by oatmeal2k on Sun Feb 19, 2012 3:34 am
Ah, when I went to send this the board warned me there were new posts and sure enough dislekcia mentions that some of this is temporary. Here's my nathed feedback just the same, hope its helpful :]
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Crashiness seems much reduced for me now, great! Again, I loved the original, and I hate to be super negative, but here goes:
I really do not like several things about the new UI. As a few people have said, this is a game where clarity of information is paramount; you're constantly flitting your eyes back and forth over your mana and health and the opponent's and your XP, doing math and planning out possible plans of attack. If you have to work to get this information it disrupts flow and kills that sweet, zenlike concentration. Specific things I don't personally like:
- The busy-ness of the backgrounds makes reading numbers a chore as they compete with random scribble and shine.
- Inconsistency! The monster's attack values are in a different place than the player's, as are the health bars, and they look completely different. I think the designer was going for kind of a mechanical theme for the player and a Monster Manual style info tome for the monsters, but when I play I'm constantly scanning my eyes back and forth from the player area to the monster area and this difference is jarring: I don't want to see the UI, I want to see the numbers, but when I look back and forth my attention is subtly drawn to visual differences between my glances, not numerical ones.
- Inconsistency part 2: by my count we have numbers on: little rolly dials (4 places), on colored bars (3 places), on little dotted boxes (2 places), on scraggly line bars (1 place). It's jarring, it doesn't adhere to any consistent reality and once again it makes scanning a chore when the background, the border padding, the fonts, the text colors, etc are all changing all over the place.
- The monster health bars have nearly-moire dark-light patterns surrounding them that are visually unpleasant. They go, from the outside-in: the dark border of the next-hit-result box, a light line on the outer border, the dark dotted line, the lightness just inside the dark dotted line, the darkness of the shaded in life bar, the lightness of the text glow, the darkness of the test itself. In the span of about 12 pixels you have as many as 7 light-dark transitions when two would be plenty (dark border, light health bar, dark text on it, for example).
- The whole thing is just noisy, filled with information-less pixels. I know you want it to look snazzy, but I gotta information out of there! Its like a 90's website. God, which sounds so harsh and I'm sorry, because it looks like someone worked on this for a long time, but it is just way too packed with details and flourishes and flair. Something more restrained in the same aesthetic could be wonderful, but this is just too much.
Its possible yall have decided you'd like to prioritize the fun-ness of the menus over easy information processing, and that's a defensible decision if so. But if you are focused on ease and pleasantness of use, I think there's some changes left to be made.
Anyway, I sincerely apologize if this sounds snarky or obnoxious or unduly unkind, but I really would love to see this game be as good as it can be, and I'm banking that you'd rather have straightforward feedback than a bunch of pussyfooting around.