique effects that truly switch up the gameplay in a visual way. If a player merely hears about these abilities then they'll want to try em out and to see what works for them.
While it took some time to get used to the UI overhaul, i quickly went on to think Ragnarök was better in this regard than GoW 2018 in virtually every way.
Finally a games talk for me, here for it!
I'm very sorry to say this. But Ragnarok had probably the worst UI I've seen in my entire life. It felt like it was all over the place, not intuitif, and with way too much informations.
I really like the design in both games. Plus the use of icons, descriptions, and so many options are easy to find. And accessibility options are neat as well.
Fascinating to learn, how much goes into the making of the game
It's funny but I tought 2018 UI was better even in UX. Ragnarok's UI is very dark and has to much information.
the UI (not UX) but the aesthetic of the UI was a step down imo in the sequel. As others have mentioned the compactness of this UI felt bad, it might have been better UX and easier to use but when I first saw this in action i was very dissapointed with it evolution.
Damn. They fully gave a GDC about how gross Ragnarök’s UI is compared to 2018
34:00 If 60% of people switch away from the default... Why is that the default, then?
You set out to not repeat the mistake, and then you managed to still end up with a default text size that was too small for the majority? If that is not a huge lesson I don't know what is.
No offense but the menu was nothing to boast about.
a case where the UI got worse unfortunately here, respect the work that went into it but it was a miss for the most part
Yes
I highly disagree. I have played God of War 2018 right before Ragnarök released and the latter is much more streamlined and accessable for the player. Which makes it a superior user experience in my opinion.
I'm curious why this talk came about because my perspective is that GOW and GOWR's weakest elements is the UI. Spidermans isn't particularly note worthy and 2077 is stylised but as basic as it comes. Nothing wrong with basic. It's functional. The 1st party sony accessibility infrastructure is awesome. But the ui design for all these projects just seem an odd topic for ui.
It's a mess
It’s kinda lame
Horrible soulless UI with tacked on rpg elements. Just go to work at Ubisoft.
i didn't like de ui too, i think it is pretty overwhelming. But beign disrespectful at the team that work in that ui for months is not cool, u should check your maners after start writing shit to people.
@@andreherrera7165He is just what we have from worst about gamers in the internet.
They dont know to be respectfull, its just going to straight attack the devs, because attacking someone in the internet, is the only thing that they know how to "properly" do.
it has one of the worst and most soulles UI's I've seen lol
someone teach this guy about type reflection and tell him data is not stored in inspector. Apparently these "AAA" guys don't know about advanced tech
ok