My Love/Hate Relationship with the Mini-Map
Friday, February 17, 2012 at 11:16AM I've been playing a lot of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning lately. It's a game that's easy to lose an evening to, but I can still pick it up for 15 minutes and feel that I've accomplished something (even if the only thing I do is clean out the junk items in my inventory).
Over the 15-20 hours and 50 quests I've completed so far, my favorite aspect is the varied and atmospheric environments. My least favorite favorite aspect is that I'm not given adequate opportunity to enjoy them.
I blame the mini-map. Dragon Age 2, I'm lookin' at you too.
When navigation becomes simply a matter of Point A to Point B via my stationary dot towards the pulsing dot on my mini-map, I stop paying attention to the wonderful environment, the NPCs (fully voiced, btw) who may say something interesting or humorous, and only care about what the map tells me is important.
The mini-map has incredible utility, but in its efficiency as a tool is wildly distracting from the experience.
I realized early in Dragon Age 2 that I would fixate on the mini-map and navigate solely by that visual until I was cued audibly of a threat or other distraction. I should have known how to navigate Darktown 10 hours in, yet I relied on the mini-map almost until the end (I did finally become familiar enough to locate Anders on my own, but only after many, many repititions).
Ok, so what's the solution? My proposal is not to do away with the mini-map but to use it to provide spacial context as opposed to specific coordinates. By spacial context, I mean a visually descriptive outline of the terrain that is recognizable from an overhead orthographic viewpoint. I'll quickly rattle off the other two pieces of the puzzle: landmarks indentifiable from a distance and descriptive facades.
Two examples come to mind. Let's start with the old staple, World of Warcraft. Admittedly, MMOs are a different animal altogether. You get to learn locations (especially in towns) through extreme repitition. What World of Warcraft does to enforce learning is make their staple buildings (banks, inns, etc) recognizable from a distance and not list them on the mini-map unless you ask an NPC specifically to call it out for you.
Let's look at a popular single-player game too -- Skyrim for example. Skyrim uses the omnipotent "location marker" to give a sense of direction without being overly descriptive. The counterpoint is that Skyrim is so incredibly open that a general direction is usually all that is needed to get to your destination, regardless of distance.
There is one other word of advice I would offer to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Allow some perspective options. Personally, I'd like the field of view to be 10%+ greater or the camera follow distance greater, even if that meant the avatar being smaller on screen. Because the world is vast horizontally and vertically (visually), greater context = greater absorption of these many locations.