If there is beauty in its art, why not also in its delivery?

There are lot of neat things in Destiny, one shining part of it is the UI. So, I am going to take some time to talk a little about it because I’ve learnt some things that I might consider when working on future projects.

In case you don’t know anything about it, Destiny is a first-person shooter game released in September 2014 by Bungie, the guys that are responsible for the earlier Halo series. The series have been a success despite some heavy criticism from reviewers and gamers, it delivers massive success boasting 20 million players as of September 2015.

So what is so great about the UI in Destiny? When I first boot up the game, the first thing I did after the in-game cutscene was to open the menu (in fact I always open game menus every time I am playing a new game). I immediately thought that Destiny’s UI looked and felt very different than many other console games in the market or at least the ones that I played. I have seen something like it before but not in console games, it was very minimalist, very flat and how you interact with the menu was something you would see more often in PC games, rather than its console cousin.

Plan C

Yeah, you use a cursor to navigate through the UI in Destiny. Cursor?! in a Console game?! Cursors are mainly used by PC with a mouse and keyboard, console video games never use this type of navigation. In fact, many PC games that are ported to the consoles change their UI to best suit the machine in mind. Now I am thinking; “why don’t we do this more often?” because although I found it weird to navigate at the start I soon become accustomed to it and quickly saw the benefit. Destiny is a quite complex game, there are weapons, armour sets, faction reputations, game modes and many more that needs to be displayed to the player. By having cursors, the game can fit as many elements without having the user to furiously tap on the d-pad to get to the desired UI element. This also gives the designer the ability to design without the constraints of having to place UI elements in vertical and horizontal rows allowing freedom to design aesthetically pleasing screens. They did a few smart things to make the cursor work on a controller pad; the speed of the cursor is quite fast which means you can get from one end of the screen to the other pretty quickly. The cursor also slows down whenever it hovers on an element which makes it super easy to land the cursor on the desired element.

There is always time to explain

Story-wise, Destiny is having a hard time to explain itself. Its plot in convoluted and story progression is very hard to follow, but fortunately the UI is a different story. Every element in the UI will have a pop up when your cursor is on top of it. whether it is a faction emblem, a gameplay node or character gear. It will tell you in detail what rewards you will get by participating in a game mode, how rare your armors and how powerful your weapons are.

Every UI element in Destiny is consistent, take a look at their colour language, white is always common, green is special/special ammo, purple is rare/heavy ammo, yellow is an exotic or super ability and at no other point do these colours appear as a UI element

Different text sizes are utilised to convey the importance of information, so players can skim read the information being displayed with speed. This is a standard use that we see in newspapers and magazines in particular but it is very nice to see this in a video game.

Super good advice

The style of the UI is very minimalist and most of the elements are square and flat coloured. My personal thoughts on this is that the design works on two main fronts; the absence of any sort of motif and texture in the UI create absolute clarity in the information the game trying to put across. It also allows the beautiful art the team have created a chance to shine without having the UI elements fighting for dominance on screen. This idea of clarity also get carried over into the HUD, one element that I personally though was a stroke of genius from the Destiny UI team was the reinvention of the minimap (if this was done before prior to this game then I am really sorry, this is the first time that I have encountered it). It does not display every enemy in the radar like other games but instead it shows the general direction of their whereabouts. Being an avid FPS player, I rarely look at my minimap because of the natural second to second pace in a shooter game, especially in a player vs player environment. What this minimap gives me is the ability to only glance at it and I will know if an enemy is coming and from where very very quickly.

The last words

So what is the take away from all of this? The UI design choice in Destiny was nothing new, it was done before but it was not tried and tested in the console market which sets it apart from other games in its genre. Its interaction was very new in console and its aesthetic choice was seen more in designer websites than in video games, yet I feel that everything gels together and felt right.

Personally the biggest take away from this for me is that just because it hasn’t been tried yet does not mean that it wouldn’t work, Destiny is the proof of that.