UI screens are getting more and more complex, which, in turn, makes it more difficult to scale text size. That's my guess as to why things are the way they are.
If a game is a console exclusive, then there is no excuse — it has to be made with console-friendly text size, even if it means the UI has to be simplified.
I wonder if UI screen designs could borrow from webpage designs. Webpages are as cramped as they can be nowadays, but you can scale text size effortlessly by pressing Ctrl-plus and Ctrl-minus on the PC keyboard (Ctrl-zero to restore). All the column sizes, icon sizes, text sizes, etc., scale correctly; multi-columns would switch to single column if things get too big, and vice versa. E-books and PDFs also use this "text-flowing" technique. I can't imagine an advanced game engine wouldn't be able to implement something like this.
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Re: Soapbox: We Need to Talk About Font Sizes in Games
UI screens are getting more and more complex, which, in turn, makes it more difficult to scale text size. That's my guess as to why things are the way they are.
If a game is a console exclusive, then there is no excuse — it has to be made with console-friendly text size, even if it means the UI has to be simplified.
I wonder if UI screen designs could borrow from webpage designs. Webpages are as cramped as they can be nowadays, but you can scale text size effortlessly by pressing Ctrl-plus and Ctrl-minus on the PC keyboard (Ctrl-zero to restore). All the column sizes, icon sizes, text sizes, etc., scale correctly; multi-columns would switch to single column if things get too big, and vice versa. E-books and PDFs also use this "text-flowing" technique. I can't imagine an advanced game engine wouldn't be able to implement something like this.