Something that has bugged me for a while, yet has received no alteration even to it's most egregious failures, is the UI design.
Take for example the awful powerplay UI, whereby to this day, you still have to click through a repetitive cycle in order to pickup 10 more units. 75 cycles of the most garbage design implemented in a modern game, to accomplish what should be a simple task of picking up 750 units. Who designed this? And worse, who approved it?! A student who submitted this would receive a fail, and a recommendation to reconsider their career choices, it is beyond lazy, it is dumbfoundingly lacking in an understanding of basic design concepts.
Compound that with the lazy (bad) sub design of the click and hold to reach your target amount of units, which is obviously an unimaginative console implementation, which has been ticked off as "good enough" for PC implementation, instead of enabling numeric input, because of the overarching "why make something good, when it will do" philosophy apparent in the UI.
Some things are done really well in this game, a lot of it is done terribly, for a company that has never designed a FPS, i shudder to think of just how badly the philosophy will translate to those interfaces, and possibly trash a mode before the mechanics are even considered. Intuitive isn't in the language of the code, it should be. I have very low expectations for Odyssey in this regard, and it is critical to FPS design, as someone who plays a lot of the best FPS games, I know if the interfaces are clunky the game gets binned before it even gets considered for a purchase. Sure we space nerds will buy it anyway, but if the goal is to grow (let alone strive for good design for the joy of it), Frontier needs to rework it's UI department.
So why hasn't this been addressed? Is it apathy? incompetence? because it certainly isn't due to a lack of time or manpower.
Take for example the awful powerplay UI, whereby to this day, you still have to click through a repetitive cycle in order to pickup 10 more units. 75 cycles of the most garbage design implemented in a modern game, to accomplish what should be a simple task of picking up 750 units. Who designed this? And worse, who approved it?! A student who submitted this would receive a fail, and a recommendation to reconsider their career choices, it is beyond lazy, it is dumbfoundingly lacking in an understanding of basic design concepts.
Compound that with the lazy (bad) sub design of the click and hold to reach your target amount of units, which is obviously an unimaginative console implementation, which has been ticked off as "good enough" for PC implementation, instead of enabling numeric input, because of the overarching "why make something good, when it will do" philosophy apparent in the UI.
Some things are done really well in this game, a lot of it is done terribly, for a company that has never designed a FPS, i shudder to think of just how badly the philosophy will translate to those interfaces, and possibly trash a mode before the mechanics are even considered. Intuitive isn't in the language of the code, it should be. I have very low expectations for Odyssey in this regard, and it is critical to FPS design, as someone who plays a lot of the best FPS games, I know if the interfaces are clunky the game gets binned before it even gets considered for a purchase. Sure we space nerds will buy it anyway, but if the goal is to grow (let alone strive for good design for the joy of it), Frontier needs to rework it's UI department.
So why hasn't this been addressed? Is it apathy? incompetence? because it certainly isn't due to a lack of time or manpower.
