The Evolution Of Video Game UI

Weapons

Who needs to reload? There's a number of bullets on the screen, I should be able to fire that many times before I need to pick up more, right? Well, that's the case for many 90's first-person shooters, and a few modern shooters too. Obligatory DOOM footage here. However, not all weapons can fire from bottomless pockets. Occasionally, you will have to reload. So how will you know when? Back when light guns were popular in arcades, and on home consoles too, the usual way to show how many rounds you had left was to show you a row of depleting bullets. Either you had to reload afterwards, or that was all you had to play with.

Legendary shooting games such as Duck Hunt, Time Crisis, and House of the Dead gave you a visual representation of the number of rounds you had left in your weapon, or even the number of rounds you had end-of! As the first-person shooter genre boomed, this more visual mentality did carry over somewhat. Titles such as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare had a visual representation of the number of rounds left in your magazine, but counting up to thirty individual vertical lines proved more difficult than it needed to be, so future titles opted for a simple numeric value. Some titles even had your ammunition value present in-game on your weapon, from Halo: Combat Evolved, all the way through to Apex Legends. The concept of information present to the player also being present in the real world of the game is also something developers like to do to shake up the usual formula of the heads up display.