Been playing a little while now and love the game. It does a lot of things right, but I feel that one thing that could do with improvement is the UI. It is clunky and not all that intuitive. Examples Below:
Start screen menu: Selecting and deselecting difficulties
check box button for Veteran, whereas radio buttons used for the other difficulties. I’ve tried to think why this decision was made, but unsure. Perhaps dev can explain?
Not immediately clear as to which difficulty is highlighted, especially when changing characters that have different difficulties selected.
Suggestion: Remove the difficulty buttons altogether. I can’t think of a situation as to why a player would need to change back to lower difficulty on a character after progressing further into the game. Alternatively prompt player with 4 large identifiable tile buttons, upon clicking one of the difficulty tiles, session begins straight away which eliminates the start game button.
Crucible difficulty selections. These should really be dialogue options once you’re in the crucible, it is disruptive having these outside in the start menu. Alternatively prompt player with 3 large identifiable tile buttons after selecting Crucible. Upon selecting a difficulty tile button, the session begins.
Multiplayer menu: This will require an entire thread I think. Multiplayer interface and user experience is a mess. Not being able to change multiplayer settings in session is cumbersome for one.
Equipment component identifiers: Currently when an equipment item is hovered over with cursor, compatible components glow in the stash inventory. The problem is that the equipment descriptions often clutter up and cover the stash inventory obscuring what the user can see is compatible.
Suggestion: right click an equipped item to open a new menu list of available components that can be attached with a left click. This would allow user to see what components are available for that particular item instead of having a stash full of every component.
If there is a solution currently to any of these ideas above please let me know.
Thats it for now. If I get time I’ll mock-up suggestions.
For example, someone has a character that is friends with Barrowholm and/or Outcast, and they want to go hostile in Ultimate, they can then go to the lower difficulty, buy their augments and keep on playing on Ultimate. You can not put augments to your stash.
Another could be having Angrim on Elite, as your craftsman, and choosing Duncan by accident on Ultimate, which did happen to me.
You can hold CTRL and descriptions disappear, while stuff is still glowing. It is even stated on the bottom of each item description.
I can think of a couple, though I guess they’re both the same really. Someone moves on to the next difficulty and finds it too hard so drops back to the lower difficulty to farm gear and level up some more. Similar to this will be the ability to skip difficulties that’s coming with Forgotten Gods. Someone skips from Normal up to Ultimate unprepared for the change in difficulty and wants to drop back to Normal again. Also some people might want to go back to a lower difficulty to finish some side quests they didn’t do previously or to get a missed shrine.
As for not being clear which difficulty a character is on, it says so when you choose that character in the main character screen.
Since the game is mainly single player with some multiplayer added on I doubt there’ll be much change to the way the latter works.
Another reason to switch back: You notice you forgot something on the lower levels. This is a reason for me to go back from Elite. Did the checklist yesterday and noticed I forogt some stashes and missed one shrine… If I couldn’t fall back…
And yet another with the new FG achievements being posted on Steam and GOG - one of which is to cleanse 60 shrines. Now we know the shrine ratio is changing so that Ultimate will have the most so you can get 55 devotion points in a single playthrough, so you might have to drop back to Elite or Normal to get that achievement.