VFX/UI Design and the Aesthetic of Large Battles

Solmyr

Nothing kills the spectacle of a massive battle faster than a sea of nameplates, or excessive use of flashy VFX. Both of these are pretty unintrusive in most games, but when you're dealing with an MMO with large-scale raids and literal siege battles, it might be wise to be sparing with both UI and visual effects.

There are several approaches to deal with nameplate clutter, but here's a couple unrelated ideas off the top of my head:

• Full names only show on party members and friends.
• Distant nameplates collapse into dots. Very distant nameplates don't show at all.
• Names remain collapsed until you point your cursor at a player.
• Options to scale nameplates. This could also help readability for some monitor setups.

For VFX, the solution is pretty simple; be conservative. A giant blast of magic should have some fancy glowing particles, but a sword swing should not. If you need to accentuate animations, there's plenty of options besides big eye-catching neon streaks. Blood, geometry smears, motion blur, air distortion, sparks, etc.

TL;DR - Make nameplates hideable and keep flashy particle effects to where they make sense. Otherwise huge battles tend to look ugly.

Asgerr

Or the easy option which FFXIV has had for ages: choose what you want and toggle it on and off, including the VFX of your own party or your own skills.

Solmyr

Asgerr wrote: »

Or the easy option which FFXIV has had for ages: choose what you want and toggle it on and off, including the VFX of your own party or your own skills.

That would be a great way to handle VFX, more customization is almost always a good thing. In the specific case of nameplates though, I think a more deliberately designed solution would be preferable.

Izil

Asgerr wrote: »

Or the easy option which FFXIV has had for ages: choose what you want and toggle it on and off, including the VFX of your own party or your own skills.

This is the most fair option as some people apparently love "over the top" vfx. Personally gonna turn the scale to minimum as im melee i want to see whats going on up close in these big battles

Scarbeus

Names on yourself and others should just be customisable. Some people might want to see all of them, some people might not want to see any. Allowing customisation is the simple and easy way to go.