Larian Studios Forums Divinity: Original Sin 2 Divinity - Original Sin 2 - General New UI thoughts

I saw the new pax update and i'm pretty excited. but the new UI jumped to my eye and doesn't please me so much. It's clean, obviously what you wanted, minimalistic, cold and edgy. especially the portrait boxes and the life/armor bar. i love the huge skillbar, finally half of the skills/spells/grenades can be displayed. ;) But the new UI doesn't fit to the colourful and vivid game world in my opinion. it's not playful like the DoS and not dark, if you want to get a darker tone, it's just mature with the charm of an excel sheet.

That's what bothered me a little bit. i know, it's all work in progress and will probably change. ;) Otherwise just keep up the great work you're doing!!!! :)

I agree Fimbul. I mean its functional but not very aesthetically pleasing is it? They should design some art elements for the UI that mimics the games tone and art style.

The UI is definitely a work-in-progress...I blame all those people who like Dragon Age Origins skill bar ;-)

I'm okay with the UI, honestly. And, yes, I would enjoy some ascetics to the UI, but I like clean UIs much better than cluttered ones, much like with other games of the genre. In all honesty, less is better in most situations. Controller support might help quite a bit, because it certainly helped when I needed to snap to objects that would have been difficult to lock on to otherwise... and lose the target just to select an ability.

I mean, it's obviously pre-alpha UI, but it's heading in the right direction for me. A little fanciness if fine, but a minimal but functional UI is good too.

I like clean UIs.

I always thought overly ornate UIs lookd... german.

on the contray id prefer a more unique artstyle...

Looked German? seriously?

Lol what? German UI?
Hope it isn't a final version and Larian will tweak it.
For now it's to minimalistic and strange.

Nothing that was shown at PAX is final.

To explain what i mean by German UI: German fantasy has a very specific style, it is ofthen very ornate, has very fancy UIs. It also ofthen has very fancy looking armors and weapons, however it has very little cultural note in it. The design of things more ofthen than not is pretty but generic.

As examples i would give spellforce (a game which i very much loved) or the recent german Dark Souls inspired game, i forgot the name but aperently people thought it was pretty good.
The lates HoMM game made in germany also comes to mind.

They all have in common that they have nice ornate designs that are neither grounded in reality (like the human armors in OS2 or the Armors in Dark Souls) nor particulary creative (like Beetle Armor in Morrowind)

To subjective.

That's an interesting observation. But there's just too little evidence to found a german cultural universal, I suppose

But I would like to see a non-fancy or generic UI design too; as I wrote elsewhere on this forum: the best UIs are those you see but don't notice; that you can use without always being aware that they consist of UI elements and are not part of the game world. The UI for EE 'distracted' me a bit. Its huge, colourful elements, and the rotating circle when you click on ground to move.

Edit: Not noticing does not mean the UI must not be artificial. It just must not foreground itself.

I would say that one example of a UI that is both lean and creative would be guild wars 2s UI, with that brushstroke aesthetic it is both deemphasized but still pretty

Guildwars 2 UI is perfect. Clean, informative, no clunky bitmap boards around. I hope that DOS wil move to the modern control style.

Especially I would see dialogs UI improvement. DOS is story focused but dialog interface and camera suck.

Current status when a tiny character show from weird angle talk with a NPC who is hidden by UI. That is shame.

Larians,would you please make dialogs personal? New camera system for dialogs, or a simple view switch like Guildwars does. Show big persons on the screen. You could get inspired by any TV soap opera. Those series are focused on dialogs and emotions - so learn from masters. :-]