10 Things You Didn’t Know About Video Game UI
1. Spatial Awareness
One other type of UI that’s become indispensable in recent years is Spatial UI.
Unlike the HUD types (mainly diegetic and non-diegetic), spatial UI exists within the game world to serve the player, but is completely unknown/non-existent to the in-game characters.
Spatial UI tends to be very prevalent in open-world games - anything from big shiny arrows pointing you to your next objective right through to icons above treasure chests.
Spatial UI tends to get a bad rap these days, with one of my friends telling me that he can’t play Assassin’s Creed nowadays because “the screen looks like icon soup”, but have you ever tried to do one of those goddamned “follow the important bloke through the market without him seeing you” missions without a mission marker? Without markers showing sight lines? Without big red chevrons telling you not to go that way, because it’ll insta-fail the mission?
Okay, so sure, nobody likes escort/follow missions in the first place (and designers need to stop implementing them, because I legitimately know nobody that enjoys these, or on-rails shooter sections), but if you have to do them, it’s better to have the lovely UI assistance.
“UI Specialists: Helping Escort Missions Remain Borderline Tolerable Since 1993”