I don't always play fighting games but when I do I prefer that they not remind me of Dos Equis.

And yes I realize I'm not the first person to make a joke along those lines. Anywho people, a new version of 'Marvel vs. Capcom 3' is out creatively titled 'Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3' and before anyone gets antsy it does in fact continue it predecessors proud tradition of making some seriously questionable design decisions. In this case the one that's going to jump out to most people (especially those who played the “vanilla” version) is the heads-up display (HUD). At this point I have to imagine that between the HUD, some of the system changes and many of the character “balance” changes that the number one action item for the 'UMvC3' team was: change for changes sake. While I won't be getting to the system or “balance” changes in this article I am going to be briefly going over the new HUD.

Pictured: A reminder of what the original HUD locked like

On the left you'll see the second most interesting man in the world.

The first couple of issues with the new HUD seem more like systemic issues with Capcom. Mainly being that no one asked for this as the HUD in the first game was perfectly serviceable and significantly more legible than the new one. Additionally when Capcom was debuting various builds of the game over the summer the community feedback on the new HUD was almost universally negative and it's nice to see that those comments went almost completely ignored. I'm not saying that a company should bend over backwards to accommodate every minor complaint that a fan base has but in this case some level of change was warranted. As far as I'm aware there was maybe one complaint to be had about the original HUD and that was that the indicator for whether or not you had a specific resource still available to you was kind of hard to see (the red dots next to the character portraits). Other than that it was fine. Ergo if you'd stuck with the original but fixed that one issue you'd have a HUD that is miles better than the one we've got now.

Furthermore I'm very curious who thinks a character order that goes 3-1-2 (new) is somehow more intuitive than an order that goes 1-2-3 (old). While this is a change where I agree with the apologists (i.e. people who're for some reason defending terrible design) that people will eventually get used to I have argued and will continue to argue that it's something that people shouldn't have to get used to. More change for changes sake. I get it that the designer wanted to make it more apparent which character was on point at any given moment but there really has to be a better way to do so than this.

Before we get to the last issue here's a test. More specifically it's a crappy web-based test for colorblindness. See 'UMvC3' like 'Bioshock 2' makes a mistake in its design that makes it difficult to impossible for those with certain forms of colorblindness to see the display properly. In 'Bioshock 2' it was a minigame that was literally impossible for those with red-green or blue-yellow colorblindness to solve. In 'Marvel' while I haven't seen the specifics of the complaints I have seen several colorblind players vocalizing their concerns about being unable to read several of the meters/gauges effectively. This is certainly an area where I don't recall seeing similar complaints about the old HUD.

Overall looking at the (ghastly) changes to the HUD it really does seem to reinforce the suspicion of change for changes sake. Even more-so than when the change results in something that is considerably worse than what it's replacing is the resources devoted to these unnecessary changes. As of the writing of this article (a couple of days before the games official launch) people have already found more than a few glitches ranging from silly to “Oh hell” that's a problem. Maybe a few less random changes and a little more QA/QC next time Capcom. Not a sermon, just a thought. See you all next week.