Overall thoughts
The UI provided in odyssey has taken a step backwards rather then forwards. All UIs went under un-needed and unwanted changes that have resulted in more cumbersome an unintuitive menu navigation and operation across all menus.
Specific Issues
Station Menu
So kick things off the Station initial menu was a great example of the changing of a system that did not need to be changed. The overall look does not fit with ED style and leads to additional button pushes and interactions in order to operate and browse to the same functions as previously. A great example of this, is when selecting missions, you are not asked with another window that prompts to select missions, passengers, or community goals. This was a needless additions that simply put another menu in front of us we dont need.
On top of this, the redesigning of the buttons is quite odd considering some of the buttons have been made very similar to one another, such as the outfitting button looking like the livilry button now for some reason.
Mission board Menu
The redesign of the mission board was horribly unneeded. The new lay out feels like we lost information. We no longer get to see our rep with the faction or their influence on the system, the new way of sorting feels very uneeded as well. We already had the ability to drill down into mission types we wanted in a much nicer way, i simply said show only comabt misssions then just scrolled down each contact that was there.
Now i need to select show only combat, and now filter out just the contacts i want rather then just already having that being an option.
The mission turn in feature to simply requiers more operations to do the exact same operation as i used to do.
For example before when i accepted a donate mission, i could just complete the mission right then and there, now i have to go back out of the mission board, and select complete missions then complete it.
On top of that, when completing a mission we are for some reason shows an additional animation screen that results in another button press to skip and or get past.
Passenger menu
Once more, the need to split VIP, and group missions was not needed, there was no benefit added for this change.
Ship Outfitting Menu
This is probably the most egregious menu change out of all the changes. The new menu navigation has made equipping and unequipping moduels so horribly tedious now. With having to not only select what moduel we want to replace, but now we need to select the type of module in that slot, for example power plants with only one type of power plant why do we have to press it twice? The scrolling down a menu which shows us even Less information then we had before. Why?
Alo the icons now have removed any indication as to what they are until you select it. How is any one meant to know the 2 hexagons are for core internals and 1 hex is for optional? Look at the old system and you can see everything was very nicely labeled.
Pioneer Weapon menu
The weapon buying system itself is fine, nothing wrong there but i honestly feel that this menu was never finished, we have a weapons stat pannel that only shows magazine size, which is just a sliding bar with no indication of actual ammo count. How am i meant to know what half a bar of magazine size is?
Where is the damage? the range? the rate of fire? the damage vs shields, vs armor. nothing, there is nothing there.
Suit and weapon engineer menu
This has the same issue that the weapon menu has, they tell us nothing, i dont know what increase my range of my waepon means, what is my current range? How much more do i get if i extend the magazine? How much faster do i draw my weapon? how fast do i draw my weapon to begin with?
Galactic map menu
This is the second worst victim of the menu change. The new galactic map UI has been a direct down grade. Everything now resides in multiple levels of filters that, i dont even think you can even search any more with multiple filters on. It was just not needed at all.
On top of that, if i was not using a Mouse and Keyboard navigating this menu would be a night mare, Before i could set a destination, and get out of the map with no more then 4 button presses, now, at minimum i have to navigate through multiple button groups to get to the exit button. Again, why was this changed? no one had issues with this menu.
Suggested Fixes for the Issues
Thankfully, this is where the good news coming in. For almost all of the menu problems, they have the exact same solution.
The fix for the following menus is thus:
- Station
- Passenger
- Mission
- Outfitting
- galactic map
Simple, change them back.
We did not need a new menu update. we did not want a menu update, the new features added in for book marks are great, they did not warrant a complete change of the UI. The old menus were great, they worked, they provided FAR more information on them then the current menu does, and no one had a single problem with them. Please do us and everyone else a favor, bring back the old menus for all of the non odyssey systems.
As for the Prioneer weapons, suits, and engineering, the fix for this is very simple to. Provide us with the actual information we need. Give us numbers, give us stats, dont give us ambiguous sliding bars that mean nothing to us. The ED community is not full of mid wits that dont understand numbers we live off numbers, we live and play this game to try and reduce a number from being .25 to .23 to let us jump or actually use that one module.
Thank you if you took the time to read this, and i hope it has not fallen on deaf ears.
(and never got it) because we have horrible Internet (300KB/s down and 1,000ms+ latency), this is ridiculous.
