I’ve played a few games for xbox one and get annoyed at how difficult it is to read alot of the text on the GUIs. It happened in The Division and the biggest culprit is GTA V. They cram way too much text on the screen at once. It works OK on a PC when you are sitting a couple feet from the screen. But even for the PC, people had to resort to creating mods to increase the font size. But for console games you may be 6-8 feet from the screen. Very difficult to read what is on the screen. Navigating the options menu is a nightmare for me.
So I wanted to create a quick test to see how small is the text?
To do this I took the screenshot.
I the opened up MS word, choose a similar font. I then increased the page width until it fit the dimensions of the game snapshot.
I then typed the text in the screenshot into MSword and adjusted the size of the font until it aligned with the game snapshot. The results:
Using Arial Rounded font.
The notifications are a size 7 font.
The phone messages are a size 5 font.
So what is the minimum recommended font size for text? Some research indicates it is around 11.
Any less then that then it becomes difficult to read.
Source: http://pielot.org/pubs/Rello2016-Fontsize.pdf
Conclusion: The font sized used in GTA V is are as low as 1/2 the optimal size for reading comfortability according to studies performed by researchers.
I believe you’re supposed to play this on a BIG screen. Like those big plasma tvs. That’s why it is small. With good eyesight it would be readable. There’s also good chance that the gamer will move closer than TV viewing distance to that screen.
It’s definitely poor design; at the least there should be an option to scale the text up. Although console games seem to be allergic to anything resembling options.
My guess is it’s a side effect of the amount of text they need to show.
My current main project has some instructions it has to give. In terms of getting the content across to the player “add more words” is definitely the easiest solution. The catch is that more words either take more space, or need to get smaller.
We’ve spent a heck of a lot of effort making sure that we don’t have to resort to loads of tiny text. The thing is that we’re a small team who can iterate quickly on things. Something the size of GTA, on the other hand… well, I can understand why they might decide they’re ok with small text!
They don’t want to obscure the game play with large point font.
Maybe from a technical perspective large font is not desirable on TVs because the pixel pitch is higher and less dense resulting in text that is not as sharp. And since console games don’t have anti aliasing, large font will look blurry and blocky if you sit too close. And the 4:4:2 chroma sub-sampling of most TVs makes text look lousy whereas most monitors have 4:4:4 chroma.
I would guess it’s an artefact of handling different screen sizes poorly. UI scaling is notoriously difficult to get right.
If you simply scale the UI size up, you get a situation where the UI takes up a ridiculous amount of scene space. No need to have an inch high font on large TVs.
On the other hand if you keep the pixel dimensions the same, UI elements can get very small on screens with a high resolution.
Even setting the UI height to a certain fixed real world distance is perilous. Players sit different distances from the screen. Meaning what’s readable in my system might not be readable in yours.
So you probably just stumbled across a screen size, DPI and distance that the devs didn’t account for.
I do agree that an options menu is the most straightforward solution to the issue.
I experienced this same thing on Mass Effect 2 and 3 on the 36 inch HD TV I had the PS3 hooked up to. Granted I was laying back away from the TV about 16 feet and @ 36 inches - the text was difficult to read.
I also noticed this on the first generation blu-ray movies. The CC/text was horribly small - on the same HD TV, and this was sitting mere 5-7 feet from the screen.
Since I upgraded 2 years ago to 57 inches - I don’t have this problem.
It’s also funny how you can’t adjust the screen brightness when you’re in online mode. You have to go to story mode, change the brightness, then go back to online mode to change the brightness. That had me spending bout a half and hour trying to search for the brightness control in the settings when I was in online mode.
The DeusEx games drive me nuts with this problem. It’s actually one of the main reasons I only played the latest one for 20 minutes or so and haven’t gone back to it yet. We have a 50" LCD TV on the living room floor for daytime use, but since the projector screen is 150" the seating is at the optimal distance of 18 feet and game text on the LCD TV is almost completely illegible. For some reason I didn’t have trouble with The Division.
My guess is that they’re rarely play-tested in a realistic physical setting. It’s rooms full of devs, designers, and testers with screens on their desk right in front of their face. There is also the likely fact that a large percentage of their customer base is probably some kid in his room, also just a few feet from the screen.
