Hello there,
The multiplayer UI’s are…pretty much what I’ve expected. Unfortunately. Modern games barely have an immersive UI anymore for multiplayer and it’s honestly a shame. Online players are searching the lobbies and such all the time, so this should be an enjoyable experience and not the hustle it is right now.
I’ve reported the recent problems since the latest patch (joining games barely possible, etc.) in a bug thread, so I’m not commenting on this for now. I’ll quickly talk about the UI in general.
- match making screen is soulless.
- lobby browser is extremely bad. It looks like a table but I can’t click at the top to sort it (for example, let me sort the games by the amount of players and such…)
- I don’t want full games to be shown, give me the option to make them disappear.
- Game name should be empty when creating a lobby and players should be forced to give the lobby a name. Seeing all these lobbies with the player’s names is really not a pleasing experience and doesn’t make sense.
- The chat in the lobbies seems not to be optimal either. When unfolding, the chat appears over players in the lobby. It really should be possible to have a chat that doesn’t have to compromise between players being visible in the lobby or not. I refer to ESO: The chat was builtin at the bottom and all the players were visible. The only reason I can see for the recent chat system is that the players have the option to now view the chat when it’s folded. But I mean, when they don’t want to see the chat they just cannot look at it when it’s builtin. This arguement really isn’t heavy enough for the compromise of players not being visible when it’s unfolded.
- Why do I have to adjust my settings again after restarting the game? It doesn’t make sense at all for me to see password protected lobbies or lobbies that can’t be joined to play. I really don’t want to set these settings again and again and again.
- Socials: I need 10 seconds to understand what’s going on in the social window. It’s not comprehensive at all. It seems overloaded for no reason and again, the design is just not good.
- The visual appereance is really not that great either. I understand that it should be modern and I know it can be hard to create a pleasing UI. I’ve created some websites earlier in the days with PHP, CSS, HTML and such and I was on that modern trip too. Everything minimalistic and clean. But the truth is, especially in gaming, immersion will be lost like this. A simple background image in the lobby browser would already add much more immersion. Now it’s just a dark space. I loved Voobly in this regard as it had let me to use custom background and such. But even ESO was much more immersive than AoM Retold when it comes to the multiplayer UI. Everything in ESO seemed connected and simple to navigate. In Retold I have to switch menues for everything and everything just looks like a dark space.
Don’t take this as a rant, I love the game. Gameplay and such is a 10/10. I’m just a bit sad that mulitplayer UI’s of modern games have no soul anymore. My English is not the best, so I hope my recommendations don’t appear to be offensive.