Press X to Squint

[Hulyen]

Poor font choices always bother me. Why settle for pretty but unreadable, when you can have both?

I'm waiting for the day when an 'edgy' rpg uses Papyrus as a subtitle font and I have an excuse to go rampaging through the city. (Protip: Almost nobody uses Egyptian fonts properly. Papryus makes me swear out loud nearly every time I see it.)

 

[8bitlove2a03]

As someone who isn't looking forward to getting around to playing Mass Effect 3 due to the horrid font size used by every EA game which is only exacerbated by my dying SDTV, I like this article.

 

[Gunner 51]

You think that was bad, you've never played Dead Rising on a small screen. You couldn't read any of it barring the main title.

 

[Kahani]

It's an interesting topic, but I'm surprised at the use of Skyrim as an example. One of the things I particularly liked about Skyrim was that its text and subtitles were all a decent size in an easily readable font. If that's an example of bad text, I can only assume that no game has ever had good text.

In any case, hopefully developers will all soon see the light and make everything using Comic Sans.

 

[Aankhen]

It's interesting to see an article like this on The Escapist, which has some of the tiniest copy [http://img846.imageshack.us/img846/8769/escapistarticle.png] and most inaccessible markup on the Internet. Even the browser's chrome uses a larger font size...

Mind you, I agree with the message. I just find the choice of medium ironic. And yes, I have seen the font size control, which takes it from illegible to a little below legible.*

* Obviously not entirely illegible, since I can still read it. Unnecessarily hard-to-read, rather.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

In any case, hopefully developers will all soon see the light and make everything using Comic Sans.

That will be the day their own graphics departments rise against them in an orgy of blood and mayhem.

The only proper revenge on someone who wants to use Comic Sans in any professional work is to teach them what constitutes 'bad kerning' in typography, something they will never be able to unlearn or unsee... although if you're rushed for time punching them in the face will suffice.


OT: I get things from the other way around... the GUIs on many ports to PC are unaltered and come across as aggressively large.

 

[SovietX]

The only thing that bothered me about the Skyrim font was that it looked too sleek and modern. I want a fantasy themed font for my fantasy games.

The only game I really had a problem with was Grand Theft Auto 4. I could hardly see most of the text on my old tv. I never had a problem with Dead Rising with my old tv so I don't see where that is coming from.

 

[Eruanno]

Hah, I was just thinking about this when playing RAGE on the Xbox not too long ago. I played it on an HDTV, and the subtitles are STILL too small to read!

 

[Johnson McGee]

Trying to hack the computers in Fallout 3 was a damn nightmare on standard def, or even a smaller hi-def screen.

 

[ChupathingyX]

Skyrim was literally unreadable on my SD TV.

The messages that pop up in the top left of the screen would be completely cut off and the actual text used was kinda crappy.

 

[Avatar Roku]

Anyone else play the first Mass Effect on a SDTV? It was so amazingly hard to read. I remember that when I first played it, I had to keep switching between an SDTV and HDTV, and the difference always astounded me.

 

[Frostbite3789]

I have the biggest problem with the NHL games with his.

I can't tell if it wants me to press square or circle for calling for a line change.

Trying to read player statistics is nigh impossible. Why they'd do this for a game that's pretty heavily text based, to make it almost unreadable on an SDTV seems nonsensical.

 

[Redd the Sock]

Oh, good I thought it was just me. I'm badly nearsighted so I was beginning to think this was something I had to live with as I couldn't tell what weapon I was equiping in MGS4 or who I was dialing in GTA4.

 

[Strazdas]

The solution is very simple: stop playing huge resolution games on small tvs. if you got a small screen, use small resolution. if you got a large screen, use large resolution. no more problems. i doubt many would argue that there is no choice in the game to use different resolution nowadays, that may have been a problem 10 years ago, not now.

 

[Littaly]

Finally, someone acknowledges this! I was beginning to think it was just me.

It's always bothered me to no end that the text ends up being barely legible on my standard def screen, especially in games like Dragon Age that actually want you to do a fair amount of reading. I've made little noise over it because I assumed that somewhere there had to be a good reason for it, some kind of technical issue that made it impossible to make the text work on both high and standard def screens and that was impossible to work around. But reading this I get the impression that it just comes down to arrogance on the developers part, which is just insane!

Is that really it? The reason they don't do something as simple as increase the text size isn't because there are technical difficulties associated with it, but because they simply don't see it as a problem?! That's infuriating on so many levels >,<

 

[Zom-B]

This is exactly why I barely played Fable 3. Trying to read the font on my 27" LCD without HDMI cables is almost impossible. Having my face any farther than a few feet away from the screen made all the text illegible. I had no desire to sit with my face pressed against the TV, and it wasn't really an option to play that way regardless, as the TV was up on a high stand and my sitting area is a good 12 feet away.

Needless to say, if you can't read a game like Fable 3, you're not going to be able to play it effectively. Sure, I eventually figured out how to respond to conversations based on colour, but I still had no idea what I was saying.

But clearly Molyneux or whoever designed the game to be played on a large screen in high def, and did not take anything else into consideration.

That being said, my PS3 on my 42" plasma and HDMI cables has never presented a problem for me reading in game text, but I'm sure that the Fable situation is just as prevalent on PS3 games.

 

[Axyun]

A noticeable drop in performance is the reason most games don't allow the user to pick and choose font and font sizes. Most vector-based text rendering frameworks for games are hideously slow.

It is orders of magnitude more performant to have your UI labels and messages pre-rendered on a texture and then render said texture when needed. Because the texture is a fixed size, unless it is scaled relative to a reference resolution, the text will get smaller or larger as resolution increases or decreases respectively.

 

[disappointed]

Seems like gaming's been in it's teenage phase for a good couple of decades...

Anyway, fully agree with all this. It's not just games, the whole software industry seems to treat accessibility with about as much enthusiasm as documentation, even though stuff like this is so easy to fix. Little tip for budding designers/developers - always have in the back of your mind the question "would my mum be able to use this?" Stops 90% of stupid accessibility mistakes before they happen.

 

[Smokescreen]

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

The next-gen games have all been lousy with ensuring there is readable text on standard screens and as someone with poor eyesight I have been astounded how little attention these companies pay to something so critical as being able to read! Now that most games don't come with instruction manuals, in game text is how they provide instruction! If you can't read it, that's a massive Fail.

 

[Ashadowpie]

i actually had to hook up my 360 to my computer screen so i could read the stupidly small text and the bloody map in All my games on my perfectly fine 29inch box tv. its a sad day when you want a 360 for your TV you'll also need a 50+ inch to see words and dots on a map. not everyone can afford one, lot alone fit it in a small living room.