I'm a big fan of simplicity in the UI. I absolutely hate clutter. So I really liked the GW UI for that reason.
Some of the stuff I've seen in WoW and other games like Rift with their UI would make me spaz out.
I'm a big fan of simplicity in the UI. I absolutely hate clutter. So I really liked the GW UI for that reason.
Some of the stuff I've seen in WoW and other games like Rift with their UI would make me spaz out.
I can help you in explaining why showing percentage is nowhere nearly as accessible for human beings as showing a bar.
Human brain functionality in terms of understanding things and acting on them can be roughly divided into two parts (note: brutal simplification incoming):
1. Optimized/learned in-hardware functionality.
2. Abstracted functionality.
A great example of this difference is in basic abstractions like low end math. You learn multiplication table, so questions like 2*2, 7*8 and so on can be answered by you instantly. They have answers that your brain has optimized to be accessed quickly without need to complex abstraction.
On the other hand, slightly more complex operations that you did not learn on the same level need to be abstracted, absolutely destroying brain's performance. For example, 22x78 will require building a fairly complex abstraction and will take you order(s) of magnitude longer to produce a result for. Obviously, some people learn these things (essentially optimizing themselves for it) and can produce the answer for this about as fast as result for 7*8, but most cannot.
Same thing with the bar vs numbers. Bar is a graphic representation with proper scaling. Our brain can use it without any numbers at all to instantly judge how much of the bar is left.
Number of health needs to be abstracted. You need to consider actual total health, and current health against each other to figure out approximately how much of total health you still have. Result is as catastrophic for brain's performance as difference mentioned above.
There are also other issues at hand, like our limited capacity of abstraction of similar tasks (try performing two calculations in your head in parallel instead of one), which means that having to abstract UI elements taxes our ability to play the game and several others, but that would require me to write a few A4's worth of text, and need me to pick up my old university books on the subject.