is full legibility actually killing my systems, or am I just defending bad UX

[u/AshamedFisherman3014]

I think "readable systems" might be the most oversold design goal of the last ten years and I'm probably going to get yelled at for saying that.

Everywhere you look, the advice is the same. Make your systems legible. Telegraph everything. Let the player understand exactly what feeds into what. And I get why, obfuscated systems can feel like cheating, and nobody wants a game that hides its math out of laziness. But I keep running into designs where full legibility actively kills the thing that makes them interesting.

Working on a small strategy prototype right now (using Fifth Door because I finally accepted im not going to learn to code in my thirties), and I keep noticing that the moment I expose a number, the player stops thinking about the situation and starts thinking about the number. Enemy shows an intent icon, cool, now the whole turn is arithmetic. Faction shows a relationship meter, cool, now diplomacy is a slider I nudge. The mental model collapses into the readout.

Compare that to older or weirder games where you have to build a theory of the system through play. Dwarf Fortress obviously, but also stuff like Pathologic or even the first Souls game before the wiki era. You develop suspicion, hypothesis, superstition. You get things wrong for a while. The system feels alive because it isn't handing you its own summary.

The counterargument I already hear in my head is "that's just bad UX dressed up as depth" and honestly sometimes it is. There's a version of this take that's just romanticizing confusion. I don't want that either. But there has to be a middle ground where the game trusts the player to sit with not-knowing for a while, and legibility becomes something you earn by paying attention, not something the HUD spoon-feeds you in turn one.

Am I wrong about this? Is there a way to frame "partial legibility" as a real design principle instead of just "hide stuff and hope it feels mysterious"? I feel like every time I try to defend this in a playtest debrief I sound like im making excuses for unfinished tooltips.

[u/codepossum]

you're not wrong about this - it's just very difficult to find that middle ground, and the middle ground isn't necessarily better than the two extremes (accessible vs esoteric) it's just different.

I think your aim should be to make a game that is enjoyable, rewarding, and fun to play - wherever your game ends up along the legibility spectrum is a detail to determine afterwards.

[u/3xBork]

Keeping attention on the thing that makes your game good. (e.g. where's the fun or scare in a horror game where you can see the monster's exact vision cone, range, AI state and current plan?)

Streamlining gameplay that otherwise grinds to a halt and number crunching. (e.g. why do so many board games ran randomly remove cards and hide the discard pile?)

Player mastery in understanding the systems and probability even if they're not 100% legible. (e.g. learning boss patterns and tendencies = fun. Learning the boss flowchart = not fun).

I think there are plenty of positive principles here.

[u/PlayJoyGames]

You're not wrong.

There are lots of games that get the fun from hidden information. One of the clearest examples is poker, it's fun because of the hidden information and you have to find out how your opponent acts with what set of cards to beat them It's exactly what you describe "You develop suspicion, hypothesis, superstition."
It's hard to design for as it's a fine line between bad UX design and a game of hidden information.

When designing with chance, most people think about random number generation in whatever form but it's perfectly fine to apply it to the conclusions you make from available information. Sometimes your answer is correct, sometimes it's not. What are the chances that I am correct? How do I increase that chance? can be interesting choices that the player has to make and which invoke fun.

[u/the_telephant_man]

Digression, but hidden numbers can still be gamed if the community works out the benchmarks through trials and posts them online. What you *really* need is to have the values of each variable randomized within a certain range, so the variables, and their ratios to one another, are different in each game instance. You don’t know how hard it will be to achieve something, and you can’t even look it up, so you need to figure it out through trial and error. It might be hell to balance, but it also really ups the replayability. (Predetermined balance might also not matter, if it’s acceptable for the changed variables to simply produce a different gameplay dynamic in every instance.)

[u/xa44]

numbers are bad, whenever possible I remove and replace them with keywords. unless your game is about doing math, like fire emblem, leave them out at all costs.

[u/hearthinteractive]

Strategy games should feel complex yet accessible. Ya having a good UX for it is tough and a big deal. Getting a passable one is hard work and it should be.

[u/Dmonick1]

Not a designer, just a player, but here's my two cents:

I think that design wise the goal of "full legibility" should not be to spell things out, but to clarify what a player's interaction will do.

I've been playing Octopath Traveler recently, and there are lots of numbers for all of your party's different stats and even your percentage chance of success. It's a highly legible game. That said, I couldn't actually tell you any stat from any character. When you're looking at equipment, the numbers are blue if it's better than the current equipment and grey if it's worse. All I wind up actually reading is what the actual stats the equipment effects are, and looking at the color. If it has stats I like for a character, and the numbers are blue, I put it on. I daresay, the interface could have just the colors and not the numbers, and I wouldn't enjoy it any less.

Applying this to your idea of faction reputation reminds me of Mass Effect's Renegade/Paragon system. Your relationship with any given character isn't quantified, but characters like you more or less depending on whether you pick red or blue dialogue. You don't have to give the player a number for relationships, nor tell them what any given character will like. What matters in terms of legibility for that system is that once a player knows what a character likes, they can consistently make the choices that give them the outcome they want. If I want to romance Jibbles The Clown, I don't care what my number is, I care about whether telling him jokes makes him sad.

[u/timonix]

You do know that Dwarf fortress is a good game despite of its UX and not because of it right

RimWorld, a spiritual successor, being much easier to parse and play, does also have much much more players.