Interface and UI are not my area of expertise, but i had to learn much about it during my work as a creative director.
One of the main lessons i learned is always to ask yourself: is the game character aware of the information, shown on a particular interface? Who’s actually looking at the interface, character, or player? Answering this simple yet important question will lead us to answer the more complex question: is the interface exists in a game world, or is it exist outside a game world and only in a player’s reality? Is a playable character a player’s avatar and doesn’t exist in the game world when the player don’t play it, or the player is just controlling a character and the character exists in the game world even if the player doesn’t play the game? Is your game’s character aware of the existence of the interface?
And the most important question: is your game’s world aware of a player?
The questions answered, with that important information, it will be easier to decide, how exactly to make interfaces for a game, to stylize interfaces in the game’s world style, make them physical and real in the context of the game’s world, or just make interfaces clean and readable for a player (of course interfaces should be readable in both cases, but you know what i mean).
Let’s try to analyze a few games using this approach.
For instance, let’s compare NFS: Unbound with it’s stylized FX and graphics and Forza Horizon 4 with it’s realistic approach. So, considering the questions i asked above, what do we know? Well, the player exists in both these games through the avatar. What’s important, other characters and NPCs in both these games only communicating with an avatar, not with a player. So the game’s world isn’t aware of the player, so the player sees only what the avatar sees. This actually explains a lot. Unbound uses a stylized interface for in-game markers because the game’s world is such. Player’s avatar is stylized cell-shaded, and so is the car FX’s. Game markers are colorful, bright, and noticeable not only because it’s convenient for high-speed gameplay, but also because the world of the game itself, and the characters who live in this world are such.
Forza Horizon 5 is actually very similar, despite its more realistic approach. Game’s world is also communicates with a player through the player’s avatar, but the world itself is less stylized. It is assumed, that some characters in the Forza Horizon 5 universe did a job of placing racing gates at racing tracks: flags with fans on day races and red flares on night races.
So in both games, the interface is consistent with the game’s world (not to miss with being consistent to the game itself).
What about a different approach? Let’s add another racing game to a comparison.
Grand Tourismo 7, for an instance. What do we see there? There’s no such thing as in-game avatar, even though we have a driver figure that we can customize, the game itself always communicates with a player directly. Grand Tourismo 7 is aware of a player, and all the interfaces it has, it has for a player and it shows it only to a player. So all the interfaces in the GT7 are interfaces for the real world, they don’t exist in the game’s world.
So, i hope this will be helpful to someone reading this: if your game has something like a quest journal, always be aware of that, who exactly reading it. Is it a player, or is game character?