Hello,
I'm a professional UI programmer for AAA video games, coming in at ten (!) years. You may know me from such titles as [REDACTED] and [UNDER NDA]. I've worked on porting games to PC, and I've worked on console-exclusive titles. The lack of tooltips in games these days is attributable to two main factors:
- Gamepads can't navigate menus very well with a cursor.
- PC makes comparatively little money.
I understand both may be controversial statements, so I'll do my best to explain. First, to address the elephant in the room: Yes, Destiny had a gamepad cursor, and it novel, and players felt it was overwhelmingly "okay":
But it took the very clever boys and girls at Bungie many years of iteration to get it right, and when Ubisoft immediately tried to copy their homework, the results were... mixed.
Like all things UI, if you do it right, it's like you've done nothing at all. But players immediately notice a gamepad cursor that isn't absolutely perfect. In terms of feature work, it's high-risk, low-reward.
What we UI programmers tend to do instead for gamepad is left-stick navigation, where you can instantly jump between elements by pointing them. But this means you're not "floating" above an element, so there is no hover state. And no hover state means no tooltips. (Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. Ignore these.)
So if you're making a game with hover tooltips, you're likely making it for PC. This brings us to the money problem. I've been privy to internal publisher dashboards, and they make comparatively little money with a PC-exclusive title. And don't get me wrong, there is still nice money to be made on PC. But the sales figures are 3 to 10 times higher on your XboxStationSwitches.
Finally, please don't ask me to put tooltips inside tooltips. That usually means you're trying to patch over bad UX.
