0:25 TRIANGLE STRATEGY 
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this company also decided to get the rights to a bunch semi finished games from the 90s and issue takedown requests for the roms while claiming to be preservationists. i guess it takes a truly malevolent force to revive glover from hell
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Yāall seen any of this āElden Ring discourseā they got going around? Cause I have, and boy do I want to rip out my own spinal column through my asshole
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glad the era of commercial preservation is here. iām fucking sick of the anthropocene.
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u know piko is serious about gameās preservation because theyā¦ *checks notes* put Eliminator Boat Duel on nesflix
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Escalating rictus grins meme
I think holding a button to run that is also the dodge button sucks, who wants to fight
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no that part definitely sucks
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Oh no hereās the flashpoint
Honestly relieved this isnāt about drawing a false dichotomy between accessibility and difficulty see above re: holding button to run
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Crucial detail here being that the first two are UbiSoft devs and the last one there worked on Horizon Forbidden West
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UX design is becoming a thing at big studios and itās very hard for a discipline whose primary axiom is never letting any users fall away or become frustrated to work nicely with any real game design interesting in emotional responses. They only play well in big studios to the extent that their designers are already worn down into shiny people-pleasers.
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Should the button that opens the map probably also close the map? Yes.
Should the map have dozens of icons for every activity? Absolutely not.
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Right, thereās not a clear area where UX should be working and where they shouldnāt. Control schemes and UI design have traditionally been worked out between game designers and the UI designers, soā¦should UX own the UI controls but not the gameplay controls? Weāve been seeing them claiming tutorial stuff, which isā¦fine, to the extent that everyone hates building tutorials and is bad at it but Iām skeptical that UX-trained people will be better at it than the gameplay team.
I need to be careful, too, because Iām probably being territorial on this!
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As someone who used to work in UX,
UX is real but itās an inflated, overvalued, psuedoscientific discipline that can offer useful insights in many contexts, but can also get way too far up its own asshole and dumb things down or make things harder to use instead of easier. It also tends to be uncomfortably tied to marketing in a way that frequently diminishes its own potential for positive impact.
I canāt imagine most UX researchers/designers bringing any positive insights into game design UNLESS theyāre willing to discard a huge amount of received wisdom and orthodoxy. Very few people in UX are willing to admit that sometimes āgritā, difficulty, or confusion in the user experience can be a good thing. I think to work effectively in games, you would have to take some of the useful āways of seeingā from UX research/design and turn them toward aims that make a videogame more enjoyable, instead of simply smoothing out the peaks and valleys into a bland, palatable mush.
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Like, I want a UX person in the room if theyāre designing a vending machine, or a piece of software I have to use at work. I donāt want them in the room if theyāre going to obsess over how to make my experience in a videogame as frictionless as possible.
Granted, I should say I have no experience working in gamedev so itās very possible I donāt know how UX people actually tend to function there. Iām speaking based on my experiences in academic software design and at conferences.
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Most UX people in games have a role of making a series of very well-thought and pretty wireframes and mock-ups that wind up looking in-game like something that makes them want to tear their hair out and then how often the back-and-forth of it follows until it looks more like what they wanted depends on how much theyāre individually valued by their team.
The person Iāve also seen come the closest to legit being assaulted in the office was a UX designer who changed the mockup in the project wiki after the engineer had already submitted the code for the UI and then loudly complained in a meeting that the UI wasnāt to spec.
ETA: The best experience with UX/UI in game development Iāve had personally was when that was just owned by the game designers, who basically had their hands in everything.
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Yeah, itās ripe for contested ownership
DX > UX
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