Actions

Ultima Online appears to me as the best example for this. There are dozens of skills, but players don't really do different things, they just see different outcomes although the only difference is the location of the skill buttons, and maybe the type of object it gets applied to. Clicking on a button to chop wood, compared to clicking on a button to domesticate an animal would be comparable to name the first one allarch, and the second one allurch (whatever..). Now this is acceptable with two skills, but imagine all 20 actions were modifications of all rch (allorch, allirch, allmrch etc ). Pretty weird and difficult to remember which skill belongs to which word, isn't it? Imagine there was no text next to the skill buttons, and probably you'll soon stop playing the game. The button locations are different, but is location on the screen really comparable to the difference between chopping wood and petting an animal? I hope not, and I also hope that you agree that his way surely cannot be the most efficient.

But how could it be improved then? Let's try again to base the UI on the real world. Swinging an axe is the basic action that comes to my mind most immediately if I think about chopping wood, so why not let the player do some of the work? This is stupid you think? In my opinion this is less stupid in the long term than double clicking on trees, and it would also feel different from the other actions and my action actually really is more like doing the real work! But hold! I don't want to say that you should make things as real as possible, bundle an extra axe device with your game and let the player hit a piece of plastic wood (though this really is the trend in arcades, if we look at Bass-Fishing, Harley Davidson. Who knows, maybe TreeChopper would do well as a fitness machine, maybe a bit like Dance Dance Revolution..). I want to show that things can be abstracted in many different ways. A certain degree of realism is enough, depending also on the complexity of the game. Imagine UO players sitting in their rooms scrammed with dozens of different devices!

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