Horizon Zero Dawn: UI Critique
Roleplaying games take anywhere between 60–200 hours to finish. In this time, the player is taught dozens of game mechanics and how they all interact with each other. There’s aspects of combat, resource gathering, weapon & armor upgrades, inventory management, quest objectives, and the overworld player navigation. All of this has to be housed in the game’s UI in a way that not only makes sense, but also needs to be done in a way that doesn’t get frustrating after 100 hours of gameplay. No-one likes having their inventory space full when they come across a rare item and having to tap through six different menus to drop a useless weapon just to make room for the new one.
The game
So why Horizon Zero Dawn? I did one of these UI critiques in the past comparing two games that shared similar UI components, and mentioned that I’d like to do a RPG next. I find their complex systems a real challenge to present to the player in an intuitive and understandable format. Horizon is what I’d call a “RPG-lite”. It has aspects of roleplaying games, but is primarily an open-world game focused on its narrative and combat.
As I was playing through it, I found many interactions of how the UI interacts with the gameplay and more importantly, how certain UI choices directly impact player actions in combat and traversal of the game world. So I’ll go through a bunch of these in no specific order to break down what the game does well and where it doesn’t quite hit the mark in terms of its UI.
The little things
It’s important to start by acknowledging all the UI and gameplay decisions made by the developers that actually makes the game work. The best decision they made, in my opinion, is to not have a mini-map at the corner of the screen. It often feels so counterintuitive to create this sprawling, beautiful world and then have players spend most of their play time staring at a tiny little circle that tells them what path to take in order to get to their next objective. I had this issue with some other open-world games where I felt like I was just ignoring the beautiful landscapes was instead laser-focused on a tiny 2D map of the world.
Not in Horizon. I spent so much time simply strolling along and taking screenshots of the breathtaking environments. The only thing you get is an objective marker that tells you how far away your currently active quest is. That’s it. Nothing else is on the screen. If you’re at full health, you don’t see the health bar. If you don’t have a weapon drawn, you don’t see the currently equipped weapon and what ammo type you’ve got in it. The game wants you to look at its gorgeous visuals and it communicates this to you by stripping away all the HUD elements on the screen. It works extremely well, especially with the Dynamic HUD option turned on. This is a great example of how removing UI elements ends up increasing player immersion in the game.
Another seemingly basic decision that has a huge impact on gameplay is the choice to always keep Aloy (the player character) off-center to the left of the screen. It doesn’t matter if you’re walking, running, fighting, jumping, climbing, or sliding off a rope. Aloy is always on the left side of the screen. This is done so that when you enter combat and draw your bow, you get a clear visual of your target in the entire right side of the screen. All of that real estate is devoted to the thing you’re aiming at, which is another way the game tells you what to focus on in that moment.
The game has a huge emphasis on bow-and-arrow combat. There are other weapons too, but for the majority of the game, you’ll be drawing from one of your many bows and shooting arrows out of them repeatedly in quick succession. It’s clear that this choice was made to ease the tension of combat and provide players with a clear read on their targets. This decision also has UI implications when scanning objects with the Focus.
The Focus is a device in Aloy’s ear that can be triggered by the player at any time to scan anything of interest in the surrounding area. It brings up a 3D holographic interface around Aloy and displays informational UI over interactable items that you scan. It’s basically detective mode, similar to how Bat Vision works in the Batman series and how the Witcher senses function in The Witcher 3. Having this sixth sense allows the game to shove quite a bit of UI stuff into the Focus, freeing up the overworld game screen to be nearly devoid of any UI elements at all. Additionally, keeping Aloy to the left of the screen at all times means you can have massive floating UI elements that can also take advantage of the freed up space on the right of the screen.
In terms of the overworld UI, the only things you’re going to see are little icons projected upward from salvageable resources. These do a very good job of telling the player that there’s important items to be looted from the carcass of a machine they just killed. It’s loud and certainly feels like it’s screaming at you sometimes, but as a player, you want these things. Skipping them could mean missing out on certain upgrades and crafting items entirely.
For a game that has so many gameplay systems, it’s impressive that these are the only things that show up in the overworld. Again, this is only possible because the Focus UI takes care of everything else. Every time you’re lost or confused on what to do, just bring up the Focus and the essential stuff will conveniently be highlighted for you. The rest of the time, just sit back and take in the beauty of the world, a brilliant decision with a flawless execution.
The Main UI — Weapons Systems
There’s a lot to dig into here. Let’s start with the basic navigational design of the main UI. On the top, you’ve got your primary navigational actions that you flip through with L1 and R1. On the left, you’ve got your secondary navigation options for each primary option that you scroll through with up/down. In the middle, you’ve got your items, and when you highlight one of them, the right side of the screen is taken up by a detail view of that item. This is done well and properly conforms to player expectations all the way through. You’re never left confused about what menu or sub-menu you’re in.
Once you tap into a secondary navigation item, note how the labels for all the items in that vertical list collapse and you’re only left with the icon for that category on the left of the screen. It’s a smart way to embed the flow into the player’s mental model of how this UI works while keeping them informed about what section of the secondary navigation they’re currently in.
The weapons screen still isn’t very readable at first glance. The green/blue/purple color blocks indicate item rarity, and the circular position indicators on four of them represent the slot they are assigned to on the weapon wheel. I personally think sorting this list by equipped weapons first would make it a lot easier to navigate, as it gets a little messy when you have twenty weapons in here. At the very least, sort this screen weapon type or weapon rarity. After all, players won’t be using the starter weapons once they get their hands on the better ones. A simple system of assigning favorites or starring certain weapons would work just as well too.
Note that none of the weapons are labeled here. There’s a huge emphasis on iconography to differentiate what the weapons are, which it actually does a pretty good job of. There are multiple bows that all look different enough (even in a 2D flat icon) that they can be identified separately. The detail view has a nice visual of the weapon model, a description, some stats, and a quick view of the modification slots. A lot of information is being displayed here, but the UI handles it elegantly.
Another great thing about this screen is how easily it flexes to accommodate new information. This is a view of what the weapon details screen looks like when you’re buying or selling items to a merchant. The entire grid of weapon icons collapses down into a vertical list to make room for the new section on the very right, which houses information about the exchange value for the item. The details view and all the navigational UI stay the same.
In this case, we do have labels for each weapon. When you’re about to purchase a new weapon, you won’t know what it is just with an icon, so you absolutely need to know its name. The game’s intention is that players learn the name of a weapon when they’re purchasing it (most weapons are acquired by purchasing them from merchants in the game), and then memorize it by icon so that the game won’t need to list out the weapon name every single time the player comes across it. It’s a very subtle touch and it actually works very well. I didn’t even notice this little quirk until very late in my adventure.
The Main UI — Colors and gameplay effects
In the weapons UI, all the icons were white and had color-blocked backgrounds that denoted weapon rarity. In the rest of the UI, however, color is used as an elemental affordance. Blue is used to represent shock, yellow for fire, orange for explosives, teal for freeze, green for corruption, and purple for tear damage. The icons themselves represent the ammunition type and the colors represent the type of elemental damage they inflict.
A quick note on the visual design of these icons: they’re styled to look like tribal cave paintings (tying in to the lore), and a lot of the UI in the game follows the aesthetic. I personally think it looks fantastic. They really nailed the feel of the world very well with their illustrations and iconography.
The elemental color pattern carries over to the rest of the game’s consumables as well, but you can tell the colors start to fall apart when a bunch of them are used next to each other. The elements maintain their color coding when used in the iconography for freeze resist potions, shock resist potions, and corruption resist potions (antidotes). Shock traps use the blue and detonating bomb traps use the explosive orange. Weirdly enough, regular blast traps use the yellow for fire. Red is introduced as the color for health potions, and confusingly, a golden yellow (that’s again very similar to the yellow used for fire) is used for a health boost potion.
You can imagine how confusing this gets when you’re viewing these in a tiny format with all the icons placed right next to each other, which is exactly what happens in the game. Take a look at the bottom left hand corner of the screen below. That barely visible menu is what you use to navigate through the potions and pick the one you want. Because of the similarities in color, I have often consumed a fire resist potion when what I really wanted was a health boost potion. Same for the similarly colored freeze and shock resist potions. It doesn’t help that the icons identifying the elements are so minuscule inside the image asset. The colors fail to communicate their purpose here entirely.
Additionally, take a look at the ammo icons in the weapon wheel. We’ll talk more in-depth about the wheel itself later, but for now, focus on the icons. The elements are only colored on part of the wheel you’ve got highlighted. The Shadow Sling is assigned to the “right” side of the weapon wheel, and it fires shock bombs, freeze bombs, and fire bombs. None of the icons are colored until you’ve got that part of the wheel highlighted. Think about how unintuitive it can be to navigate through this wheel when you, say for example, come up against an enemy weak to shock damage and simply want to quickly glance at all your available shock tools to deal with the situation. The blue would work very well to highlight all the shock weapons, but instead, you’re left with just the base icon without the color affordance.
But still, the weapon wheel is big enough and you use it often enough that it isn’t as hugely noticeable as the issue with the traps and potions being tiny, similarly colored, and tucked away into a random menu of items consisting of other miscellaneous actions like throwing rocks, lure calling enemies with a whistle, and summoning your mount. I’ve talked to at least two other players who said that they didn’t use traps and potions during the entire game simply because that menu was too time-consuming and annoying to navigate.
This isn’t just a UI problem, it’s also a gameplay decision. The developers clearly intended setting traps and consuming potions as things that you do before engaging a fight, not something you do during it. But you don’t often get to choose sometimes. The game has enemies ambushing you unexpectedly or forcing you into a fight immediately after a cutscene with no time to prepare anything. Forget traps and potions in those scenarios. In order to even navigate through that menu, you need to use the left/right buttons on the D-pad, which means you have to remove your left thumb from the left control stick, leaving you standing still and vulnerable to attack if you were to do it in the middle of a firefight. Even if used as intended before engaging in combat, it severely limits the tools you have available at your disposal. The execution of this system could definitely have been a lot better than what we got.
The outfits menu uses similar color blocking for rarity, just like the weapons menu does. And again, they’ve got illustrated icons for each outfit. This is a very specific scenario where I think using the elemental colors would have worked a lot better than using the item rarity colors. Throughout the entire game, the purpose of outfits is to protect against different types of damage (elemental, melee, or ranged) or buff certain stats (like stealth). When you’re browsing through available outfits, what you want to know are the stats, not how rare it is or what its illustration looks like. Yet, the UI prioritizes the latter two over the former. Stats are displayed in the detail view of the outfit, tiny and tucked away, despite it being what players care about the most.
I think there’s a big missed opportunity here. They could’ve used a similar style of colors on the outfit illustrations just like they did with the ammo icons to represent the elemental resistances that each outfit provides. This makes it much easier to browse through the outfits in a situation where you come across an enemy shooting flames at you, realize you need protection against it, jump into your outfits menu, scan for an outfit with the flames icon on its illustration, equip it to get the fire resistance, and resume fighting the enemy. If you’re feeling sadistic, you might also want to try and consume a fire resist potion by navigating through that hellscape of a menu (🔥).
The modifications icons do a slightly better job at the color coding. They utilize both the rarity color blocking as well as the elemental color affordances in one illustration. At a glance, you can immediately tell how rare the modification is, and the icon does the job of telling you what it actually is. While some of them are still a bit too close to each other in terms of color similarity, it still succeeds in conveying the essential information to the player purely through the icon. I wish the outfit icons worked in a similar fashion.
All these little inconsistencies in the usage of color across the UI causes player confusion. At worst, it gets them killed in combat because they couldn’t discern the freeze potion color from the shock potion color. It’s amazing how something as simple as color can have huge gameplay implications if used incorrectly or inappropriately. Players build mental models and cognitive associations with little things like icons, colors, and UI conventions. Breaking any of these models starts to strain the link the UI is trying to forge with the player to explain its game systems.
Inventory Management
In a RPG, this is the screen that players will get frustrated the most at, in part due to the glorious game mechanic of limited inventory space. As a result, the UI execution of this screen becomes a real challenge for the designer. How do you allow the player to view all available resources at a glance? How do you navigate through them? How do you clear out space quickly to make room for new items? How do you ensure that players don’t accidentally get rid of an item that’s valuable to their journey?
In Horizon, this screen is treated similarly to the other inventory screens. You’ve got the rarity color blocking in a massive list of items, with an expanded detail view to the right. The detail view does a decent job of explaining where the item comes from and what it can be used for, which is always appreciated. And this screen has sorting! This is the one screen where the player can amass a ton of items, so you’re able to sort them all here. But it really begs the question, if you can sort items here, why can you not do so on the weapons and outfits screens? Those screens can also build up to a lot of items quickly, so it’s a strange choice to leave it out there.
This is another screen that would benefit heavily from adding elemental color affordances. Chillwater is a resource that’s used for literally one thing: crafting freeze ammo (arrows & bombs). Similarly, Sparkers are used for shock ammo and Blaze is used for fire/explosive ammo. It’d be great to simply glance at this screen and get an idea of how much elemental resources I’ve got. But no, we’re left with white icons that we again need to memorize.
For all its blandness, the screen does do a few things well. It allows you to mark items to sell later individually, which is a nice touch. It also allows you to sell or disassemble multiples of an item in one go. It’s shocking how many RPGs overlook this extremely basic functionality. It’s surely a welcome addition to the screen and does it very well without the slider accelerating weirdly as you push your control stick to the right.
My only complaint with the screen is that it houses quest items in here without telling you that they’re important. For example, hearts and lenses that you gather from machines are sometimes valuable to certain NPCs. But you don’t know this until you encounter them or somehow trigger that quest. So you’re left with them building up in your inventory until you’re full and decide to sell them to clear out space, only to realize two quests later that you needed that Stormbird Lens and Ravager Heart you sold. Having a separate section for these items would’ve been greatly appreciated.
Weapon Wheel
From the weapons inventory screen, you get to assign weapons to a slot on the weapon wheel. Up, down, left, or right. This is the only time you get to see this visualization of the wheel and what slots the weapons are assigned to. The actual in-game weapon wheel looks quite different. When you pull up the weapon wheel in-game, the entire game background blurs out and the weapon wheel shows up on the right side of the screen (while Aloy’s on the left, as always). There’s a nice scrim in the background to ensure legibility of the text inside the weapon wheel on nearly any environment.
With the in-game weapon wheel in game, you don’t see the weapon assigned to it in the slot, but instead see the ammo it fires. You get to pick between the different ammo types (up to three) that the weapon assigned to that slot fires. It’s weird at first, but you get used to it quickly and it actually works well. After all, you care more about what kind of ammo you’re about to fire, not what weapon you’re firing it from.
The center of the wheel displays a lot of information. It shows you the icon of the weapon, the weapon name, ammo name, stats for weapon handling, damage/tear/elemental stats, and the number of modifications installed. You could argue that this is information overload. The game doesn’t actually pause when you pull up the weapon wheel, but instead goes into slow-mo mode. As a result, players won’t actually be reading the ammo stats with the wheel pulled up. They’re risking certain death if they do. Instead, they make up their mind for what to switch to and then pull up the wheel to make that switch. Even if it is a lot of information, at least it’s not salient enough to distract from the large highlighted ammo icons, which is what the essence of this UI is.
Another thing to take note of here is that crafting happens in pseudo-realtime through the weapon wheel. The crafting ingredients for each ammo type are displayed below the wheel and you need to hold down a button to craft that ammo type while the wheel is still up. It’s a very painless, easy, and quick way to craft new ammo types on the fly. I normally hate crafting in RPGs, but this was so effortless to do that I didn’t mind it at all. Their goal from the start was to not have players open a menu to perform a frequent action like crafting. The game director himself says so in an interview.
A huge limitation of this weapon wheel is that you can only assign four weapons to it at any given time. Throughout the course of the game, you acquire a lot of weapons: slings, rattlers, tripcasters, ropecasters, tearblasters, and all sorts of bows. But the game severely limits your usage of all these varied weapons by only allowing you to use any four of them at any given time. You can hop into the inventory and swap out the assigned weapons in the wheel, but it’s such a tedious and immersion breaking task that I found myself making do with what I had equipped rather than bringing up the menu to switch the weapons assigned to the weapon wheel.
Weapon wheels can handle large amounts of icons to switch between with ease. Look at Prey’s weapon wheel, for instance. It’s a massive spiral that actually goes deeper into the screen as you hover over the items. This is one of my favorite implementations of a weapon wheel in games, because it does the job so well and is simply delightful to use.
The whole idea of a weapon wheel is to make switching between your available tools quick and easy. Horizon has certain weapons that are highly situational. When fighting a Stormbird, I like to start by immobilizing it with my Ropecaster, then rip off its components with the Tearblaster, then use my Shadow Sling to lob freeze bombs at it, use my Blast Sling to attach a few sticky bombs onto it, and then finish it off with a combination of Precision Arrows and Hardpoint Arrows. This is literally not possible without jumping into the menu and swapping what’s equipped on the weapon wheel. It’s hugely frustrating and definitely breaks the immersion of an intense fight.
Breath of the Wild also has a great quick-select menu. You hold a button on the Switch to bring up a linear, horizontally scrollable list of all items in that specific category that you scroll through and pick one of. This list does get messy to navigate through when you have twenty bows and thirty swords in your inventory, but at least there’s a way to switch without having to pull up the game’s menu and manually unequip and equip items mid-battle.
It’s difficult to tell whether Horizon’s weapon wheel allowing for only four weapons was the best available UI execution of a bad gameplay decision or whether it was a UI problem to begin with. Maybe they ran into issues not being able to segment weapon and ammo types properly into a scalable quick-selector. Maybe they wanted players to constantly be swapping weapons on their weapon wheel depending on the situation. Either way, it really should scale to allow more than four weapons and is yet another example of how a UI limitation directly hampers the gameplay experience in combat.
The Combat UI
On to the actual combat. The UI plays a huge role in how the player approaches a fight and what they choose to do in it. The game places a big emphasis on “knowing your enemy”, just like a hunter would. When Aloy comes across a machine she’s never seen before, she can activate her Focus to scan the machine. This presents a UI overlay in the Focus that highlights the components and weak spots of the machine.
As you hover over different components of the machine, the UI overlay updates to show you what the different components are, what they do, and what their weaknesses are. It’s a realtime scanner that’s a very cool concept in theory, but falls apart in practice. The machines are usually moving so quickly and are rotating side-to-side so frequently that it’s impossible to even read the content of this UI element before it decides to show you the information for a different component on the machine that you accidentally highlighted due to the machine’s erratic movements. You have to constantly keep moving the Focus in order to keep it static on a component.
If you’re up against one of the fast-moving machines like the Corruptor or the Stalker, it can be very difficult to even scan its components in the first place. A good solution here is to trigger the slow-mo effect when you’re scanning a machine (similar to how it happens when you have the weapon wheel up). You can’t fire weapons anyway when you’ve got the Focus up, so this would allow you to really study the machine before engaging a fight with it.
Thankfully, the game has a list of all the machines and its component details that you can reference at a glance while not in the heat of combat. They’re all in their undiscovered state at first, but they unlock with their silhouette after you scan them. The silhouettes are designed well here, with each one being distinct and identifiable enough to tell them apart.
Once you have a basic idea of what the machines look like in their profile view, you’re able to find them quite easily in this list. The emphasis on iconography and the large character models really pays off. I found myself referencing this screen a lot in-game to view machine weaknesses and what they do, since the in-game Focus UI is extremely unreliable for this task.
The detail view of each machine has a list of all its components in a list that you can scroll through and analyze. It lists out the weaknesses for each component and what the resulting combat effect is for removing that specific component from the machine by targeting it. I found this incredibly useful to learn about a machine and memorize its weaknesses and components. It truly made me feel like a hunter, as I was studying these machines and devising the optimal combat strategy to take them down.
As you scroll through the components, the component highlights itself on the body of the machine. You can barely tell in the screenshot above, but “Power Cell” is highlighted in yellow at the very top on the machine’s upper back. This is a useful way of spotting where the components are on the machine’s body, but a lot of them are so small and hidden that it’s really difficult to pick them apart in a profile view. Oftentimes, there are components on the underbellies of machines or on the other side of it entirely, which aren’t even visible in this type of profile view.
During the game’s launch, PlayStation released a whole bunch of promotional videos for the game highlighting certain machines and their functions in a stylish, 3D model that zoomed in and out of the machine parts as it explained their combat capabilities and vulnerabilities. They’re very cool and have impressive production values. Check out the videos for the Thunderjaw, Stormbird, Behemoth, and Snapmaw.
I seriously wish some aspects of those videos were in the game. They detail the attack patterns of all the machines, special abilities, and even provide tips on how to approach them in combat. At the very least, having a rotating 3D model of the machine would’ve helped out way more than a profile view. You could then just pan the camera around the machine and spot exactly where the components are, instead of having to guess their approximate location in 3D space from the highlighted portion of where they are on the profile view.
One thing the Focus scanning mechanic does really well is the weak-spot highlighting. Once you scan the components, the Focus highlights them in a yellow glow to make them visually distinct from the rest of the machine. The best part is that this glow lasts for about five to seven seconds after you turn off the Focus. This allows you to quickly trigger the Focus and immediately turn it off to get the weak-spot highlighting and then aim some Precision Arrows directly into those spots to really hit it where it hurts.
So you’ve scanned the machine, have learned about it, and know how to approach it. Then you engage the fight. The actual combat consists primarily of inflicting status effects on the machines (fire/shock/freeze, etc.), ripping off components to dampen their combat potential, and then increasing your own damage output on them by firing a combination of arrows and bombs.
In terms of the UI, there’s quite a bit happening to inform you about the various states a machine is in. There’s the yellow “alertness” icon that slowly fills up in red to inform you that the machine is either scanning for you (yellow circle), is aware of your presence (red circle), or is about to attack you (flashing red diamond). Then there’s the primary status indicator that slowly fills up as you inflict more and more of that elemental damage on it (that’s the shock icon in the screenshot above filling up), and when it fills up, the machine goes into that elemental state. Finally, there’s a secondary status the machine can go into, like being tied down by ropes or going into an incapacitated state where the machine is susceptible to a critical hit.
All of these circles have a countdown timer on them as well. An outer white line on the circle unfills as it counts down on the elemental status and the secondary status. A countdown timer also unfills on the alertness status icon as enemies stop scanning for you. And of course, there’s the HP bar of the machine itself. All of this seems like a lot, but it works surprisingly well. You train yourself over time to keep an eye out out for specific states of the status indicators, as they serve an important function to tell you that the tide of the fight is changing and that you need to need to move on to Phase II of the battle. They tell you whether you can get aggressive and run in with your spear or back off, keep your distance, and keep firing arrows at it.
The only complaint here is that the game doesn’t necessarily teach you to recognize these icons and all the various states they can be in. You sort of just learn it by trial-and-error, seeing what happens to the machine visually (or what they’re doing), and making mental connections to the updated states of the status icons. As a result, it can be a little confusing when you’re starting off, but you catch on fairly quickly over time. Overall, these indicators do a pretty good job of keeping the player informed about what’s happening to the machine, allowing them to easily make decisions about their next move.
I haven’t talked much about the rest of the on-screen HUD, but that’s because there isn’t much to talk about there. The health bars are fairly basic, the equipped weapon indicators work well, the level indicator is helpful, and the navigational compass does its job of guiding you where to go without being too distracting. I’ve already bashed the D-Pad menu on the bottom-left corner hard enough already. I do wish some of these UI elements would hide themselves when you’re in combat. I don’t necessarily need to know where my next objective is if my current goal is to take down this machine. Would definitely make the game feel a lot more immersive.
The Map
The map is a section of the main UI you’re going to be referencing frequently. Similar to other open-world games, the entire map is covered with a cloud fog to begin with and slowly reveals portions of it as you override the “towers” for each area, dotting the map with icons and points of interest. You see icons for campfires, collectibles, objectives, the “towers”, settlements, machine sites, and merchant locations. All of these are important and all of them are shown as simplified icons, which works well.
This can look like a huge cluttered mess when you’re zoomed out, though. At times, it’s been difficult to pinpoint where a quest objective is because of how tiny and simple the icon for that is (a diamond) compared to something like the icon for a campfire or a merchant. Thankfully, the map does have filtering options where you can turn specific categories of icons on and off.
Another thing the map does well is how it dynamically updates to provide more or less details as you zoom in. The collectible icons get a circular area effect indicating that the item in somewhere in the vicinity of the circle, but the game won’t tell you exactly where. Additionally, most of the icons are either hidden or greyed out until you actually “discover” them by going to those spots, which surely helps reduce the map clutter.
I should also mention that the visual fidelity displayed in the map is astounding. It’s an extremely detailed topographical map of the whole region, complete with environmental effects and weather systems. It looks very much like a high-resolution satellite image of the region. The only issue I had with the map is how much I had to rely on it. The lack of a mini-map was actually a good gameplay decision, but this meant that I had to constantly keep bringing up this large map to make sure I’m going the right way and that I don’t veer off into the wrong direction. This is especially important when you have waypoint pathfinding turned off.
Quests
This is a great example of an extremely information dense screen done right. There’s a ton of stuff displayed in the quest details screen, and it’s all handled well with good typography and clean layouts. You’ve got a full list of completed quests that you can reference to catch up on stuff you’ve done in the past, as well as a full list of sub-tasks per quest with completion indicators. The descriptions are short and simple yet highly informative.
Another aspect I appreciate is the level of transparency that the quests are treated with. You get a clear indication of what you’ll get for completing the quest in the Rewards section. I found myself constantly wanting to complete quests simply because the rewards were too tempting.
Other little details here are the icons for each type of quest. Main quests, side quests, errands, corrupted zones, Tallnecks, cauldrons, and collectibles all get their own little icon in the secondary navigation on the left side. The Hunting Grounds quest info screen as well is highly detailed with precise information down to partially accomplished objectives and what state you previously left the trial challenges in.
The biggest issue with the quest system for me were the weapon tutorial quests. In the strangest of decisions ever made, you need to have a tutorial quest active in Horizon Zero Dawn in order for it to be marked as complete. All of these tutorial quests have you doing really basic things with a new weapon you just acquired. Imagine my annoyance sixty hours into the game when I discovered that the tutorial quests weren’t giving me credit for the tasks I had already completed, just without the quests being active. Aside from this minor complaint, this whole system works pretty well in conjunction with its UI.
Other screens
There’s only a couple of other minor screens where there’s interesting things to discuss, so let’s wrap that up.
The skill tree upgrades screen is fairly basic, with a bunch of skills listed out that the players can invest their skill points in. I love that there’s a little video thumbnail to go along with each one, which either explains how the skill works or shows a live-action shot of the player doing something cool with that skill. It clearly and transparently demonstrates the value of acquiring the skill before you spend skill points getting it.
One thing many players have complained about here is that the branching skill trees are difficult to see. If you look closely, all the skill upgrades aren’t exactly linear. Some branch out to their neighboring skill and go down a totally different path. Many players miss this the first time around and assume that the entire upgrade tree is linear in nature. The UI is trying to maintain a clean and consistent layout, but the upgrades aren’t linear. Better visual separation at the branching points (or simply more prominent paths) could have easily solve this issue.
The game also has a very basic loading screen, where it shows you a progress bar and gives you some in-game gameplay tip or explains a bit of lore. I think there’s opportunity to do a lot more here. The game has a whole slew of collectibles in the form of vantage points, audio logs, holograms, and so much more. Oftentimes in-game, I would trigger an audio log and just stand there to listen to it, because I was afraid of a cutscene interrupting it or the audio log overriding other NPC dialogue, machine noises, and what Aloy is saying.
This loading screen would have been a great place to have you listen to those audio logs or read the lengthy text data points about the history and lore of the world. Later in the game, these loading screens get quite long, sometimes 90–120 seconds. Giving the player something new to do in that time rather than have them view a bunch of gameplay tips they’re likely already familiar with would’ve been a nice thing to see.
Yet another great idea for the loading screen would’ve been to create some sort of digital photo gallery that randomizes a screenshot you’ve taken in-game through Photo Mode and display that as the game is loading. The game’s visuals are absolutely stunning and Photo Mode is an amazing feature that allows you to take some truly breathtaking shots. This would’ve really solidified your connection to the game and its world instead of staring at a generic washed out backdrop as the game loads.
Overall Impressions
So that’s Horizon. It absolutely nails some of its interface elements like the navigation through the main UI, the minimal overworld HUD, and the status effects that machines are in. But it meanders into some ambiguous territory with its usage of mixed color affordances and limiting the number of total equipped weapons to the weapon wheel. And it handles certain gameplay elements quite poorly, like the D-Pad menu to consume potions or set traps and the Focus UI being difficult to use for viewing machine components while scanning them in the midst of combat.
Overall though, I really appreciate the level of transparency every piece of the UI adheres to. You always know what you’re going to get for doing a certain task. You’ve always got predictive information about what the effect of removing a machine component will be. You’re always pointed in the right direction and incentivized to complete actions with interesting rewards. Even if certain things require some getting used to, the player is very rarely left confused about what’s happening because the game always ensures to close the visual feedback loops with its interface whenever necessary.
I also love the aesthetic styling of all the UI, where the techno-futurist visuals in the Focus interface elements contrast nicely with the tribal cave-painting inspired iconography for all the weapons, ammo, and outfits in the game. The UI in Horizon makes excellent work of simplifying complex RPG mechanics into an accessible format for all players, even newcomers to the genre. This is something that it feels like the game overall is trying to do, and the interface certainly encourages it.
It’s easy for me to sit back here and critique the UI of this game as a player after having experienced the entire thing in one go. The reality for the interface design team at Guerrilla Games is that they had to work in conjunction with the gameplay systems as they were being developed. Some stuff gets cut, new stuff gets introduced, the combat system changes entirely, the leveling and progression are constantly being tinkered with, and the RPG mechanics are always in flux. Inevitably, the design system they came up with for the UI at the beginning of the project isn’t going to scale and handle all these new things being thrown at it. So what we end up with is a mix of ideas and systems that are all over the place in terms of execution.
I have to applaud the UI folks at Guerrilla overall because they seemed to understand player immersion, the one thing that matters most in a game like this, extremely well. They knew when to show the UI and when to hide it entirely. They went full-on minimalist with a lot of it, and even added a Dynamic HUD option that systematically hides and shows the HUD contextually based on what Aloy is doing. It’s very forward thinking in a lot of places, despite a couple of hiccups here and there.
If you’re interested in taking a more in-depth look into how Horizon’s gameplay interacts with its UI, I’d highly recommend watching The UI Show’s video on it. There’s also a Part II where he masterfully breaks down areas of improvement for the UI and prototypes a solution to some of its most problematic screens and menus.
I always feel obliged to apologize at the end of posts like this because it often feels like I’m bashing the game’s systems with no context about the constraints, deadlines, and pressure that the team that built it were working under. The interface teams for large games like this are often at the mercy of much larger gameplay decisions, which makes it tough to isolate bad UI executions from the best possible UI execution of a poor gameplay choice. As a player, you see the entire game as one experience, not isolated systems working together to create an immersive entertainment package.
I wanted to highlight how simple things like not using colors inconsistently can confuse players completely, or how limiting the number of equipped weapons you can have at any given time totally changes your gameplay style. I wanted to show that shoving random actions and items with combat gear like potions and traps in a tiny menu at the bottom of the screen with a frustrating control scheme can annoy players so much that they refuse to engage with those game mechanics entirely. Conversely, I wanted to show how removing the mini-map allows for a stronger connection between player and world, and how being transparent and detailed with the UI can actually incentivize players to complete quests and tackle challenges. These were some of the most obvious things that I couldn’t help but notice in my playthrough, and I hope it’s taught the folks reading this a thing or two about how interface systems are inextricably linked to gameplay systems.
This was Guerrilla Games’ first foray into the open-world genre and they absolutely nailed it. I loved my time with this game and exploring its world, lore, setting, and story. Given how things ended plot-wise, we can expect a sequel. I know the team will learn from what worked and what didn’t in this game and improve upon it in the next title. I wish them the best of luck!
