www.RamblingAboutGames.com is a place for me to share my in-depth analysis of the games I play. In particular, I want to focus on breaking down why specific parts of a game do or do not work, and try to generate productive takeaways from every game I talk about.
Since WoW’s launch in 2004, players have been able to customize just about any part of their UI, and in the years since, the community support that has emerged has been incredible. Not many games face this kind of customization support, and it has come with a lot of ups and downs over the years. So let's talk about where we’ve come from, and where things are going.
Read MoreFF14’s UI is very customizable, but coming from a game like WoW which has a fully customizable UI, is a world of difference. So I thought it would be fun to look at the top 5 UI mods that I would install if FF14 let me.
Read MoreOne phrase you will often hear if you hang out in gaming circles for a while, is that “there’s no wrong way to play a game”, but I don’t necessarily agree. I think one of the biggest successes in Devil May Cry 5 is that they did a good job of guiding the player down the path that is the most fun to play.
Here’s how they accomplished that…
Read MorePreviously, I posted talking about the UI/UX of Red Dead Redemption II, and came to the conclusion that, it wasn’t really worth trying to fix or analyse. But after thinking about it, and talking to friends and colleagues about it, I eventually came to the conclusion that perhaps the game’s pause menu was one area that actually was worth a look. So here is my attempt at redesigning that menu from the ground up.
Read MoreIn theory, a UX designer’s job is to solve the problem of “It wasn’t anybody’s job to think about this from the player’s point of view, and now we accidentally have an unintuitive game that’s hard to understand, and a chore to play”.
But what happens when that’s the point?
Read MoreAssassin’s Creed Odyssey sits in an interesting position wherein, it is so very similar to it’s older brother, Assassin’s Creed Origins. So many of the screens, systems, and mechanics are inherited nearly exactly, and so it serves as a fun comparison to look at what parts of it’s UI it decided to change, and why. So hey, let’s do that!
Read MoreOctopath Traveler is a game that clearly takes a large amount of inspiration from JRPGs of yore, but the question is, when we’re dealing with a genre that historically has stuck to very menu-heavy, straightofrward interfaces, how does this translate into a modern game's UI/UX experience? Let’s take a look at Octopath Traveler, and see how it fares.
World of Warcraft and I go way back- all the way to 2006 in fact. And while it's been several years now since I actively played, Blizzard still manages to pull me back for every new expansion, and the upcoming Battle for Azeroth is no exception. A new expansion means setting up my UI again for the umpteenth time, so I wanted to use this as a chance to walk through how and why I make all the UI decisions I do.
When God of War (2018) came out it set the gaming community ablaze, and as it sat at a 98 on Metacritic, I was convinced that maybe there was something worth looking at here. As it turns out, God of War 2018 is really good video game. The thing that most impressed me was that, I felt pulled into the game world in a way that most games never achieve.
So, I thought I’d take a look at how they achieved this…
Read MoreHi, I like stuff
