Does UI need to be clutter?
by K. Michael Alexander
This is the beautiful trailer for EvE Onlines newest expansion, Apocrypha. Beautiful dosen’t really describe it. Kotaku’s Mike Fahey makes an interesting comment in his writeup that raised an eyebrow:
What the trailer most notably does not show is the first lonely hours spent wandering around the expansive universe, with nothing but the generally unhelpful help channel to keep you company, or the user interface that clutters up said beautiful vistas.
The user interface… that… clutters… up said beautiful vistas. EvE is a beautiful game, and its extremely complex which would require a complex UI. It’s interesting hearing this, it brings up a question, does UI need to be clutter? Is it possible to intergrate the user interface so that a user would never want or need to turn it off? What do you think?
Comments
For some reason it seems like consoles pull this off easier than PC games which doesn’t make a ton of sense except maybe the devs think they’re dumbing down the gameplay as well…? Definitely possible to have a beautiful UI that doesn’t mess things up, but it seems to be hard.