Playing through Wanderlust: Rebirth has rekindled my thoughts about forcing so much irrelevant feedback at the player that it actively blocks the on-screen action the player really cares about. The most glaring flaw I can find with this game is that the RPG elements are way too in-your-face.
Every single point of damage dealt and received is displayed on the screen around the characters; the font size is overly large and often drowns out the characters on-screen, making it difficult to see the action. Worse, though, are the giant “comic words” that appear during combat. Every block is accompanied by a huge comic bubble screaming “Block!” at you. The bubbles are so large and prevalent I constantly lose track of my character and enemies on the screen. It shouldn’t be such a chore to tell what’s happening, but it is - and sadly this is a major factor in the challenge level of this game.
Every single point of damage dealt and received is displayed on the screen around the characters; the font size is overly large and often drowns out the characters on-screen, making it difficult to see the action. Worse, though, are the giant “comic words” that appear during combat. Every block is accompanied by a huge comic bubble screaming “Block!” at you. The bubbles are so large and prevalent I constantly lose track of my character and enemies on the screen. It shouldn’t be such a chore to tell what’s happening, but it is - and sadly this is a major factor in the challenge level of this game.
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| You can't even see my character sprite, can you? |
Note: I recently discovered that Wanderlust allows you to disable many of these obnoxious notifications in the graphics options menu.
Again I wonder if damage numbers, status bars, and action “comic words” are really necessary in any game, though it seems to be a mainstay of the action-RPG genre.
However, some games manage to display damage statistics in an important, meaningful, and understandable manner (e.g. any Final Fantasy title). Are we keeping damage statistics around just for the sake of tradition? Notice that popular, successful titles like Call of Duty, Fallout, Skyrim, and Batman: Arkham City have ditched the “damage numbers” motif in favor of more intuitive forms of feedback. As characters sustain damage they begin to visibly show signs of wear: blood, torn clothing, significant changes in posture and movement speed, and more.
It's an interesting question: numbers can provide an immediate sense of reward (by increasing or decreasing them appropriately), but often that same sense of reward could be created by using a more abstract method (on a decreasing scale of "feedback immediacy" from health bars, to changes in behavior, to visual signs of wear and tear).
ReplyDeleteI think the appropriateness really depends on the realism that the designer is going for. For an arcade-type game like Wanderlust, I think the campy numbers really fit (though I agree they're not implemented as well as they could be). In a game like Skyrim, they would be completely out-of-place and would break the player's willing suspense of disbelief.
More than relief from "damage numbers", I would like to see better, more noticeable forms of feedback developed and introduced. One of my chief complaints with both Torchlight and Diablo III (from my time in the beta) center around the lack of feedback -- your character can die before you even realize that you're taking damage. That's the real travesty; they provide feedback that doesn't truly have grounding within the game and just contributes noise to the player.