Just look…
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This.
I remember watching some WoW gameplay (I actually never played wow until a year ago, played for a lil bit) and thought, how the hell you can see something when 100000 of things are on the screen moving with 10000 skills doing stuff and so on. But after playing it, I didn’t find anything that confusing at all. The inexperience is the biggest reason why people find stuff “difficult to see” or shout about “visual clusterfuck”.
Once you play a game for a reasonable amount of time you learn to see things that is important and ignore all the other stuff that is happening. The same way it is when you play Diablo games. If you watch someone play, it seems so abysmal, but when you play it by yourself everything feels ok and nothing is overboard as it seemed before.
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Funny you say that, cause I’m (legally) blind.
But yeah, I never had any problem getting used to the UI and the only time I have a problem with the chaos that happens on screen is when I’ve been staring at my computer screen for about an hour or 2, cause that’s when I usually take a break from gaming as anything bright becomes blurry.
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The only major problem with BB is the extreme amounts of super bright colours. It really wears people out.
Also, with all the flashy hud peices, people might not prioritise correctly.
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The general consensus seems to be too much “visual clutter” and being “too repetitive”. Like a lot of people who have played this for a long time, you get used to filtering out all the effects and seeing the important stuff. For new players, it must be a complete visual overload, and is too much for them to cope with.
Maybe there needs to be a slider that allows for UI scaling and maybe the character guns need to made smaller? Not sure what GBX would do with regards to particle effects, as I have no idea how that system works or even how it deals with particles in general. I remember Total Biscuit saying that there needed to an option to turn the visuals down so it wasn’t so “in your face”. (EDIT: Turns out there is already an option to scale the UI… my bad :P)
As for the repetitive stuff, maybe there needs to be a global health nerf across the board. If things are taking too long to kill, then give them less health? I’m sure that has been suggested before, and I’m pretty sure people have said it’s a bad idea, but it’s the simplest thing that GBX can do without re-building the game from the ground up.
…One of the things missing that BL2 has is that good ol Friday evening family event.
My daughter and I enjoy replaying the Tina dlc, but she won’t even try Battleborn.
She also enjoys Left for Dead 2, but I don’t enjoy playing that one.
Battleborn would be really awesome if it had a better Phoebe or Toby dlc for family and friends.
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I don’t play Overwatch, and I don’t like it (or Blizzard in general) all that much. That said…
Overwatch:
- Information is coded using four dominant colors - A cool blue and white, for neutral information, a saturated red – used to emphasize immediate threats, and mustard yellow – used for time-sensitive information, such as cooldowns and point captures in-progress.
- The objective summary at the top is made up of simple, rounded shapes. Objectives achieved are filled in, objectives not yet achieved are transparent.
- Whites are typically used with some level of alpha transparency throughout the design.
- Available skills are presented with simple, emoji-esque icons, using translucent white as negative space, and transparency as the positive.
- The character being played is represented by a full-color portrait.
- Ammunition is represented by a fraction, set above a complicated silhouette of the player’s weapon.
- Most text blocks are presented at an italicized angle.
Battleborn:
- Four colors are dominant - Light grey for all neutral information, saturated green for all friendly information, saturated red for enemy information, and dark grey as a backdrop. Note: Green/red have been changed to Blue/Orange in Versus modes since the Winter Update.
- The objective summary at the top is made up of simple, angular shapes, plus complicated miniature icons representing each Sentry.
- There is no use of alpha transparency – all HUD elements block the viewport.
- Available skills are represented using complicated icons rendered in light blue and magenta, loosely contained in a circular frame.
- Ammunition is represented by a vertical bar, that depletes towards the bottom of the screen – or in Toby’s case, charges up away from the bottom.
- The character being played is represented by a full-color portrait.
- There is a minimap in the upper left, peppered with small icons.
- Using Toby adds another HUD – an animated cockpit that aggressively frames the viewport.
So, in my opinion:
What Overwatch’s HUD does right:
- Color coding is very consistent, using less-impactful colors to represent the variables each player will be personally managing, and saturated colors to represent external elements that threaten the success of the entire team.
- Lots of transparency and translucency. The less the viewport is blocked, the better.
- Rounded edges on almost every element. They lead the eye around the frame gently, without sending it to the edges of the screen.
- Creative use of transparent areas to denote negative and positive space, such as objective markers becoming inverted as they fill in, and skill icons being traced in transparent relief.
- The italicized typeface visually separates text from the horizontals and verticals of the environmental design.
- The subtle arc to the bottom area of the hud sets it away from the viewport, as if it is floating – the MCU Iron Man effect.
What Overwatch’s HUD does wrong:
- Too much visual push/pull caused by offsetting the size of numbers and delineating them with thin lines, which make it difficult to read information at a glance – see the ammunition, HP, and personal sentry count for examples.
- Enemy/friendly player identification. With the rest of the on-screen elements having such a precise layout, simple red text and lifebars above the heads of enemies betray the design language of the rest of the HUD.
- The complicated, busy icon representing the player’s primary weapon.
What Battleborn’s HUD does right:
- Bars everywhere. HP, ammunition, objectives, all represented by bars that are easy to read at a glance.
- The typeface used adjacent to each bar. The numbers are easy to read, and clearly related to each bar.
- The circular XP meter, with current level contained within. Compact, effective.
- Opaque HP/Shield meters above the players. They aren’t the best out there, but the unified presentation of the bars beneath saturated text keeps them legible in combat, which is the most important thing.
What Battleborn’s HUD does wrong:
- Too many saturated, loud colors. The environments and characters are already lousy with bright colors, and the HUD just exacerbates the issue.
- Opaque HUD elements that block the player’s view and unintentionally delineate the screen into regions.
- Sharp diagonal edges create leading lines that drag one’s gaze to the bottom center of the screen.
- Angular forms and circular forms and detailed icons are mixed in ways that break up the visual flow of the entire design.
- Compounding the above problem, the detailed icons – the little Sentries, skill graphics, et cetera - don’t do the best job of representing their respective gameplay element.
- To elaborate on the above, looking back at the Overwatch screen, if a player went in knowing nothing about Symmetra, they could probably assume that her first skill is some sort of little thing she deploys, and the other skill is some sort of shield. Yet in Toby’s skill tray, only his Proximity Mine reads at a glance – it’s most likely an object you deploy, that has some sort of radial effect. His Ult graphic is a bit more vague – it could be him firing a big beam, or exploding, or just powering up. And his shield? I’ve never read that as a shield. The shading makes it looks like some sort of thick glass panel, with something going into or coming out of it. It’s a strange graphic, and I still have trouble correlating it to the actual shield that gets deployed.
- And that last icon, the one that typically represents a Battleborn’s passive ability, serves little to no purpose. It’s rarely used for anything worthwhile. Stuff like Benedict’s Divebomb cooldown shows up there, yet cooldowns on similar abilities such as Thorn’s Burst Propulsion show up near the targeting reticle. Inconsistency abounds.
- Back to other elements that don’t work well, there’s the Grand Theft Auto-style minimap. It’s ants crawling on a cookie. I know what all the information means now, from hours of play leading to an understanding of the related mechanics, but when I first started, it was just a lot of distracting noise.
- And last but not least, we have Toby’s HUD on a HUD. This is a character-specific problem, to be sure, but I find it to be the most frustrating, glaring example of Battleborn’s zany visual decisions. I mean, bright bloomin’ neon yellow? Seriously? And while all that kibble and fluff imitating the HUD on a fighter jet might be funny as a Lore tie-in, it provides no useful gameplay information to the player. Slap the animated pixel-art Toby on top, and it is, hands down, the most pointlessly busy on-screen device I’ve seen in any video game to date.
Things that both games do wrong:
- Character portraits. I’m in favor of a simple representative icon, or at least a simplified portrait with reduced colors (see Street Fighter V). We already know which character is being used by all the other visual cues, so adding a full portrait needlessly breaks up the visual design.
TL;DR, I think Overwatch does a much better job of not overwhelming the player with too much on-screen information. It sticks to what you need to know, then lets you read the rest from the environment. Battleborn gives the player too much information, providing on-screen cues for things that the player could relegate to their own mental timing. It’s certainly not the poster child for “less is more.”
I sympathize with the devs of both games – designing a good UI is very hard, and from what I’ve seen, there’s currently an understandably significant demand in the game industry for experienced UI artists that do the job well. Battleborn’s not the worst offender out there – I’d stop playing if it was – but I think it provides many examples of areas to improve in the next UI iteration.
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I honestly didn’t know it had been changed because I had to change it to that right after launch…I hate having color deficient vision
My sister did the exact same thing. I wish I had too – Blue/Orange is a lot better. I just wish the change carried over into PvE.
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Perfect job, a like is not enough
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A slight derailment but a friend of mine forgot I’m red/green color blind so he was laughing when I was dodging allies as well as enemies because I was having trouble differentiating. So sometimes “can you not tell your team from the enemy?” Isn’t a jerk question
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While transparency looks pretty, you realize how bad of a design choice a white transparent hud is once you try to look up in a bright map and can’t see any of it.
Otherwise, a nice breakdown. I still don’t think either of the games look too busy, personally.
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I would think then, at that point, you implement some sort of blending engine into the UI. Put a translucent grey outline around the white text, and give it the equivalent of a image editor’s “Darken Only” blending mode. Against white, it shows up, against anything darker, it doesn’t appear.
Haven’t looked to see how all that transparent stuff looks against bright areas in OW. If it just washes out, well, that’s lame.
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You’d think something like that would have been included when they first drafted that UI but… no. The objectives huge ass non-transparent icon is also floating in the middle of your screen whenever you face the objective.
Though to be frank, both of these things have received complaints… And have gone untouched for a year while Blizz is too busy making content for their cash gra— “Events”.
I don’t know. What I got out of Battleborn was my moneys worth, what I got out of Overwatch was “Please give us even more money” as a promise for “future content”.
I’m just hoping that at least 2K would let Battleborn die in dignity rather than trying to milk every last penny out of it before throwing it in the trash. Which, looking at Evolve, is exactly what will happen…
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What I got out of Hearthstone was “Please give us money” as a promise for “more cards that will balance the gameplay.”
At least with Magic: The Gathering, I got little physical pieces of collectible cardstock.
Blizzard… meh.
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While I strongly respect your well-worded post - please refer to your initial comparison of pictures between OW and BB.
Simply put, the OW picture has like…3 characters on the screen and the BB picture has maybe 13. If OW had minions cluttering around…can you imagine what the OW screen would look like with 12 minions dancing around?
So this picture is a poor representation at implying OW is less cluttered visually than BB. I mean, obviously it is because it has no minions.
As I alluded to earlier, this streamer the OP is referencing is a CS : GO gamer.
This is what your regular CS GO screen looks like :
Obviously someone coming from “this” is going to start spazzing out when they see any type of MOBA FPS screen. There’s nothing you can do for these people. I take zero stock in anything they say as far as insulting the “cluttered UI” because theyre confusing a MOBA-esque FPS for
imagine any of these screens with 8 minions clustering around all doing their own seperate attacks. And all 8 of them simultaneously taking damage and blowing up. Put that in any of these screens and it’ll look like a clustef*
The thing BB has going against it is that it’s really in a genre unto itself at this point in time so gamers have no reference point to compare the UI to anything other than what they are used to in FPSs such as Siege, CS : GO, OW (which has no minions, etc), Destiny, Doom, the list goes on. So when gamers come into BB thinking of a UI theyre comfortable with in first person shooters, they have it in their mind’s eye that the UI for any “good” FPS should look like a game like freakin Battlefield or COD. It’s a “dead man walking” scenario right out of the gate for BB in this case.
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@loving-hatred @Qmzn you folks know you can change the team colors back right? I was told by a dev once it was changed to those colors because they are popular in other big MOBA games. But if you prefer the old red/green (like me) or want to try one of the other color combinations (as i think there’s a couple) you can! There’s also options to customize the way your map works too! This isn’t really well explained anywhere and I was saddened when the change over happened but very happy when i found out i could change it back!
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That’s the thing – I like the blue/orange. I wish I had switched to those from the start.
Unfortunately, with no option to switch the PvE colors (unless I’m missing something), it’s kind of confusing when jumping from Versus to Story/Ops.
Except I focused entirely on the UI elements, and how they relate to anything that happens in the environment. I picked that screen because it was from the official site, and showed the HUD and Toby’s secondary HUD well. My choice had very little to do with the visual effects going on in the battle. In fact, I would have probably preferred a shot overlooking the bright green/teal parts of Overgrowth.
I’ve watched enough Overwatch to see what a full team-on-team brawl looks like there, and I’ve played plenty of Battleborn. The problem I have with Battleborn doesn’t have as much to do with what’s going on during a battle, but how all combat information is visually presented to the player at all times.
For example, let’s say a player is fighting minions in the lane, and Nova announces that their first sentry is under attack. The player has to look on the minimap in the corner (or open the full map with a keybind), and look for the position of the little skulls swarming the sentry.
However, wouldn’t it be just as or even more effective if the Sentry just applied a reveal debuff to anything attacking it? With that, plus the audio cue, one wouldn’t really need the minimap at all. You could just turn around towards the sentry, see the outlines, and probably have an easier time planning a counterattack.
Furthermore, why do we need to know which big Shards are available, really? A good player derives their availability by the state of the match timer, plus how their team controls the map. What about who owns what buildable? Is all that information that crucial to advanced gameplay, or is it just more little dots of noise?
What about Toby’s weapon charge? Why is it on the reticle and the skill tray in the corner? Why the redundancy?
Why do I need to know what buttons activate which skill? Shouldn’t I already know my controller settings? Why isn’t there a toggle to shut that off?
As you say, Battleborn exists in a new, hybrid genre. As I see it, this was an opportunity to take a fresh, minimalist, perhaps even modular approach to the HUD. Instead, someone decided to shove as much information on the screen as possible, in a rigid layout. Don’t forget that, right before launch, Gear loadouts were on-screen as well, at bottom center. They’ve dialed it back, and with good reason.
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Changing the color options in the settings should change it for both… I’ve always used Pink/White for my Team/Enemy colors and it always used them for both PvP and PvE.
Unless I somehow imagined that happening.
I’ll try setting it again. Maybe I need to flip it to a different color, then back to Orange/Blue.
I am playing on PC, and I’ve noticed visual options tend to get stuck in certain states. It might be a platform-specific issue, and I may have to go as far as wiping the config files to get it unstuck.