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Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

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Re: Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

#21

Post by cloogshicer »

shash7 wrote: post #20

Dota 2 is an incredible and vastly underrated experience of having a godlike UX. Problems: - Fast paced game, both keyboard and mouse are heavily used, with over 60 apm usually - Incredibly team based game. It is a team sport, even if you're good, if the rest of your team is bad, you will lose. - Players can't talk using the chat, usually. Because of the high apm requirement. Solutions: - Press alt. Almost every butt…

Are you talking only about the UI? I can't really comment on that since I haven't played Dota enough. But in terms of clarity, other MOBAs (HOTS, LoL) are miles ahead. Just a few examples of what I mean:

- Little portraits show which hero is which in the mini map

- You get a loud and obvious ding and visual effect when you get turret aggro

- This is subjective but the Art direction is way better. In Dota it's often very difficult to discern the players from the background.

Re: Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

#22

Post by matheusmoreira »

zubspace wrote: post #19
throaway46546 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfu_WZ6p51U

This reminds me of Unreal Tournament '99. Would be cool if there were announcer sounds in Outlook, if you send many mails in a short timeframe like this: https://youtu.be/C3_ToT14lt0

Nothing beats Unreal Tournament announcer! In UT2004 it goes even further and you can even configure it with different voices!

https://youtu.be/UPIxHddkNgc

https://youtu.be/pJeSwlmhoPw

Re: Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

#23

Post by bhaskarbb »

shash7 wrote: post #20

Dota 2 is an incredible and vastly underrated experience of having a godlike UX. Problems: - Fast paced game, both keyboard and mouse are heavily used, with over 60 apm usually - Incredibly team based game. It is a team sport, even if you're good, if the rest of your team is bad, you will lose. - Players can't talk using the chat, usually. Because of the high apm requirement. Solutions: - Press alt. Almost every butt…

Dota 2 also has the best sound design of any game I've played. You can close your eyes and still roughly understand what's going on.

Re: Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

#24

Post by definitelyhuman »

vvanders wrote: post #11

Having worked in both domains on the technical side one thing they share in common is no one really knows what makes something "fun" or makes UI/UX "intuitive". There's no sure-fire formula and the most successful approaches I've seen require extensive experimentation and iteration. To take that further the most successful teams weren't the "smartest" or the "hardest working" but ones that had the fastest iteration l…

Totally agree - the definition of done is really hard in creative work. Having a culture of refinement with the courage to ship early and often is a powerful tool to hone in on great results

Re: Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

#25

Post by paulmd »

antiterra wrote: post #2

That said, one of the killer features of the tactical fps game Valorant is the sound you hear when defeating another player. It’s incredibly pleasant and satisfying in a way I haven’t experienced before, to where it feels a bit like a psychological conditioning reward. Despite being a somewhat similar noise, the effect is the polar opposite of the Windows string hit. If done in quick succession it builds to a little…

Battlefield 1 has a rather excellent one as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2QxpSoYF18

Re: Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

#26

Post by GuB-42 »

vvanders wrote: post #11

Having worked in both domains on the technical side one thing they share in common is no one really knows what makes something "fun" or makes UI/UX "intuitive". There's no sure-fire formula and the most successful approaches I've seen require extensive experimentation and iteration. To take that further the most successful teams weren't the "smartest" or the "hardest working" but ones that had the fastest iteration l…

Usually, it means good tools.

I don't work in the video game industry personally but tooling that allows for these fast iterations seems to be a common theme among success stories.

And if you look at the composition of a large game dev team, sometimes, tooling makes the largest part. I mean for programmers, not artists, obviously.

Re: Video Games Inspire Great UX (2019)

#27

Post by kirkules »

cloogshicer wrote: post #21
shash7 wrote: post #20

Dota 2 is an incredible and vastly underrated experience of having a godlike UX. Problems: - Fast paced game, both keyboard and mouse are heavily used, with over 60 apm usually - Incredibly team based game. It is a team sport, even if you're good, if the rest of your team is bad, you will lose. - Players can't talk using the chat, usually. Because of the high apm requirement. Solutions: - Press alt. Almost every butt…

Are you talking only about the UI? I can't really comment on that since I haven't played Dota enough. But in terms of clarity, other MOBAs (HOTS, LoL) are miles ahead. Just a few examples of what I mean: - Little portraits show which hero is which in the mini map - You get a loud and obvious ding and visual effect when you get turret aggro - This is subjective but the Art direction is way better. In Dota it's often v…

The last point is extremely important. I tried DotA for a while after playing a lot of LoL and had the same content, but it's not just discerning characters against the background that's difficult, but even distinguishing one character from another. Not that it's hard to tell them apart when looking at them, but in LoL characters are so distinct in how they move and in their shapes that even with tons of skins that you aren't even familiar with you can tell out of the corner of your eye which character just appeared on screen, while looking at something else.

I'm convinced this is part of how world of warcraft distinguishe[d|s] itself: characters aren't just cartooney, they're distinct. Zones feel entirely unique because of the appearance at any point.

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