A aplicabilidade das heurísticas de Nielsen e Pinelle na usabilidade de jogos soulslike

Abstract

The growing popularity of digital games in the soulslike genre, represented by titles such as Elden Ring and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, highlights the need to understand how traditional usability evaluation methods apply to more complex and challenging design contexts. The main objective of this work is to critically analyze the effectiveness of Nielsen's classic heuristics and Pinelle's game-specific heuristics in evaluating the usability of a prototype based on Elden Ring, seeking to identify not only strengths and limitations but also possible inadequacies or insufficiencies of the evaluation instruments when confronted with the particularities of the soulslike genre. The methodology involved the application of the selected heuristics by usability specialists using an interactive prototype developed in Figma and complemented by audiovisual gameplay recordings. The collected observations were qualitatively analyzed based on the categorization of heuristic violations and the recurrence of the reported issues. The results show that, although Nielsen's and Pinelle's heuristics identify general interaction problems, they do not cover essential aspects of the soulslike genre. Evaluators pointed out issues related to contrast, lack of information, and lack of clarity in some prototype elements. They also reported difficulties in assessing genre-specific characteristics, such as subtle feedback, which are not well addressed by the heuristics, revealing significant limitations in traditional evaluation instruments.