Nether Disruptor and Command Center Buildings, Tweets, Con Before the Storm, DLC #579

In the games you’ve worked on, how did you handle writing ability tooltips? Was it something gameplay designers did, or was it something you had writers handle? And on the subject of tooltips… how do you balance being descriptive without being too pedantic?
I have written shit tons of tooltips. I haven’t done many for League, but I did a ton for WoW and it’s possible I did all of them on some of the Age of Empires games. I also made an editing pass on almost all of the WoW class ability and talent tooltips, and truth be told, I should probably be doing more of that for League, since our tooltips are getting out of control.

Overall, I find that designers and writers make a few common mistakes with tooltips. Again, I don’t pretend to be the galaxy’s best tooltip writer. I’m just sharing what I’ve noticed.

First, you can’t teach everything in a tooltip and that’s really not their point. A new player (or even someone new to a particular tooltip) doesn’t need tons of detail. It will just be overwhelming. And an experienced player already knows all of the text anyway. So I often try to think of tooltips as just a reminder about what something is. Imagine that a player frequently confuses two spells with similar thematics, or there is an icon for some kind of menu feature that isn’t super self-explanatory.

Shorter is almost always better. A few times on Blizzard, we found ourselves in a situation where QA would point out that a tooltip was technically incorrect because maybe it implied that it blocked ALL magic. QA was right to point those potential errors out, but they were just that - potential - and it wasn’t necessary that we took that documentation as a mandate for change. Our tooltips over time started to look like legal documents with lists of parentheticals and exceptions. Just cover the main use cases. A tooltip doesn’t need to provide binding arbitration. Clarity is king.

Second, I agree with you that it’s easy to make tooltips too flowery. I don’t think tooltips are the best opportunity to show off beautiful writing for the sake of writing. (Now, I’ll also argue that really well written tooltips ARE beautiful.) Flavor text in a different format is a good option to communicate to players “There is something hopefully cool here, but it’s an aside to the main description.” But not every tooltip has room to support flavor text. It is possible to take this too far. Words are precious and you don’t get too many of them in a game, especially for tooltips, so if you can convey a lot with a little, go for it. I named one of the early Death Knight talents “Veteran of the Third War.” I didn’t explain what that meant in the tooltip itself, and it was probably some lame passive stat boost, but folks who knew WoW lore understood the reference. There is nuance among words like affect, blast, penetrate, strike and so on. What feels the most appropriate for your game? But shorter is still better.

And speaking of room… if you’re an English-speaking designer or writer, it can be easy to forget that other languages take up different spaces. German and Russian for example are long. It can take 50-100% more space to convey the same message in those languages. German also uses long words that can look bad in a narrow tooltip space if they get hyphenated a a lot. Korean is tall. If you devote tooltip space that is horizontally long but vertically short, then Korean characters might get clipped off.

I’m a fan of style guides. They can be a pain to compose (mostly because you have to get everyone to agree and then enforce them), but the consistency will help provide clarity later on. For example, what kinds of words do you capitalize? I started capitalizing class names in WoW at some point and can never break the habit. Do you refer to the player as “You” or do you try to avoid mentioning them? Are fragments okay? (Probably.) Do you use periods? Do you say “Creates a bolt of energy that flies at a target causing X damage”? or do you say “A bolt of energy strikes your opponent for X damage”? or “Strike your enemy with a bolt of energy, causing X damage”” or simply “A bolt of energy - X damage”? Players may not notice the differences in style (though I always do), but it does help add polish and clarity when tooltip sentences are structured similarly and you use the same kinds of words. (Source)