Press X to Squint

[Sewer Rat]

Hear hear. Since I play most of my games on PC with a monitor at most 2 feet away from my face this is rarely an issue, but when playing some console games and even a few PC games (Empire Total War I'm looking at you)reading is just a pain in the ass because of how small or indistinct text can get.

This really shouldn't be a problem,text is pretty damned hard to screw up, but somehow developers have found a way.

Personally would recommend changeable text/menu sizes, so those with smaller tvs or who sit farther away can read them at the cost of more scrolling/more screen estate taken up in menus, and those who have large tvs or enjoy pressing their eyes against the screen can have their small menus.

 

[BENZOOKA]

Good article.

It immediately brought to mind Diablo II where the numbers 5 and 6 were nearly indistinguishable.

 

[Squigie]

I recently bought a PS3 and a few games, and I've encountered this problem. On my SDTV reading text in the Amalur demo was painful, and in the FFXIII-2 demo some letter are just blobs even with the larger font option on.

All of the text in Disgaea 4 is readable, with just a bit of squinting at the unit stats. Sengoku Basara 3 Utage is totally clear, perhaps a result of also being developed for the Wii. On an SD screen it only loses some of the finer details, though it's also an import in a language I don't understand.

Much of the text in Warriors Orochi 3 is completely illegible. Even on a large HDTV with component(?) cables the text in between battle dialogues runs together, and the dialogue boxes take up only a meager portion of the screen.

With PC games their minimum requirements are prominently displayed. Buying a new TV means ~$200 of my entertainment budget is now spoken for. I'm not destitute, but there isn't much in that budget to begin with. "You should already have an HDTV" sounds like some "Final Destination only, no items" nonsense.

 

[surg3n]

The problem doesn't really lie with developers, it's console manufacturers - there just isn't enough standardisation.
Most fonts in videogames are bitmapped, compared to your OS, with it's truetype, smooth screen fonts. See a truetype font like you see on this webpage is made from vectors, so the font can be scaled to any size without loss of quality, it will always look right, and remain legible even at pretty small sizes. The smoothing, or anti-aliasing is better, because it's based on vector data being rendered onto bitmap data.
Now, if you have a bitmap font, it's at a set size, when it's scaled, all hell breaks loose. If you scale a bitmap font to a higher resolution it looks blurred, if you scale a bitmap font to a lower resolution it looks blocky. You can't win, all you can do is set the font size to a standard, don't scale it, in fact if you scale it your better off having different sized bitmap fonts = lots of resources taken up.

Take the iPad for example. Someone might make an iOS game that runs on both iPhone and iPad, but that's not easy because scaling will make one or both of the versions look worse. You take a 480x320 display and update it to 960x640, fair enough. Then add in the iPad res of 1024x768. That's a scaling factor of 2.0, then 2.13333333333. Scale a bitmap font by 2.1333333 and its starting to look pretty shitty already. The general solution? - make the font ideal for iPad, then it'll look shit on the iPhone... developers can't win. The more complex and fancy and pretty the UI has to be, the less power the developers have to customize it for each different device.

So what is the ideal solution?

Truetype font support across every gaming format, a standard - a flexible font system that looks good no matter what the resolution, because it's being anti-aliased on a native resolution. It might mean less pizzazz on screen fonts, but legibility is the important factor. Not that it matters, it'll never happen - developers are stuck with bitmap fonts because console manufacturers might not necesserily want older games to look too nice on new hardware. This is gamings era of cross platform gaming - developers have driven that, not console manufacturers... they tend to only care about their own platforms, and really Apple doesn't even have to care about these things, people buy their hardware anyway.

 

[SodaDew]

Tuning cars in Forza 4 is a nightmare if your using a SDTV that's blurring out and losing color.

 

[zaphod121]

Follow up article needs to be about sound problems. How many times have you missed what a charector was saying because the explosions or background music drowned out the vocals (Yes, even in surround sound)

 

[Little Duck]

I have used a standard definition set for this whole generation. It started out fine, but I have huge issues now whenever I want to just read text. It's infuriating. Anything beyond 2009 2010 is overly difficult to see anything on. I am playing fifa 12 at the moment and the text in that is horrible, often being incapable of deciphering simple on screen information. How hard can it be to put a text resize option into the game?