Video game UI that helps immersion — Weapons Wheel
This is a case study to understand how nuances and flavours of UI elements are used to help immersion of players with respect to the expected fantasy and experience. It hopes to analyse a specific UI element in this regard — the weapons wheel.
Many action-adventure games rely on the feeling of thrills via bullets, fire, grenade, more bullets, and gigantic booms. The way to enable all these is to offer a massive arsenal, from machetes to assault rifles all the way till bazookas.
With game having evolved as a medium, sub genres have evolved within the space. What was considered as action games are now classified under open-world action games, linear action adventure games, cover-shooter game, and much more. Open world games are punctuated by sequences of linear set-pieces, linear games have sprawling sandbox levels in them. The nuances that have developed with the branches and evolution of media are staggering. So how have players adapted to interacting with these games and how have we helped them?
If we take an example from the early 2000’s, when the concept of scale was truly growing, we’d look at a game like Grand Theft Auto III. Baseball bats, miniguns, shotguns, rocket launcher were the feature of the arsenal, followed by throwables like grenades and molotov. Each weapon was unique in the way it operated and the carnage it caused, and subsequently, in the spaces it could it be used. A pistol was always better than a baseball bat no matter where you are, but a rocket launcher in the crowded alley was suicide play. Yet the interface did not account for that, there was no way to change between the vast array of weapons that you had. It was exactly that — an array. A player had to go through the entire list to reach what they wanted.
There were two whole buttons (out of fourteen) dedicated to accessing the next and the previous buttons. PC players had to scroll through it like they were scrolling through a website. It was tedious, for one had to take so much effort to reach where they wanted. It was clumsy, for one had to press a button so many times and a mistake would be corrected by pressing more button. It was tiring because player needs would change from the space you occupied and the ammo you had for which players had to scroll again and again. Sure, the player was not required to look at the weapon icon in HUD since the weapon would update in real-time on the player character who was always the focus of attention anyway. But it still didn’t effectively inform where in the list you wanted to be to equip what you wanted to use. Every change that wasn’t to an immediate weapon was spent multitasking between a fight and a scroll interaction.
Yet this was the early era of games where the ways of interaction were yet to catch up with the rapidly scaling systems of game.
The weapons wheel and video games
While the wheel has been seen throughout games, from Ratchet & Clank to Dishonored, and has taken multiple iterations to reach the state we know and love. Let us look at how this evolution too has branched and has been dictated by the needs of the game. While there are many games older than the wheel which have resisted it (such as Fallout), there are some that have grown along and evolved it with themselves. Before we look at how that came to be, we will first look at why wheels are a great method of interactions.
The wheel and why it’s so good
This is the Fitt’s Law. It states that the time taken to complete a movement is a function of the start and end points of that movement and an inverse function of the width of the object to which we are reaching. a and b are constants that represent the dexterity of the user and the ergonomic ease of the input device. Many studies prove using this law why pointing with a finger is easier than pointing with a hand. And a device that ergonomically fits well and is represented by a pointer works very well for flat interfaces, hence the mouse. And the mouse has been often studied as a more viable interface to interact with games (especially games that involve shooting) than a controller.
https://www.csse.canterbury.ac.nz/andrew.cockburn/papers/julian_fitts.pdf
This is obvious, as constants a and b are a measure of dexterity and ergonomics which perform better with a mouse as coarse motor movements (use of wrist) are well and accurately translated by flat tracking devices. The fine motor movements of a thumb are not as fast or lack the twitchiness of good reflexes and hence result in poorer performance on controllers.
But Fitt’s law also states that more the size of target element, easier to reach it.
Before we came to know it as weapon’s wheel, it was and continues to be more popularly known as a pie menu in traditional UI applications. Let’s see why they work so well without controllers and joysticks.
As we see, the width is infinite because the radius of a circle can house infinite concentric circles. Without getting into complications of mathematics, it’s easy to be quick and accurate when the it’s a circle and the angle of sector is large enough. Studies have shown that humans can accurately navigate an average of 8 sectors (slices) without introducing any substantial cognitive load and reducing accuracy.
The gesture of interaction
Weapon wheels all have a standard gesture when it comes to controllers and mouse, it’s dragging from centre of the wheel in the direction of the option players choose. For a mouse, that’s interacting with and element around which, radially, the menu shows up. For controllers, its usually holding a button down that shows the menu, which then responds to the direction in which one of the joysticks is pushed or pulled. This gesture to open a weapons wheel is also followed by games played with a mouse for standardisation’s sake.
In games, usually when players open a weapons wheel the gameplay stops. With the enhancements in technology, time slows down instead of the gameplay completely stopping. Which means users can still react to the gameplay withut diluting the stress and pacing while in the menu, but the gameplay also doesn’t run ahead. Normally, one of two functions are taken away- the ability to turn the camera or the ability to move. The joystick that control the disabled function is instead used to navigate the wheel, so players are not forced to take their fingers off any of the input they were currently using (unlike a D-pad which requires players to displace their left thumb).
While point and click are the dominant gesture of a mouse, drag works as well and the same features of button and drag can be used for a mouse. The more important thing to notice is that in the case of mouse, the function to disable is always the camera as games on PCs always control the camera via the mouse.
For a mouse, clicking the option may be viable to end the micro-interaction. But for the sake of standardisation, the wheel system finalises the choice that is chosen when the triggering hold input is let go so it is consistent with controllers.
When hold and drag gestures are involved, tactility is a huge factor concerning the hold gesture. While holding and dragging is a one finger function for a mouse, becoming a two finger function for a controller (or tandem of keyboard and mouse) means managing the acute responsiveness of the menu open and close. That has to also correspond into a smooth transition between usually stressful combat gameplay and moments of respite in selecting a weapon without breaking the pacing too much, or at least making making the shift in pace very smooth.
Evolution of the wheel with evolution of video games
Going back to games that have imbibed and evolved weapon wheels, it would be important to mention the Far Cry series. And the first one to observe would be Far Cry 2, the final game in the series without a weapons wheel.
Without rattling on for hours about what I think is a hallmark of gaming experiences, at it’s core Far Cry 2 is about surviving the jungle. Jamming weapons, vehicles that break down, diegetic maps and radios, roads chock full of guard posts, virtual malaria — the game is a battle for survival. In this game, you had to visit a physical store owner to purchase weapons and a physical armoury to access weapons. Save points and fast travel were skimpy in terms of availability and weapons needed maintenance (or at least replacement). The game was brutal in the sense that everything was hard to acquire, and acquiring was just the first step.
At any point, a player could carry only 4 weapons. The categories were hard fixed, and so were the quantities. The D-pad was exclusively conserved for the use of changing navigation, and doesn’t it look intuitive? A single tap to access a weapon of specialty, and the game doubled down on this by not allowing players to equip a weapon of another kind in a slot or even carry two weapons of the same type. On PC, the same system was mapped to number button 1, 2, 3, and 4.
Was it better than the generation of GTA III? One would argue the merits and demerits, because at any time your could carry less weapons on your person. But it was neither overwhelming to navigate through them nor did it demand you pay attention to a list of scrolling objects on your HUD. And most certainly lent to the part of “bring your own solution” instead of “bring your entire arsenal and choose your solution”.
Growth and requirements of an arsenal, and helping immersion
In 2018, we got Far Cry 5. The series had a come a long way, benefiting from the growth of hardware. It’s scope and scale would explode equivalently. There were a ton of weapons, each serving it’s own purpose. There were other tertiary elements like grenades, baits, fishing rods, repair tools for vehicles, other explosives that players could carry around on their person at all times. Most importantly they were back to an age, much of GTA III, where the player character was a mule and a walking armoury at the same time.
Gone were the simplistic requirements of Far Cry 2 when you could only carry 4 interchangeable weapons with you. The interactions of the D-pad would no longer suffice. They had long introduced the weapon wheel, but even the wheel was shaped by the contemporaries that took advantage of it.
Let’s look at the core loop of Far Cry 5
While all of these can be done with ongoing combat due to open world nature of the game and ignoring the nuances, this is the core loop of the game. The player’s objectives would be to refill the ammo they just spent to win a combat encounter, and then they must look for other resources that will help upgrade their base. Slain enemies and ammo caches will dispense most, if not all, ammo. Due to prevalent nature of ammunition and it’s supply, they don’t require you to craft anything. You can purchase ammo from a roaming or a static vendor as well, or get it from looting the open world.
On the other hand, what you must forage are the auxiliary resource that are available in the woods and forests. The game requests this as a an invitation to explore, forage, scavenge and then combine these resources to give you some of the best buffs and advantages in the game.
Notice how the instruction to craft is in the menu, but not in the actual function? Is this not poor accessibility? No, this is the developers’ demands that we use the intended tool for this function so we learn what to expect from the game which enhances immersion. These buffs require the players to forage the world and then craft them at a time of need, inciting these on-the-spot feelings of “scavenger” and “resourceful”.
The interface surfaces the fantasy. The weapons wheel is a quick tool to use, and hence it elicits the feeling of “quickly crafting my solution” when players react to the challenge and craft the appropriate buff.
Obviously, conclusions are no good without research. I gathered 4 people I knew who have never played Far Cry 5, and dropped them in the middle of a firefight on normal difficulty. These people have been playing shooting games for a long time, but had never actively divulged in the Far Cry series.
Next step was to understand what fantasy they most related to when they perused the weapons wheel to craft and consume a buff, which would be considered as a solution in uneven combat scenarios. The fantasies were pre-selected and presented in a manner that most of us relate to — fictional characters from movies.
Click here for the complete research
Let’s look at other examples
Weapon wheels are abundant, but the games they are found in are very different. Another long standing franchise that has only recently incorporated a weapons wheel is Doom. Unlike Far Cry, Doom as a franchise kick started first person games and was copied by many. Released in 1993, it was a game that allowed the doom guy to carry 8 unique weapons which were again mapped to number keys on a keyboard. Almost 2 decades later, the doom slayer carries forward the tradition of packing a mammoth arsenal at all times. The core loop of the game is much different from Far Cry, and hence the solutions it implements.
With such an emphasis on fluid and easy to commit violence, it would’t fit the game to create the downtime by foraging and scavenging for resources. Especially in a linear game. Instead it makes the players search for keys to exit the current level, and offers smalls detours to look for resources that would upgrade your arsenal. So how’s the weapon wheel for such a game look like?
While Far Cry 5’s weapon wheel has many layers, arrows, functions, and other kinds of gestures, Doom’s is pretty simple. It shows the player all the weapons that are available and how much ammo they have. That’s all the game deems needful to be shown at this point. Doom slayer isn’t a “nifty” and “resourceful” character, he’s a murder machine.
This hasn’t caused the designers to forget accessibility though. The wheel is colour coded to show what ammo it uses. The R1/RB button is multi gesture, tap once to switch to previous weapon and hold to open the weapons wheel. This multi gesture allows the game to facilitate even faster change between weapons that are used in tandem, thereby enabling the murder machine to murder more efficiently.
Yes, there are weapon mods in the game. But they are facilitated by a button the D-pad and not in the weapons wheel. The entire focus on the game is to be quick, so the adding and removing mods is a toggle function. Hence they don’t need to be offered by an on-screen interface, and instead use a button. The interface surfaces the fantasy.
In 2017, a (then) PS4 exclusive game gained a lot of attention for unique open world gameplay. That was Horizon Zero Dawn, a game about a young girl finding her way through untamed wilderness and making the best of everything the natural and artificial environment has to offer. Aloy, too, has a huge arsenal of weapons that she can carry with her all times. The challenges here are different though, such that unlike Far Cry 5 and much like Doom, Aloy carries her entire arsenal with her all the time. But unlike Doom and much like Far Cry 5, she is a very human character who is quite vulnerable. In Far Cry 5, players have to visit a store or the HQ to swap weapons in and out of the weapons wheel. Aloy can do that from her back pack in the main menu. Yet her weapon wheel only allows her to carry 4 weapons. Let’s try to understand why.
The loop, while similar to Far Cry 5, has a nuances. There is no clear demarcation of things that are craftable and things which must be purchased, and there is no clear HQ that the game sends Aloy back to. Both these reasons are why Far Cry 5’s protagonist needs to frequently revisit the HQ, but Aloy can survive in the wilderness and rely on nothing but her environment. Ammo can be entirely created from salvaged material from killing enemies, making it a positive feedback loop. Constant weaving in and out of stealth is facilitated by the AI of robo dinosaurs, thereby allowing to puncture times of intense combat with opportunity to instantly utilise scavenged resources. Aloy is more tuned towards the “resourceful” and “self sufficient” trope than the the protagonist of Far Cry 5, where the narrative theme is to build a community in Hope County by bringing back resources. While Aloy only carries 4 weapons on wheel, she carries a huge amount of specialised ammo that is the core focus of the combat. The weapon firing this ammo is merely a multiplier on the damage and effects of this ammo.
Hence crafting is a very core function of the weapons wheel, and so is accommodating it all in a single layer. Far Cry 5 has a multi layered wheel due to clear separation of things that can be crafted vs can’t (or primary and secondary). But Aloy’s character is about wits and management, and the players have to exercise equal wits when choosing to prioritise what ammo type to quickly craft during combat.
Another game in a similar vein, albeit the lack of a true open world, is Tomb Raider.
And doesn’t it look very similar to HZD’s weapons wheel?
The accessibility and usability functions are very similar as well. They both indicate the ammo quantity you are currently possessing, but HZD show’s the upper capacity when a player highlights it as crafting is possible in the wheel. This is important to know when crafting so players could how many they will end up holding and how many resources will be consumed to top up. Why isn’t the same feature in Tomb Raider? Because crafting isn’t a function in the wheel. In Tomb Raider, players can simply hold R2/ RT/ RMB during gameplay and Lara will craft her arrows. And that is where players would need the information of ammo caps and resources more than here.
Are Weapon Wheels the end all, be all?
No interface is the end all, be all. It simply exists to facilitate the fantasy that the players are expecting.
Yet another game that sells the fantasy of quick-wittedness and crafting quick solutions during tense encounters is the first Last of Us. While the loop of that game is also similar to these, the feel of the game is much, much different. It’s narrative about an apocalyptic zombie outbreak and a story of a two people traversing the desolate ruins of civilisation. The resources are far limited and even harder to acquire, the atmosphere is dark and uncertain, the ambiance is tense. Crafting from a common pool of rare resources means prioritising and choosing quickly is important. The game implements a quick menu instead of a weapons wheel, where the menu forms a plus sign. The weapons are along the horizontal prong and and throwables (along with health packs) are on the vertical prong. Even “quick crafting” is slower than rest of the games, navigating the quick menu is done by buttons instead of the stick and there is no hold to open the menu. This requires more dexterity and precision as mistakes mean more clicks and more time spent not being aware of surrounding dangers. The quick menu auto-directs to the full crafting menu and the player character gets on their knees to craft. The auto shift to a menu that covers the screen and the character taking a vulnerable pose with an unfavourable camera zoom-in creates a real sense of dread and urgency in the players while they are crafting. This tension and dread would be the case if we are handling small objects in highly anxious and immobile states where dangers surround us and mobility is the only way to save ourselves. Without using a wheel, the game offers a convenient way to access weapons from a rather hefty arsenal (4 weapons, throwables, health packs) and not breaking the immersion or the pacing.
Halo, a game about a soldier’s mission to save the world and win a galactic war, has never featured weapons wheels. It has always been about Master Chief and his ability to carry exactly 2 weapons, and the players’ ability to strike a balance between their tactics and the offered weapons. The narrative facilitates the abilities and heart of a hero facing against the odds, unlike Doom which puts a spotlight on a literal superhuman force of carnage and destruction. Carrying every weapon at all times is a characteristic of the violent nature of the Doom Slayer.
Fallout, a series about a technological standstill, features a very cumbersome interface that resembles what it represents. Analog computers were bulky and, most importantly, required a lot of input to achieve very little. Many tiny switches, manual input for every repetitive task, a terrible UX were hallmarks of that technological era (just attend a electronics engineering class with me, I’ll show you). Doesn’t the fact that switching weapons requires players to access the pip-boy, navigating the old-fashioned menu to find the weapon manually, equip it, and then return to gameplay sound equally cumbersome? Even though it may be low on usability and breaks the pacing of the encounter, does it not encapsulate the sense of tediousness of the thing it represents?
Then comes an important question — could Fallout, Halo or Last of Us include a weapons wheel? For Halo, the two weapon system is the great pillar of gameplay. So a UI element to facilitate choice when owning a huge arsenal is redundant. For Last of Us, it would objectively create a disconnection with the immersion carefully crafted by the designers.
As Fallout continues to transition into an action-adventure genre while disowning it’s RPG pillars slowly and methodically, this may be the natural conclusion. Fallout’s scavenger style fantasy of scrounging for resources to bring back to base to craft ingenious contraptions may be replaced by a weapons wheel and in-inventory crafting to quicken the pace. How would Fallout feel with a in-wheel creation and consumption of stimpaks, drugs and food instead of going into the pip-boy to eat a hundred carrots? How would a wheel resonate with other pace-breaking mechanic like CRITS, for better or for worse? Before we ask “is this good or bad”, we must ask “does it help sell the fantasy promised by the game”.
When it comes to gestures and accessibility though, we can see in Far Cry 5 itself that they implemented a weapons wheel and a weapons grid. A grid with clickable buttons works better for a mouse as the mouse is clearly meant for point and click, while grids don’t work so well with controllers where the gesture emulated is a drag.
Ubisoft was considerate enough to give an option to switch between either since familiarity with an interface is also important, causing players to choose something familiar over something ergonomically more efficient. But this shows that even for the same game and experience, a weapons wheel is not end all be all.
If the method and technology existed, should and could Far Cry 2 have a weapons wheel? How would it be designed?
The Far Cry series after the second is about a sandbox to have fun in, where the world is littered with tools to facilitate your fun. The map is abundant with checkpoints and safe zones to restock ammo, and fast travel makes them even easier to access.
Far Cry 2, on the other hand, is about survival. It focuses on tension and looming mortality. The console version does not even have quicksave, fast travel can only occur to and from specific points, and the protagonist suffers random health attacks from malaria. Weapons wear down and start jamming which is a huge inconvenience during tense firefights.
Naturally, a weapons wheel would mean the pace and immersion of combat will be broken every time it is accessed. The D-pad based weapon switching of Far Cry 2 is very good for the same reasons of not breaking out of the combat, and the state of a weapon is very diegetic in the sense that as it wears down, it’s physical shine disappears and is replaces by scratches and rust. While the game may not objectively improve with a weapons wheel, this is how I would design it with “tension” and “unreliability” being the keywords if I had to.
Without changing any game systems or even the existing control scheme, it made no sense to add throwables (grenades and molotovs) and syrettes (health packs) to the weapons wheel as they already have their own dedicated buttons. While there are only two types of throwables which operate in a toggle manner, the concept includes a reminder to players about the actual button used to switch between them.
The major theme of weapons in Far Cry 2 is that weapons wear out after use. The more their condition erodes, the more unreliable they become. Worn out weapons may jam more frequently during combat, which is a huge looming sense of tension when the player hasn’t replaced their worn out weapon in a long time. This UI concept takes advantage of that, as the encroaching red fill in a slot shows how much the weapon is worn out. Use of indefinite colour instead of a definitive bar fill lends into the unknowable nature of when exactly and how often it will jam, but whenever players may access the weapons wheel they will be reminded of the weapon’s unreliable nature. The unknown is what creates the original sense of unreliability and using a UI element denoting known quantity will negatively affect the fantasy. Surely it could have taken on an artistic touch. Using themes of cracks, scratches, and rust in the UI to depict wear and tear with the passage of time would be much better suited. But the concept still remains the same to surface a fantasy.
The game also has a mechanic that induces an incapacitated state in the player character who is suffering from Malaria. With such mechanic striking randomly (even just after tense combat) with no scripted event to warn about it, the game has no problems prioritising continuity of combat over gameplay stopping mechanics. With such an inference, this UI concept also does not include any slow motion or background blurring to remain consistent with the immersion. The opaque UI also borrows from the examples where reduced/ covered viewport create a sense of dread and the possibility of danger when players are distracted. It is even placed near the cursor area to purposefully create a nuisance value while in the middle of shooting but not in the centre to create a disconnection from ongoing events.
Take Away resource
While making the prototype in the above section, I ended up making a document where I could chart down the pillars of just the weapons wheel to analyse why certain decisions were being made. I hope that this can also be a helpful resource to others
Conclusion
Weapon wheels have transformed from a way to make a choice between finite selections to now containing their own standardised and familiar micro-interactions. In-wheel crafting, customisation, menu navigation have been successfully integrated in weapons wheels. Wheels have gone from being simple solutions to multi-layered and multi-faceted tools. Every game that has integrated them has added their own nuances and design tweaks born from their individual requirements. Yet, a weapons wheel is not a checkbox to mark when it comes to using it in our own games as it is a very deep and complex tool with many implications on immersion, feel, fantasy, usability and pacing.
Unlike traditional applications like a pizza ordering app for Domino’s, the UX of a game is not dependent on the lowest barrier of entry. While we must empathise with our players, we must focus on why we are doing things rather than how to best suffice an entry into our UIs. If players are attracted to the experiences because of fantasy and immersion, then why contest them? Wouldn’t a cumbersome gameplay UI that replicates old military interfaces help with immersion for a WW1 game, even if the usability aspect was slightly compromised? Obviously this is not a license to design terrible UX , as components like a matchmaking lobby is universal and should be designed for minimum frustration since it is not a place where players seek immersion.
But while we empathise with players, we must also realise that they are seeking to empathise with an immersive experience. Wouldn’t the best way to facilitate that is to imbibe the nuances and structured frustration of whatever experience they are expecting?
