It’s time. The questionable last minute choice to move the 3K civs to the main game instead of chronicles was the last nail in the coffin. But that’s beside the point, for the sake of this thread and discussion;
The UI is a complete mess. A complete disaster from a usability and UX perspective. Devs, put yourselves in the seat of a player that is opening the game for the very first time. Where do I even begin… Here are some screenshots, I guess. The inconsistencies and the intuitiveness of this is beyond me.
Give me a call if you’d like a conceptual wireframe and UI map - for free, from me. Take care.
While I agree that the UI is not ideal, I think if you want the devs to make any changes to it, you’ll have to be more specific about what you think the problems are.
The UI has been changed in response to specific feedback before, e.g. mods were moved out of settings, the editors were moved out of singleplayer, historical battles were moved out of their inexplicable location in Africa, and so on. But all of these changes were made in response to clearly explained criticisms or suggestions. I think just posting some screenshots and expecting everyone to see the exact problems you see is unlikely to achieve anything.
If they call you, can you also possibly try to change some buttons to a shade of green or blue since red usually means Cancel/No and green means Continue/Yes? Maybe even a neutral plum/purple of some of the more neutral buttons, too. You can still make it look cool with well-chosen shades and saturations. As a visual person, I hate having to read and process the button text every single time because the non-intuitive color choice. This is an old collage, but we all know all buttons have remained red.
Not Christmas red and green, of course. After testing, maybe like a teal, blue-teal, or faded blue for the “ok” / “yes” / “apply” buttons
Or if are resistant to colors… then just a brighter-than-“no” buttons red might work for “yes” type buttons, or a brighter red along with a slight teal or blue haze outer glow so it pops a little more than the “no” buttons?
Some tests with teal, plum, and teal-blue colors:
I spent like 15 minutes on this. An expert getting paid to work on it can, surely, figure something out over a day or two, I’d think
I just have to think there is a more intuitive design than the exact same red for every button everywhere. Part of UI/UX design should be about minimizing conscious thought processing… not requiring us to read the text of every. single. button. to find the one we want. I realize AoE4’s UI design goal was likely to have players look at the UI as long as as possible as some sort of UI mini-game, but I’d like to think AoE2 doesn’t have to be constrained to the same UI playbook.
The more I look at the faded blue or blue-grey ones, the more I personally like those over teal/green-leaning ones.
And please also work to give:
A classic AoE2:HD font option
A smaller font size option
A fix (smaller font size option, wider columns, etc.) on the Stats screen so we don’t see bouncy text:
