Why do so many modern games have tiny text? (8min) https://www.eurogamer.net/why-do-so-many-modern-games-have-tiny-text
That's an issue that comes again and again in a lot of games, it’s worse on local coop, for example, Tiny Tina Wonderlands makes it next to impossible to read any weapon description, subtitles are minuscule and so on. I’ve never understood why we could not have a setting to make the font bigger when needed #Game#Accessibility
@stephaniewalter
OMG this is a huge problem for me. I'm mostly deaf and can only play with captions. Often the captions are so tiny I can't pay attention to anything else but just trying to read the captions. Impossible to play and read at that size.
‘Developers create UI on large, high-definition monitors right in front of them. This is a context in which few of us play.’
‘“You have some players who are playing on a Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck,” Cran says. “PC players are probably a couple feet away from a monitor that is 4x larger than a handheld device, and then you’ve got console players who may be 10-15 feet away from a 70 inch television…”’
@stephaniewalter Even on mobile this is a pain. Android for example provides sized units (sp for a player's preferred font size set at the system level) and non-game frameworks use them extensively. But I haven't found an engine that's wrapped it in any way for devs.
@stephaniewalter I remember playing Dead Rising on 360 back when we were in the transition from CRT to flat screens, and it was genuinely impossible to play because I couldn't read any of the tutorials.
Currently as someone who just got into using XR glasses, this problematic practice is becoming an issue again. As we move into VR and AR experiences in the future, this is a problem that will need to be adjusted and will need new design standards to be met. I already can't read stuff on the XR glasses when it is too small, but the idea of expecting a user to have to physically move closer to something in the future to read it will be a major downside to most experiences if this doesn't get adjusted.
I don't know why devs don't just give us font size options. I get it might break some styling, but because I can't read, your game is broken anyways.
@stephaniewalter also green and red text can be hard to read for visually impaired people with green/red correction glasses; I've seen that in ie. Transport Fever 2 and some other economic games,
@stephaniewalter this irritates me a lot, and I have good eyesight. Some games are literally unplayable, even big studio ones.
The reasons are simple. Devs don't focus on this. Games usually have pretty custom text rendering engines. UI and especially text scaling is difficult to implement and test, things tend to overflow. Players have different screen sizes and sitting distances, where developers and play testers usually have one....
@stephaniewalter I noticed this back when Fortnite first came out. My kid played it on both iOS and Xbox, and I couldn’t believe they make no adjustments to text sizes on the phone.
Nintendo does a better job of balancing text sizes so they work well on both the Switch’s screen and TVs (at least for first-party games), but it definitely suffers from this as well.
@jens this is exactly the issue, even if you have a big TV, you still don't have your nose on it, so font should be adapted. Thanks for the link, very interesting read
@stephaniewalter@jens Lot of the game designers/developers have large (TV size) displays on their own desks, but the distance is way smaller. Lack of accessibility playtesting is common these days, since public beta testing became more important for most. 😓
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