"Everybody's a Critic When It Comes to UI" (Patreon)

This was going to be my latest video.

The idea and title has been in my head for years, ever since exactly what I detail in this video's opening about the launch of Halo Reach for PC in December 2019…

It's such a good jumping off point, not only because I have an amusing personal story attached about Halo Reach PC's launch and a certain Discord server, but because this re-release of such a beloved game can be directly compared to the original as the extremes of good and bad UI design.

The rough idea was to explore exactly why the original Halo Reach was a peak of UI design, yet for some reason wasn't copy and pasted by the rest of the industry, who are now copy and pasting Bungie's following franchise in virtually everything and much to the annoyance of many players, both creativity and functionally.

I was going to talk about how Microsoft went from innovators to imitators, not just the influence but the realities of mobile devices, and talk to some UI designers to give credibility to my claims.

That's what they're supposed to do, right?

Now I am being facetious, I didn't call up said UI Designer and friend for confirmation bias, but I didn't expect after our 3-4 hour conversation to feel so… lost and overwhelmed.

It really hit me just how little I as a player actually understood User Interfaces from a development perspective.

I say development and not design, because not every UI developer is a UI Designer.

In-fact, one of the things I learned from our call is that if an article uses "UX Designer" that any developer worth their salt will be unable to take it seriously.

In reality for many projects there's…

UI Designers, the people responsible for the UI's layout, not exactly the final product being released.

UI Developers, the people who are actually putting the designed UI into the engine.

And of course the UI Artists…

Sometimes a game will have someone who is a UI Designer, Developer, and Artist. Sometimes they'll have a team. Sometimes they'll have a lead. Sometimes they're in a Waterfall development pipeline where the whole project's made in a linear cycle, and other times it's an adaptive development where everybody's making their own minimum viable products that will hopefully sync up.

Regardless, like so many aspects of game development, it's not consistent, and it's not uniform.

To ask that everything just copy and paste Halo Reach's UI doesn't take into account the differences in development.

There's then the modern development conflict for big games, that a user's interest, isn't a business' interests.

It's absolutely true that certain game producers have demanded from their UI staff that the in-game store take priority over traditional menus, and in a free to play game, where that's the only method this game collects income, that demand is impossible to fight.

You couldn't copy and paste Halo Reach's UI into a free to play game, because that design would go against the very goals of a free to play game that needs to attract a small but important percentage of its audience to turn a profit, or even just stay afloat.

There's also the matter of contrary to popular belief, the sheer amount of different ways to play these games.

Modern Warfare 2 alone has its single-player campaign, spec-ops cooperative modes including missions, survival, and raids, the core PVP, alongside its Battle Royale Warzone, the extraction based DMZ, and the Battlefield-esk Ground War.

Combine that with the customization, battle-passes, and settings, and portraying all of this via Halo Reach's tabs would lead to lists as long as your arm.

What I experienced in this conversation was like exploring an abandoned home in pitch black, slightly mapping a layout in my head but still bumping into walls, and having no idea where the exit is.

To drop the metaphor.

I don't have a point yet.

I could make a video about my personal frustrations with UI, but after this conversation, honestly… I don't want to.

There's already so many videos on the subject, instead, I'm now more interested in telling the developers side of this story, more building a platform to share their perspectives which even in the most basic forms, is widely unknown to the general gaming public…

But to do that, I need to know my shit.

I need to talk to a wide variety of people, find a link between all of their perspectives, and build a diverse yet cohesive narrative…

And I'm not even 10% ready for that yet on this subject.