Dear Esther. You may have heard about it. It’s the little indie from The Chinese Room title that was profitable in less than 6 hours. It had slipped below my radar until I started seeing the articles swarming the web, but it wasn’t until I saw the video above that I made the decision to buy and download Dear Esther.

I love indie games, but I don’t think I’ve ever played one that resonated with me as deeply as Dear Esther. I stepped into its world and was shocked to discover how incredibly immersive it’s island could become, the sound, the music, the visuals, everything. It drew me in from the moment I started. I can not think of a game that has told a story in such a phenomenal way. Even now, I find myself mulling over the experience. I wrote last week about how details matter, Dear Esther is a good example of why.

These two screenshots show how attention to details really makes a final product, and how the lack of attention to those details can change a game’s entire vibe. Details matter. Sloppy, easily corrected mistakes like [1] text that bumps or breaks borders, [2] text that is poorly aligned, [3] or clearly missing spaces serve to illustrate the difference between a solid well-constructed product and something that feels hastily slapped together.

Charles Eames once said, “The details are not the details. They make the design.” It couldn’t be more true.

The Kingdoms of Amular: Reckoning demo was recently released and over the last weekend I installed it onto my 360 eager to see 38 Studios’ contribution to the fantasy genre. The hype surrounding 38 Studio’s first major release has been quite strong. Comparisons have been drawn between World of Warcraft, Fable, and Skyrim. As a gamer who has played and enjoyed all those games it got me interested.

After years of swallowing my opinions on a game’s interface design during open betas (It’s just the beta!), it feels weird to be making a judgement call based on a demo, and I keep reminding myself that a demo is supposed to be a reflection of the final product. It’s what entices someone to purchase that game. So I feel a little more justified in critiquing Reckoning’s interface. There are a lot of game design quirks I could ramble on about but Inglorious serves to look deeper into game UI and I feel it should remain focused on the interface itself, and frankly, if this is the reflection on the final product, I am disappointed. I’ll explain after the jump…

The interface is an mess. It is a haphazard jumble of bad typography, bizarre inconsistencies, poor communication and mechanics lifted from other games. You’ll see conversation trees from Mass Effect, lock picking eerily similar to Fallout and Oblivion, and quick time events that feel more at home in a series like God of War. All of those things could be combined into an interesting and engaging product but Reckoning’s interface suffers from a significant lack of unity that begins in the tutorial and continues throughout the product and as a result the whole experience suffers.

One of the more bizarre choices that I kept running into was the game’s conversation menus. Menus. Plural. There are two of them. Half the time I’d receive a radial style menu similar to Bioware games, but then inexplicably the choices would change to a vertical list of options, sometimes in the middle of a conversation. While neither menu was particularly difficult to use, the constant random switching between two drastically different interfaces lessened the immersion, and in a single-player RPG immersion is a big deal.

There were other odd choices or just flat out bad communication: tiny icons floating in random locations with no labels, huge bits of legible text with smaller text below that was difficult to read even on a large television. The inventory menu opted for odd clues to inform you of what armor you were wearing as opposed to something a little more forthright. The font was so stylized I had to get off the couch and walk closer to the screen to read whatever note I found laying on the table. I installed the PC version to nab a few screenshots and see if these issues carried through, and found even more odd UI hiccups that were PC exclusives. The more I played, the more Reckoning was feeling like one of those hastily made Korean MMORPGs.

So is the game bad? No. I’d compare it to Fable, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the combat. The world also has that handcrafted style that feels like you’re playing a Disney cartoon, which can be pretty neat. But when it comes to the UI, there are a lot of mistakes that make what would have been a great game only good. Sadly that’s the real reckoning.

This summer while my wife and I were traveling on vacation we stopped at a small bed and breakfast in Anaconda, Montana. At breakfast we met a mother and daughter from California. When the topic of where we worked came up I mentioned I worked as a designer for Picnik. The mother and the daughter both became super excited and told me how much they loved Picnik, talked about their favorite features, and told me what they did with the product. It was great. It was a great reminder of who we were and really who we made Picnik for.

When were were told that Picnik would be shut down, that mother and daughter we met in Montana kept coming to mind. In the end it’s not about us, it’s about you. Our users. You’re the ones who really suffers with this shut down. Not Google. Not the Picnik team. Not our API partners. It’s the people, our users, that made Picnik what it was.

As a proud member of Team Picnik I want to say to all you amazing Picnikers out there, thanks. This shut down sucks. I know. I understand. I commiserate, but remember it was you who made Picnik great. It was you who made it exciting to come into work every day. It’s you who made me smile every single day.

Never stop creating.

Here’s an understatement: role playing games are complex. If you have any experience with an RPG you understand. The level of complexity packed into these games can be quite impressive. It’s a part of their appeal. Even action RPGs like Runic’s Torchlight still require inventory management, ability/spell selection, stat management and armor outfitting. Things get even more complex with MMORPGs and more classic single player RPGs and as a result of their complexity we’ve been left swimming in row after row of icons, windows, quest panels, conversation bubbles, guild management popups, and on and on and on.

The most complex are the games that seek to recreate the richness present in the old table top systems. These tend to be massive, with expansive worlds, full of rich cultures, unique characters, and deep engaging quests. As a result that level of complexity has, for a long time, left players scrounging in menu after menu. We’ve all been there, and more often than not, leading those games was Bethesda‘s landmark series The Elder Scrolls.

I will fully admit to being a fan of TES games. I have played them all, from Arena to Daggerfall, Morrowind and Oblivion, I have marked many hours in the world of Tamriel. I’ve been a wizard, a warrior, a thief and all manner of combinations in between. However as both a player and a UX professional I have always struggled with Bethesda’s lackluster UI. Frankly they just haven’t been good. Morrowind was a series of windows that were difficult to manage, Oblivion was clunky and frustrating living a bizarre partial existence between the desktop and console worlds. These interfaces have become so commonplace in Bethesda games that when they announced Skyrim, the next chapter in the TES series, I fully intended to be less than thrilled with the game’s UI.

I think I might be wrong.

Before I delve any further, I should point out Skyrim is currently in development, and still months away from release, so we may yet see changes. However the recent gameplay videos that came out of E3 have shown more and more of Skyrim, and while screenshots tend to forgo any HUD or UI we were able to catch a glimpse during a 14-minute interview with Todd Howard on G4. Not only were we allowed to see how the game looks and feels but how the UI works, and based on what I saw, it works well.

Instead of the heavy UI we’ve seen in the past, Bethesda has opted for a clean almost utilitarian design. Gone are the illegible stylized type, parchment backgrounds, and thick wood textured borders. Everything has been streamlined, and as a result the interface takes a back seat to the gameplay. You are in an out of the HUD only spending as little or as much time as you desire. Navigation through the UI is done from a central hub allowing users to move to four distinct sections. Magic. Map. Items. Skills. Each showing a downplayed UI style that gives hints at fantasy elements without being overpowering.

Even the HUD interface is downplayed. A simple and legible typeface has been chosen as opposed to some fantasy-esque script that we’ve seen in the past. Selecting a spell or more powerful shouts, binding weapons and interacting with characters are all done though simple non-intrusive menus. It’s all very Apple-like in form and style, and that’s intentional, in fact in a recent interview with Game Informer, game director Todd Howard had this to say regarding the Skyrim interface:

”You know in iTunes when you look at all your music you get to flip through it and look at the covers and it becomes tangible? One of our goals was ‘What if Apple made a fantasy game? How would this look?’ It’s very good at getting through lots of data quickly, which is always a struggle with our stuff.”

You can see that. While I am no fan of the iTunes UI, taking cues from Apple is a great direction for a game interface. Too often we see UI get bogged down in style and lack in function. Games become over-complicated to a point where they feel over-designed. (Just play some of the free-to-play MMOs out there and you’ll see what I mean.) Seeing Bethesda take this direction is a nice departure from the typical RPG fare and we should be excited about the direction towards a clean and streamlined interface.