this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2025
39 points (97.6% liked)

PC Gaming

12948 readers
554 users here now

For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki

Rules:

  1. Be Respectful.
  2. No Spam or Porn.
  3. No Advertising.
  4. No Memes.
  5. No Tech Support.
  6. No questions about buying/building computers.
  7. No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
  8. No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
  9. No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
  10. Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
EXiLExJD@lemmy.ca
UncleBadTouch@lemmy.ca
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
39
'Rethinking the survival genre': In [Verdant, a] post-apocalyptic adventure, 'your body tells you what’s going on' instead of stamina and hunger meters (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by Agent_Karyo@piefed.world to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
12 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] FishFace@piefed.social 30 points 5 days ago (1 children)

My stomach rarely growls when I'm hungry, and when it does it's only a few times on an interval of a few minutes. Not ideal for being able to tell and therefore make decisions. In contrast, I've never experienced blurred vision from exhaustion or "warping" due to stress.

At the end of the day, these HUD elements make up for the fact that it's not possible to simulate a sense of an empty stomach that you physically feel through a computer, or the sense of exhaustion when you've been awake too long. You can display that information clearly with a UI element, or in an obscured way with other cues, but they'll all be artificial.

I liked the follow-up paragraph:

I'm not sure that qualifies as a "rethinking" of the genre: other survival games have relied on sounds and visual effects to give players information about their character's survival status. It's also, honestly, not my favorite approach: effects like blurred vision can just wind up being annoying to deal with if they're overdone. None of those effects are shown in the trailer, so I guess we'll see how Verdant handles it.

[–] Agent_Karyo@piefed.world 8 points 5 days ago

I am big fan of abstract constructs (hunger/ thirst meter) in games. I am all for experimentation, but in terms of UI/UX, different for the sake of being different isn't always a good (and I say this as a person who is opinionated about UI/UX and will simply not play games if they have a console UI).