Saw this pop up, and it rings true for me at least. I like some numbers in my games, and not just the washed-out kind where they might as well just use a color instead.
And like he says, it’s fine in games like DOOM 2016. Doomguy needs no numbers, his numbers are “Shotgun” and “More”.
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They use Borderlands as the poster child for too many numbers on screen, but I think that was intentional. The beauty of endgame Borderlands is seeing the ludicrous amount of bullshit on screen at one time.
I get what they mean. I can only see 1,297,948 flood my screen a certain amount of times before I ignore the numbers. It was hopeful where it came from, RPGs and TRPGs are much slower games than shooters and therefor the information is digested easier. But 30 minutes into a game of borderlands and or Destiny and I’m not looking at those numbers anymore. They spill out everywhere and so fast, and by endgame they really arent changing all the time. So whats the point? Extra dopamine when the shot lands?
The only numbers I dislike in games are the kind that fly off things when you attack them. That shit is visually annoying and I hate every game that uses it without an option to turn it off outside of old turn-based JRPGs. So I totally understand that.
They’re not meaningless, per se, but most of the time you also have a gauge indicating health and it’s far less distracting than a ton of numbers flying off obscuring the action.
Not to mention, sometimes they actively take away from the art direction. You can have a game that’s clearly going for semi-realism and yet keeps damage numbers flying off like it’s a comic strip, which doesn’t fit whatsoever.
The strangest, funniest mixture are the games built off comic licenses that employ a semi-realistic style with damage numbers, when a better combination would be stylized so it would all fit better artistically.
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Maybe they spent too much time with the Encyclopedia of Numbers?
THAT’S NUMBERWANG!!!
