In this episode of Speak Up on Kotaku, commenter Nevest wants developers to know they can use bigger fonts already, dammit.
OK, I’ve gotta ask… what the hell is up with developers still using the tiniest text possible in their games? Even with an HDTV, connected through an HDMI port and everything set up properly, there are still games that are hard to read if you’re sitting more than three feet away from your TV.
Case in point: Transformers: Fall of Cybertron. My ONLY complaint with the game is the text in the menus. I don’t have perfect eyesight (even corrected w/ glasses) and it’s tough to read the text in the store or when customising a character. It makes no sense. There’s a TON of screen real estate that can be used but they just cram it into a small box. It hasn’t stopped me from playing the game, I just get up and get closer to the TV when I need to make changes, but it’s slightly annoying.
Another game that I pretty much stopped playing for this reason was Syndicate. It has a LOT of stuff that you need to read for a lot of the backstory on each mission/item/person, and the box that the text is in is the full size of the screen, but the text itself only takes up the top 1/10th of it. Why? What’s the point? Are they just so desperate for it to look “super clean” that they feel they can’t use a font that’s two or three sizes larger?
Another example is Deus Ex: Human Revolution. LOVE the game, but it too suffers from a lot of space being used for text boxes but only a very small part of those boxes is used to show the text.
I know it may be a minor complaint to those that have perfect eyesight, but I can’t be the only one that gets irritated to load up a new game and see so much screen space that goes completely unused just for the sake of it.
About Speak Up on Kotaku: Our readers have a lot to say, and sometimes what they have to say has nothing to do with the stories we run.
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