What are your thoughts on it? Mods can be found next to your profile’s avatar, which I find in quite a bad place. I think it should be near the bottom of the screen somewhere. Map editor in single player window seems strange also.
Edit: [Anne_HK] Old Main Menu. Quick play is hidden. You need to click on the battle royale button to access quick play.
Edit new poll
- Bring back old menu.
- Keep new menu.
- Make it optional.
Quoted edit post by xWHIT3W0LFx for good feedback.
Some in-depth feedback and suggestions regarding the overall user interface:
Problems with the modern UI in general:
The new UI, and I don’t talk about the main menu alone, I talk about the modern mobile-game-ish UI, has a few problems. It contradicts with the general UI design philosophy of the game. Most menus are held in this oldschool paper background design. It is clear, easy to read and makes a good overall impression. And then threre is this new UI with huge all-caps fonts, huge buttons etc… It’s not ugly but it wastes so many space if you compare it to the oldschool UI. This is a PC game, played mostly in high resolutions and this screen space should be used. Apart from looking a little clumsy, it also doesn’t fit the historical setting of the game as much as the oldschool UI.The new Quick Play user interface feels a bit out of place, firstly because all other multiplayer UIs are in a single screen and secondly because all other multiplayer interfaces have the old design. I suggest adding a new tab “Quick Play” to the multiplayer interface right next to the “Ranked” tab to have everything multiplayer related combined in one place.
Animations:
For me, transition animations are completely unnecessary. I wouldn’t mind them being in the game though, as long as you can turn them off somehow.Civilization selection menu:
I really like the new civ selection, however a few things could be improved here as well:
- do not use all-caps font, it’s a pain to read
- remove the “Confirm” button and change the behaviour so you only have to do one click to select the desired civ and close the dialog
- maybe highlight some stats and bonus values like suggested in this reddit thread:
r/aoe2 - [UI] What we wanted vs what we got
803 votes and 119 comments so far on Reddit
Campaign Screen:
The campaign screen is absolutely amazing. The only thing which could be changed is to remove “The Art of War” and the “Historical Battles” from there. It makes no sense to have them besides person-centered campaigns positioned on a world map.“Historical Battles” should definitely be accessible via the main menu. Some people even asked on reddit or here on the forums if the the historical battles were removed because they couldn’t find them after the November patch.
“The Art of War” and should be selectable via a new “Learn to Play” selection screen alongside with the “William Wallace” learning campaign.
History Screen:
In comparison to older versions of the game, the history screen is a step backwards. The old UI not only fitted better into the game, the readability was also better, because you saw much more text at once.This topic has already been discussed here:
Main Menu:
Designwise I can’t really make helpful suggestions as I’m no graphic designer, but I can make some regarding the structure:In my opinion the above displayed menu items are essential and should therefore be directly accessible to the user. Right now, some of these items are hidden behind a little gear symbol, where you would normally expect to navigate to the options menu… not optimal. The “Learn to Play” button should lead to a screen like the campaign selection screen with fancy background etc. where you can access the “The Art of War” and “William Wallace” learning campaigns.
It has already been confirmed that the devs are working on a menu to access all the challange scenarios (Mongol Raiders, Barbarossa Brawl etc.). With this addition, there are a lot of options you could select if you want to play a singleplayer mode. Maybe these items could be merged into one main menu item leading to a submenu (only if it would overload the main menu too much).
The “News” button can be positioned like in the picture above. It’s a button you hardly ever click, so it doesn’t has to be as big as it is right now.
Conclusion:
In my opinion it would be better to discard the modern user interface completely and use the oldschool UI design, which is already used in most places anyway. The new UI feels more like a mobile game UI and doesn’t fit AoE II well.Please consider making the user interface more consistent and don’t oversimplify simple things.
Ok, now enough of those words. Thank you so much Microsoft, Forgotten Empires and Tantalus for constantly updating this amazing game. I hope that this review is at least a little helpful.
