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I'm sick of tiny, tiny type too, but not in my browser....

Rather, almost all modern video games seem to have huge amounts of insanely small type, that's in many cases literally unreadable on my TV because I have a smallish (20") olde-style CRT television with only analogue inputs, not a wall-sized HDTV. The pixels in the characters are blurred into unreadability—even putting my nose 10cm away from the screen and using a magnifying glass, there's text which cannot be deciphered (seriously, I've tried this).

This is particularly bad with CJK text, because it has more fine details, and especially for CJK text translated from English, as they typically don't increase the character size enough to compensate for the differences (I guess they're trying to re-use the same layouts).

I find it hard to believe that even those people who do own wall-sized HDTVs are comfortable reading much of this text, because people generally sit fairly far away from their television. I suppose it's a sign that video game makers are designing for the PC, and then doing a very poor job of adapting for consoles ....




Text simply doesn't work very well with SDTV resolutions. You could always use a monitor instead.


Text on an SDTV worked perfectly fine through to the PS2 days and on the Wii. The problem is that nowadays with HD consoles taking the forefront, developers are all targeting HDTV resolutions, leaving SDTV users to deal with the unreadable text size.


Text works fine with SDTV resolutions, if made large enough.

And "large enough" doesn't mean absurdly large either, simply not the insane small sizes they're using. In most cases there really isn't a huge amount of text (we're talking video games here, not novels, here), and there's little apparent justification for the small size other than "hey it looked good on my dev monitor!"

Moreover, it's not just an "SDTV vs. HDTV" issue; as I mentioned, in most cases, the sizes used would be uncomfortable for almost anyone playing with a typical TV setup (where one tends to sit fairly far away from the display), even if their television is capable of resolving it. The sizes used seem pretty clearly intended for people using a typical desktop PC setup, where the monitor is much closer.




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