Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
"That hand goes there... This hand goes here... But WAIT, there are not enough hands!"
Being able to customize content on unit frames
Being able to change colors.
Being able to have macro's to do advanced stuff wth abilitiy bars, like FFXIV.
Being able to put buff trackers on ability bars.
Being able to export and import loadouts of UI layouts.
Being able to hover cast abilities on unitframes.
Hi - As I'm going through all of these comments, I wanted to let you know that when the questions are sometimes formed this way, we are trying to kick-off discourse and conversation on the specific topic. We don't want players to literally decide between two different things.
Instead, we want those things to kick-off discussion for the overall topic (in this case, UI) and tell us what they would like to see! In the future, if you see a question that seems like "do you want x or x." try to think of it as an opener to a discussion on that topic, rather than quite literally between two different things. The key here is the topic of UI, rather than choosing between information overload or minimalism, if that makes sense!
I hope this helps with future questions we ask. I'll do my best to be cognizant of how the questions are formed to avoid confusion
Ty for the feedback!
MY ART --> Instagram | Twitter
Everything can absolutely essential situationally. There needs to be an option to enable and disable everything individually.
As a game developer, you do not decide what players consider essential. That is up to each player and their unique play styles and situations.
At a minimum, the UI should be more customizable than FFXIV. Especially since you guys are so against client modding. Which I strongly urge you to reconsider.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Formerly T-Elf
This seems like a false choice. I want the option to strip down the UI to almost nothing, scale it to exactly what dimensions I want, and snap or separate elements together. It’s all about context.
If I’m exploring alone in a dark cave where I want to see as much of the environment as possible (and still know vital info) is a very different UI than healing a 40+ person raid with high boss damage output windows (where I want a Vuhdo view).
So, here are the features:
- ability to show or hide ANY UI element (there is nothing sacred here)
- Ability to scale the size of ANY UI element
- Ability to snap / separate UI elements
- Ability to visualize real-time data (like cooldowns, inbound damage, healing output, for a single or multiple characters)
- Ability to choose exactly what data is relevant for my context (don’t assume the data you want as a dev is important)
- and for godsake - the chat window isn’t holy ground. There are plenty of times it’s annoying AF. Settings need to let me strip this banter down to minimum or go away completely.
Thanks for always keep an ear on our feedback!
@Vaknar you're gonna have to give us a little more than that
The head of the UI team at my last position would have rolled his eyes at this answer. Customizable UI is hard, and hard leads to buggy, or weird interactions. If we'd asked a client this question, we'd have been wanting to know 'what is the lowest level of complexity we can get away with and you still be happy?'
I'm fully willing to believe that Intrepid is willing to devote weeks to perfect customizable UI 'because the playerbase demands it' and 'you can't rush perfection', but if that's the case, the question is in fact completely moot.
"Just make literally everything customizable, end of discussion."
For those unfamiliar with the way these things are built, there's a big difference between:
'This component can't move but can be shown or hidden'
'This component can be put in different, set places, and it will cause other components to move or swap places with it'
'This component can't move but can be resized'
'This component can be put in different, set places, and also resized'
'This component can be put anywhere on screen'
in most systems. If Intrepid isn't using such a system and have easy, lossless customizability, they didn't need to ask this question, they just needed a LOT of QA, which doesn't have as much to do, with us. So even the answer of 'wanting to spark discussion' doesn't seem right. Discussion of what? It's like asking people to discuss 'what they prefer at a buffet'. The correct answer is always 'as many options as possible'. People 'discussing' whether or not any given 'food' should be there doesn't need to happen, the answer will always be 'just add it' unless you're running out of space.
'Are you running out of space?'
Ideally in a fantasy mmorpg with great grpahics I'd prefer a minimal UI. Just let me enjoy the scene plz.
But in an open pvp world where I can literally die any second, I'd prefer a load of information about the surrounding area displayed so I can react quickly & properly to incoming threats.
e.g. In Eve Online, one typically needs:
- Local chat, to see who's in system with you and spot potentially dangerous players (known gankers, hostile corp members etc.)
- "Overview" showing ships on grid with you, their pvp flags, identity (name/corp/alliance), ship type, distance speed direction etc. etc. etc...
- A directional scan which you keep refreshing (why didn't ccp make that thing auto-refresh ...) to check on ships far away that could ambush you
And Ashes is a hybrid of both. So I guess you'll have to make things highly-customizable and just let ppl setup their own.
But since scanners & overview probably don't exist in Ashes, I wonder what kind of information would help ppl avoid potential gankers in this case ...
I dont want to stare at my hotbar looking for Proccs all day. i want to be looking at the game. Good clear indicators that show proccs like:
-reset CD on an a core ability
-extra damage on an ability
-legendary and gear specific proccs
most games dont include the last one in the ui. and it really rustles my jimmies. if a gear set proc changes gameplay, or the way i use my abilities, i dont want to be squinting and staring searching for a tiny little specific buff icon for it
Weak auras is a great tool for UI customization in wow. though i personally think that with the scripting portion it can be taken too far for what ashes wants. I would love to have a customizable UI with the ability to add small but impactful things such as:
- a swing timer
- set up image pop ups for a specific buff showing up (so i can track buff stack falloffs, or proccs from gear/not base kit things) without having to stare at my hotbars
- ability to move UI elements such as: ui screens (inventory, character stats, ect.), Hotbars, player & target frames, buff frames ect.
thanks for taking the time to read this
For me it is important that I can disable every element of the UI separately from others:
- I don't want someone to decide for me that I always have to see skills / map / my current level / mailbox status, or whatever else.
- At the same time, I want to be able to decide that I want to only see, say, map, and nothing else at all (i.e. a "disable HUD" button is not what I want).
- Disable visual indicators such as "new mail" red dot
- Disable announcements in chat windows
- Disable any kind of pop-up windows
- Disable audio notifications
- Check notifications log at later point to see missed notifications
Yes, sometimes when I play a computer game - I want to relax, and I don't want to be disturbed by blinking red dots, invasive announcements at the top of my screen, or worse - an actual pop-up window, every time I got a new ingame mail, a guild announcement got posted, or a new boss record was set; when I am done chilling - I want to be able to go to notifications log and check it all out, if I choose to do so.
Regardless of the amount of data displayed, I personally prefer minimalistic look, therefore I'd love to be able to do things like:
- Disable backgrounds of UI elements
- Disable particle effects (for skill icons and similar)
- Switch to flat colours (flat colour HUD can be surprisingly easy on the eyes)
Another important UI capability is key binds.
The rule is simple:
- If I can assign a key bind to it - I want to be able to remove this element from the UI separately from others.
- If it's a skill (or similar) - I want to also be able to disable "clickability" in the UI, but leave the icon showing for cooldown info (or similar).
Basic UI customization features, including:
- Moving
- Sticking / unsticking elements to each other
Storing UI loadout as a plain text configuration file would be grand, both for precise editing and for easy share / transfer between players and computers.
As well as a hotkey to switch between few favourite loadouts.
That's a very good point. I'd want my UI to be character-based, not account-based. Having to change it around every time I logged into a different character would absolutely do my nut in.
Even if UI is full of important things and you can customize their placement, they still are bad if they are just square boxes.
Well fitting and stylized UI is important to have.
Good example is Guild wars.
I see many of us here likes FF14, it is good example of well customizable but little bit bland looking.
Flexible UI and some added spice to it here and there is good, lets see what we will get.
-Complete customization to display as much or little information you want for ALL elements provided (on/off)
-Size/Scale
-Width/Height
-Ability to adjust position of any window on the screen
-Ability to condense any window in game (minimize I guess) into like a tab/arrow as needed on the fly or back to its icon.
-Ability to change the shape of ability buttons/bars (can we get more than squares and rectangles?)
-Presets (clean, in between or more to glean)
-Reset to presets/default
-Ability to save custom presets (maybe up to 3 initially in addition to presets)
-Transparency percentage
-With respect to text (combat damage taken/dealt, heals, crits, server messages, chat, etc) the ability to:
-Change Font
-Change Color
-Change Size
-Position
Specifically I want:
-Chat box
-Main Story quest line displayed
-Side quests up to X showing (not sure what X would be really)
-Mini-map
-Simplified Party/Raid frames
-Buffs/De-buffs bars
-Bag icons and windows
-Tool Tips (if I want it on)
-Current target selected
-HP/mana/threat/etc bars
-Menu bar/icons
-PVP enabled
-Level/XP indicators
-Time
There is a point that it can get too complex. I don't like having to spend hours figuring out how to set my UI up. I understand that there has to be a balance. I do however want good customization that is intuitive and makes sense.
There is probably more I am missing/wanting but this already a lot and its getting late.
2 cents.
Customization is important in this area. It's really annoying being forced to use a default UI across every player because everyone prefers different setups.
U.S. East
As the average gamer that I am, I'd make use of every piece of useful information I could gather through UI customization in order to "stay competitive". This could result in a cluttered screen and loads of useful little bars that take attention away from the beatiful world you guys are creating.
The UI should be modular as much as possible. This being that each piece has the ability to:
If a piece needs to be static, due to specific software design decision, denote these pieces and make it clear it's not a bug.
(the following image is a wireframe I made in 2 seconds that is garbage but gets the point across)
I play my Healer very differently then my PvP Archer so it would only make sense my UI would reflect this as well. Players should be able to save their UI's collectively on their account and loaded onto specific characters. Defaults? Sure they can set a specific one / their only one as default for all new characters created for ease of use.
It is mind blowing in the age of cloud computing how much is still saved on the client. I game on both my desktop and laptop and the experience, as it relates to the game, should mirror that. Most have also had to reinstall client for some reason or another and have to reconfigure everything all over again. Save UI configurations on the cloud/account to be loaded anywhere anytime.
If a streamer wants to share a configuration they use, maybe a clan has a suggested healer setup, or a top tier PvP'er may all want to give back to the community and make it easier to improve their experience. This could be as advanced as having an external/build it market of sorts where players can submit and load community configurations, or simply builds saved generate a RNG hex value 'X2GT1' that can be shared externally and loaded by typing in said code. There are loads of options to simplify this process but in the end it is another example of community contribution.
I think they're a good idea, but please be careful of how you implement contextual menus because they've become a source of exploits in many games. Please be especially careful of:
Some Examples:
FFXIV does a great job at that.
There are 2 things it is missing tho.
1 - ability to define how many slots you want your hotbars to have. Most games have 12 slot hotbars, personally i like having 9 slots. My usual setup is 2 '1x9' hotbars on the center and 2 '3x3' hotbars on each side.
2 - Keeping track of important skills (procs/CDs/etc), i like to quickly being able to see those skills and not having to look all the way down to my hotbars to check them.
Cheers