VFX/UI Design and the Aesthetic of Large Battles
Solmyr
Member
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:
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.
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.
3
Comments
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