inglorious

I am going to sort of talk myself out of a job here. I walk into this topic fully realizing what I am going to say. I want to talk about EA Sport’s Fight Night Round 3. The game has been around for a few years and recently EA Sports have started releasing some slick videos for the series’ next entry, Fight Night Round 4. Two weekends ago I had my family visit, and my father and brothers were introduced to Fight Night Round 3. As we are all fans of the sweet science they quickly latched on and seemed to really enjoy the game experience.

After observing them play and seeing how quickly they took the the controls, I realized how revolutionary Fight Night is to not only the fighting genre but to games in general. The entire game can be played, easily, with no HUD. That’s right: none. During the fighting sequences there are no on-screen graphics, no timer, no health meter save the action itself. What’s so stellar about this approach is that EA Sports communicates to the player all they need to know based on feedback, animation, sounds and camera effects. If a boxer is hit hard and could drop he begins to stumble around, the camera darkens at the edges, blurs slightly, and sounds become muddied and distant until the player recovers. If a character tires he sweats more, hunches over, and punches slower. If his is cut, he bleeds. Faces swell and sweat flies.

It’s very effective and it really does wonders to the entire play experience, it draws players in, passersby would look at the game (which boasts some of the best graphics ever seen to date) and could easily feel they were watching a fight on PPV. My families game skills ranged from non-gamers to casual to hardcore, yet without reading instructions, and with only a brief overview of the controls they took easily to the gameplay. It was amazing to watch.

EA Sports has included as an option the classic fighting game HUD that you can turn on in the options menu. Few days after my family left, I was brushing up on my Fight Night skills, I figured I’d check out the classic HUD thinking the extra data would help me. (Plus, I am also sort of into the whole HUD/UI thing.) I turned it on. Upon my next fight, I found the classic fighting game interface with health bars and power/energy meters floating in place.

I ran into a problem yet it is what I found the most interesting: the game less enjoyable with the HUD turned on, my eyes would go there and I would miss blocks and miss opportunities to strike at my opponent. The HUD became clutter, and a distraction, I lost the fight. EA Sports had done such a good job communicating to me all I need to know though non-typical means when the classic HUD was switched on my experience was hampered rather than enhance it. It’s no wonder the default setting is “off.”

Does this work for every game in every genre? No. However it’s an interesting lesson learned. Every UI designer should always be exploring new avenues to communicating vital information to the user without distracting from the action. As Antoine de Saint Exupéry said in his famous quote, “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”