Goodbye Radar

I want to apologize for not having left comments since your return, but I've also had a lot of real life things taking away my free time and I like to put a good amount of thought into my responses. As for how to best respond to them, I like the idea of you leaving a somewhat brief response to everyone in the comments section (as long as that stays a viable option) and addressing the comments/points you found the most interesting within the video. As for the subject of radar and UI, I agree 100%, and it was something I only became consciously aware of when you brought it up at one point on TruPCGaming's podcast. I think one of the reasons we've seen it become more prevalent as graphics have advanced and evolved is because there's now a lot more superfluous detail and objects within the environment. In other words, the basic visuals and sparsely populated environments of older games meant it was usually a lot more clear what you could and couldn't interact with compared to newer games. That said, I think this could easily be mitigated by some clever visual designs on the artist's part, and I really liked the way objects were subtly highlighted when you looked at them in Thief (it struck me as a nice balance between functionality and immersion). This goes a little bit off topic, but I think the over-use of radar in particular is to a greater or lesser extent tied to the fad of everything being an open world game these days. Maybe I'm just crazy, but it radar has only become more and more common as we've seen major releases get away from structured level design, and I've got to that it has to do with designers wanting to give players a crutch when they can easily become surrounded by enemies from any angle. In the end, I'd like to see more designers find clever ways to give players in-game tools or mechanics to help with things like these instead of just taking the easy way out with UI, radar, sonar vision, etc.

Since I know you're busy, just like the rest of us, try to respond to us in the most efficient and painless way you think will fit. This show is yours and I greatly appreciate hearing your thoughts on gaming, because it helps me solidify my thoughts on those subjects you talk about. The amount of UI elements can improve or hurt immersion depending on the context of the time period or technological level in the game. You mention the divide between games of old like Doom and newer games like Mad Max. The old games forced us to explore and use one's intelligence for navigation and progression in levels. Many of today's games are dumbed down due to the limited attention spans of younger gamers than us. For us who remember playing Doom or other games like it, we all deep inside miss the puzzle factor of game progression in some form. Star Wars: Dark Forces is one such game I remember playing a ton just to find all the secret rooms. Sorry...I think I rambled on about the UI/Radar topic....

I think if you address comments in the video it's probably best to just stick to 1 comment or rather the most common sentiment, I like responses read out rather than written because I like the interaction but it should only be a small part of the video. The prompts in games comes from casual gamers needing their hands holding, and they now dominate the market, most of these changes have evolved out of engineering new gaming experiences for people who have maybe never even picked up a controller before. Radar absolutely essential for competitive multi-player, I just got back into CS and bought CS:GO and the Radar is super important. However for RPG like games such as The Witcher I think turning it off is probably a great way to increase immersion, I've never done that but will definitely try it. I think how well that turns out will depend largely on the complexity of your environment and what other navigation options you have, if you get a full map and can navigate then that becomes part of the fun. I find games with a lot of height to the maps benefit from radars which indicate your height relative to the target (above/below) otherwise using basic 2D maps becomes a lot harder.