The User Experience of Video Games (inventory & quests)
I recently came upon a short article on Kotaku about a Smart Solution To A Common Video Game Problem. After reading the article it quickly dawned upon me that something so simple could be overlooked so easily. Something most people don’t usually think about, yet it’s so important to our experiences in a gaming.
@patrickklepek from Kotaku says:
How many times have you wanted to buy a new piece of equipment and been short one random piece of crafting material? It’s annoying, especially if you’re not sure where to track down what you need. InHorizon Zero Dawn, the “create a job” option will generate a quest to give you the items to buy the equipment.
Which leads me into my first Medium article I’ve ever written. So please forgive me as I’m still new to this thing. I wanted to talk quickly about creating better UX in certain areas of gaming and why it’s important. While UXer’s learn a lot from the video game industry about telling successful stories. I feel a lot of improvement can still be made.
Being a gamer myself I can quickly think of a variety of examples of instances in which I’ve been extremely frustrated with the UX of in game inventory systems, quests and game play.
What did certain icons mean when no legend was visible or accessible? How do I access quests or manage the quests I’ve picked up during my game and why can’t I sort them. This is especially frustrating when playing open world games where you can collect a large amount of quests and items. How do I sort through the the hundreds of items I’ve picked up and how did I know which was useful and which was not? While many companies tackle these issues, many also do not.
A frustrated user will not be a happy user (gamer in this case). Creating a game is not the same as creating a mobile app or website in general. Successful apps generally pride themselves in how easy their product is to use, but can be are slightly different. Video games are suppose to be challenging and tough. This is where some confusion seems to come in I think.
While video games are meant to be challenging and rewarding upon completing difficult sections in the game, that doesn’t mean the player needs to be frustrated. Challenging and frustration are not the same thing. Any challenges in the game should come from fighting difficult bosses, enemies and collecting rare items, achieving hard to gain goals and other similar objectives, not from having to spend 30 minutes sorting through your inventory after every 2 hours of gameplay. That’s just bad UX. The less time a player needs to spend in the inventory the more time they can spend actually playing the better parts of the game.
The less time a player needs to spend in the inventory the more time they can spend actually playing the better parts of the game.
Useful or useless?
The inventory system is often neglected in game development. While I understand the inventory system plays a small roll in the large scale of game production I think it’s an important feature to spend time talking about. The inventory for the most people will determine how your user will interact with the world, which will inevitably affect how they play the game. Too often do players have useless items in their inventory they know nothing about because the game gives them little to no indication of it’s usefulness. Is this item rare? Should I keep it for later or can I sell it? What ends up happening for a lot of players are by the end of the game they have a large bulk of useless items they’ve been holding onto because they have no idea what to do with them.
What ends up happening for a lot of players are by the end of the game they have a large bulk of useless items they’ve been holding onto because they have no idea what to do with them.
What could video game companies do to relieve this sort of problem? Well, for starters a lot of companies already have solved this. They implement a “sell junk” or “sort by junk” function while the player is in their inventory or shop trying to sell. This fast tracks the game and saves a lot of time without the worry of the usefulness of a lot of crap they pick up. You can also indicate how rare items are. Giving an item a “junk” icon can easily relieve confusion on it’s uses.
Sorting items
For some odd reason many companies don’t put into a lot of thought into how players can easier manage their inventory. While many companies do a good job at making items easy to sort with filters and tabs, a lot of them seem to ignore it all together. There also comes a very large frustration when a person accidentally sells a good item they’ve been saving.
The ability mark items as “favorites” to prevent being junked, sold, or tossed away will save a lot of players some frustration down the road when they maybe have 10 broadswords in their inventory but with all different status. Being able to mark the best one to “save for later” or as a “favorite” would be extremely useful in this case. The ability to prevent players from selling these marked items would helpful as well. Also being able to sort and sell items by “value” would also be super useful and would be the UX of item management much better too.
Everything I’ve said above can also be closely applied to any other management system in the game. It could be quests, items, characters, mini games or even maps. The point is the player should haven’t waste time trying to figure out how and what is valuable in the game.
Learning to play a game should always be intuitive even if it’s a complex game with a new style of gameplay.
Worse case scenario the player will leave the game
That doesn’t mean the player will rage quite and just decide to stop playing all together. Although that wouldn’t be an impossible outcome either and but it certainly would be the worst outcome.
But more realistically the player will leave the game to look for solutions else where. They couldn’t figure out if X item is useless or rare, or how to find a quest they picked up recently but isn’t clearly visible in their list of 50 ongoing quests they have (sometimes the quest is named something ridiculous so they pass it when skimming through their quest list, later to find out it was there all along)
Some quest just simply gives no details or indication of how to accomplish or finish the quest. This is a common mistake among developers to assume the player is actually listening to the dialogue. Quests should always include full details or hints on how to pursue the quest after it’s been picked up. Otherwise players might be left clueless or go search for the internet for solutions.
Why is leaving the game to find answers elsewhere bad? In UX you want your user to be fully immersed, or as much as possible anyways. The moment you force them the product the immersion breaks. This is the opposite of what you want, you want your product to be so smooth and intuitive, any questions or concerns you might have can be quickly resolve inside your product and on the spot. You have to keep your user in the game for them to be immersed.
Some of the best games play smooth right off the bat with no frustrations or 2nd thoughts on what certain elements mean, you just “know” despite never playing this game before. And like everything UX, the best user experiences are the ones you never had any problems with because those problems where found and solved before the product made it into your hands.
the best user experiences are the ones you never had any problems with because those problems where found and solved before the product made it into your hands.
Conclusion
Although I’ve only touched the tip of the iceberg as far as UX goes in video games I’m not here to provide all the solutions. That’s the developers role to find those solutions. I just wanted to take a bit of time to talk about some of the problems and why they are important to be addressed. Hopefully now people will talk a bit more about the UX that goes into video games since it’s not something most people really think about.
I’d love to hear what bad UX experiences/frustrations other gamer have had in their past. Feel free to drop me a line.
