I’m not saying that the grenade indicator is hard to understand. The problem I have with the grenade indicator is that it doesn’t attract my attention enough. It’s mashed together into the corner right next to all of the other weapon elements with the radar right next to it. It feels like an afterthought and sometimes I just find it hard to notice. Given that the ammo indicator right above it is a bold, bright slowly filling circle, I don’t see why the grenade indicator is a fat dull bar and not the same thing.
I agree that the HUD is already cluttered, but adding more info wouldn’t be such a problem if some of the information already being shown was consolidated and organized in a way that makes sense. Having your allies’ weapons glow is a good indication of when their weapons are buffed… when they’re already facing you and your aim isn’t constantly darting left to right.
What I want to propose is this: As far as ammo and health levels for allies goes, I don’t see why everything has to be shown all at once. And what I mean by that is, if an ally is at a certain percentage or above, say 70% of health or ammo, friendly health/ammo bars shouldn’t be so bright and big and in-your-face. In fact, if an ally has full health/ammo and is a certain distance far enough away, why do I even need to know that? I should only be seeing what I need to see: allies low on ammo or health who could use my health.
I hate to make all the comparisons to Team Fortress 2 that I do, but the reason why I do so is because I believe that the games share fundamental similarities, yet TF2 has much more consistent visual design. You don’t see every single health bar when you’re playing medic; you only see friendly health when you’re looking straight at them. Anybody can spam medic calls and fill your screen with speech bubble icons, but the people that really need your help have a bright red icon instead of the normal white one. It’s this sort of consistency and transparency (both in the literal and figurative sense) that Brink’s UI should have but doesn’t have.
Reduce the clutter on the screen, shrink some HUD elements and make counters more consistent so that they fit into the overall aesthetic, and suddenly you have more screen real estate to use for other things. Let’s look at this screenshot, for example:
Now it doesn’t have everything that I’d like to address but it’s good enough to point out some things. First off, the particles sticking out of allies whenever they get any sort of buff are nice, but it’s a bit excessive to have so many and for them to be so bright. You can’t see what’s behind them, and they obscure the teammate’s health bar/name/class icon. Furthermore, why are the health bars for these allies so opaque? They’re three feet (or one meter, if you prefer) away from me and they’re at full health. Couldn’t they be at least a little more transparent? Then, if an ally is say below 50% health, have it be as opaque as it is now, and red. Suddenly the HUD is more efficient at conveying the information that the medic immediately needs to know.
Actually, on second thought, I think the meters already glow red when an ally is critical, but I may be wrong. If they are already red, disregard that specific bit of criticism. The bars are still too big and not transparent enough.
For small nitpicking, the mission timer and selected objective marker in the top-right corner should be smaller. That’s not a big issue (pun intended) though. Of particular interest is the contextual action text that appears whenever you want to do anything. A lot of the time in Brink your team mates will be clustered together and when that happens it’s difficult to tell exactly who you’re aiming at for a buff. There is that bright blue outline but when they’re that close the colors get mixed together. All my teammates look the same from behind. Having the text, ‘metabolism booster’ be that big and right in the middle of the screen is also unnecessarily distracting. The text showing player names should also be shrunken and more transparent.
Overall, Brink should have had a contextual system for displaying player names and such, and only display info such as ally ammo/health when it’s necessary or critical. i.e., only display health bars on mouse over unless the player is close to death. Revive icons shouldn’t be so massive, either.
As far as kevlar goes, once the screen is less cluttered there’s no reason there can’t be a small circular kevlar icon for teammates right underneath their class icon. It doesn’t have to be big, bold, or bright.
The worst problems I have, though, are with the abilities in the lower left, and the ammo/radar in the lower right. I’ve already talked about the ammo/grenades, but I think the radar should also be a bit farther apart from the ammo counters. Just a bit of space helps.
My issue is that if the rest of Brink’s interface is so intent on being round and circular, having the abilities be massive ugly rectangles is really inconsistent. They should also be circles, and the icon for the objective wheel should disappear entirely. I’m assuming we all know how to play the game and use the objective wheel properly. There’s no reason for it to be there since it doesn’t change based on the context. It just wastes space.
More nitpicking, the thunderbolt icon above the supply meter doesn’t need to even be there. It could just as easily be shrunken a bit and placed next to the actual supply meter, instead of on top. That’s just my opinion though and it’s not important by any stretch.
And as far as the crosshair goes, the problem is that the circle is very distracting, especially given that it’s not really transparent enough. Compare it to a traditional crosshair where there are four lines pointing inward. There’s more empty space and the crosshair is simply less distracting. However, I don’t think the crosshair is such a large problem. There’s no reason why a circular crosshair can’t work; the problem is that in Brink the spread is very sporadic and as a result the circle can become very large and then shrink again at a moment’s notice. That’s VERY distracting in my opinion. It’s different from a game like TF2 where the crosshair never moves, and thus circular crosshairs are used for certain weapons because it’s not distracting. It’s different from a game like Call of Duty (ugh), where the crosshair flat-out disappears when shooting gets inaccurate. It’s different from Counter-Strike or Day of Defeat Source where the crosshair is tiny and thin, but brightly colored so it attracts attention without being too distracting.
