By Pedro Cerqueira, UX Designer at Kokku
In an age where remakes, remasters, and ports dominate the gaming scene, the role of UX/UI in game porting has never been more crucial. As gamers return to their old favorites—or discover them for the first time on new platforms—the way these games look, feel, and play is under more scrutiny than ever.
Game porting isn't just about replicating what once was, but about enhancing the player’s experience while staying true to the original spirit. Let’s dive into how UX/UI design can make or break this delicate process.
Knowing the Target Audience
- First things first: who are we designing for? This question drives every UX/UI decision when porting a game. Are we trying to capture the nostalgia of the original player base, those who still remember every pixel and sound effect? Or are we introducing the game to a new generation of players, with modern expectations and sensitivities? Maybe both?
For games like Final Fantasy VII or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the nostalgia factor is a significant driver. Fans want to relive their memories, but not at the cost of outdated design practices. Porting a game involves a careful balance—preserving what made the original iconic while making it approachable to newer audiences, accustomed to more intuitive interfaces and streamlined user experiences.
UI and Legacy Software
- When you start porting an old game, especially one from an era where UI design wasn’t a priority, the process often feels like you’re uncovering ancient relics. Legacy engines and software are like time capsules, and porting a game means understanding not just how the game looks and plays, but how it was built under the hood.
For many older titles, the UI is deeply intertwined with the game's core systems. It wasn’t built with modularity in mind, and the original developers probably didn’t envision anyone needing to overhaul the UI for future platforms. This is where porting teams become digital archaeologists, piecing together old code and art assets to reconstruct an experience that can meet modern standards.
The Challenges of Hardcoded Systems
One of the biggest obstacles is dealing with hardcoded elements. In older games, it wasn’t uncommon for developers to build UI elements directly into the game’s logic, with things like health bars, scoreboards, or menus being baked into the engine itself. This means that trying to make simple changes—like repositioning or resizing a menu—can become a massive undertaking, requiring you to unearth layers of code, often with incomplete or non-existent documentation.
For example, let’s say you want to update a game’s HUD to better fit widescreen displays. In modern engines, UI elements are often built using frameworks that allow for dynamic scaling or adaptive layouts. In a legacy engine, those elements might be rigidly set, and adjusting them can require rewriting significant parts of the engine or compromising on modernizing the UI altogether.
File Formats and Data Structures
Old file formats present another challenge. Many legacy games use proprietary file formats that modern tools no longer support. So, even before you get to changing the UI, you might have to reverse-engineer those formats to extract the assets and make them usable in today’s tools. This kind of work involves not only deciphering how old data structures are set up but also figuring out how to reformat or recompile them without breaking the game in unpredictable ways. Usually, when working with a client, they will provide the team with the necessary tools to work with these sorts of files, but you have to be prepared for every case scenario.
In some cases, UI textures or layouts might be embedded directly in the game’s binary files or stored in formats that no longer work on modern hardware. Replacing them can feel like open-heart surgery on an ancient machine: one wrong move, and the entire thing could crash.
Recreating Old Behaviors with New Tools
Even when dealing with simpler aspects like button layouts, the logic that governed old systems often doesn’t align with modern UI practices. For example, older games might have made assumptions about input methods—perhaps designing around a Wiimote or clunky, limited joystick setups. Porting that to today’s multi-input systems (where we have touchscreens, controllers, and mouse-keyboard combinations) is tricky.
Modern engines come with sophisticated UI frameworks—think Unity’s UI toolkit or Unreal Engine’s UMG—that are designed to handle the complexities of modern input systems and screen sizes. But when working with legacy engines, you may not have those luxuries. Instead, you might need to create custom scripts to mimic old behaviors while supporting new input methods. This often leads to creative solutions, like designing entirely new wrappers for the UI that can work with modern engines while preserving the functionality of the original code.
https://nintendosoup.com/nintendo-switch-has-outsold-the-wii-in-lifetime-sales-in-japan/
Documenting the Past to Inform the Future
One of the most interesting aspects of working with legacy systems is the sense of preserving gaming history. It’s like stepping into the shoes of developers from a bygone era and learning how they solved the unique challenges of their time. In some ways, you're creating documentation for the future—lending a hand to anyone who might revisit this work 10, 20, or even 30 years from now.
This is also why the "archeological" aspect of game porting is so valuable. Every discovery—whether it’s a forgotten art asset, a quirky piece of code, or a limitation of the original engine—helps inform not just how we preserve these games but how we approach the design and development of future titles. It’s a fascinating intersection of historical preservation, technical problem-solving, and modern UX design.
QOL Improvements: Beyond Control Mapping
- When porting games, it’s easy to think that Quality of Life (QOL) updates are as simple as rerouting inputs for modern controllers. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The real opportunity lies in rethinking interactions altogether.
Consider how some games like The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and how Nintendo adapted the motion control combat for gamepad use, or how Resident Evil 4 improved aiming and movement on modern consoles. These aren’t just control tweaks—they’re full-on reimaginings of how players engage with the game world.
COMPARAÇÃO do RE4 REMAKE e o CLÁSSICO!
Zelda: Skyward Sword HD Special Edition Joy-Cons for Nintendo Switch | Unboxing and Gameplay
And it's not just about making the game feel good to play; it’s about respecting player time. Streamlining cumbersome menus, adding tutorials that fit modern expectations, and adjusting difficulty curves are all key UX improvements that help make legacy games enjoyable today.
Modern, but Authentic
- When it comes to the UI, art direction matters as much as functionality. But how do you introduce new UI elements that fit seamlessly within the aesthetic of a game that might be decades old? This is where art direction and UI design merge. The trick is creating something that feels fresh yet familiar.
Take the recent Diablo II: Resurrected as an example. The updated UI is cleaner, more intuitive, more responsive to different scenarios and easier to navigate, but it still feels like it belongs to the dark, gothic world of the original. It’s about preserving the emotional connection players have to the visuals while also respecting modern standards of clarity and ease of use.
I have this personal anecdote: Diablo II was one of the first games I ever played, but guess what stuck with me the most? It was the devil holding the mana pool, while an angel held the blood-red health orb. It was the ingenious tile-based inventory system, which felt like organizing an actual bag full of swords and staves. It was the gothic flourishes all over the menus. While playing the remaster, all those feelings of nostalgia came back rushing in – which was definitely by design. I’m sure that many first time players are feeling the same as I was around the 2000’s.
https://gametyrant.com/news/diablo-ii-remaster-a-breakdown-of-gameplay-nostalgia-and-thoughts
There’s also the challenge of knowing how far you can push modernization without breaking the game's original feel. For example, older games often had limited resolution options, and their UI was designed around those constraints. Moving that game to a 4K display isn’t as simple as scaling everything up. The fonts, icons, and even color choices might look terrible at higher resolutions, and you may have to recreate assets from scratch.
But doing so can lead to another dilemma: how much should you change? Modernizing a UI while maintaining its original charm is a delicate balancing act. Too many changes and you risk alienating nostalgic players; too few and new players might find the game frustrating to navigate. The key is to be mindful of what needs modernization (like making text legible or menus more accessible) while keeping the spirit of the original alive.
The Heartbreak of Sacrificing UX for Legacy Systems
- As much as we'd love to give players every modern UX/UI improvement, the reality is that some ideas just don’t translate well to legacy engines. Sometimes, the cost of implementing a seemingly simple QOL feature is too high, both in terms of time and resources. This is where compromise comes in.
Maybe you can’t add that slick new inventory system because it would mean rewriting half the codebase. Maybe adjusting the camera to be smoother would break the game’s AI. These are the tough decisions porting teams have to face. In these cases, the best you can do is optimize what’s possible within the constraints of the original engine and communicate those limitations transparently to the players.
Porting games is more than a technical challenge—it’s a balancing act between preservation and innovation. UX/UI is the invisible hand that guides players through these experiences, and when done right, it enhances the nostalgia or introduces the game to a whole new generation without alienating either group. Whether we’re tweaking control schemes or completely reimagining the way players interact with a world, UX/UI holds the key to making these classics feel alive again.