Larian Studios Forums Divinity - Original Sin Divinity Original Sin - Beta GUI related feedback

I'd like to start a thread where we can pool our thoughts about the GUI. In my opinion the GUI is extremely important and even a very good game with rich content and great ideas can fall with a bad GUI design and game control. A game must offer as much comfort as possible to control it by the player and the difficulty of a game shouldn't be adjusted by tinkering with the controls, especially on a game thats driven by the narrative and solving riddles, fighting in means of tactics. Also the game should be adjustable to the habits of the player, so a player should somehow have the freedom to choose what he prefers. In some sane borders as it goes to complexity and the effort the game designer has to put into it.

• That said, I want to start with the question why the camera has a somewhat fixed angle? I would really prefer to circle around and choose the best angle for the situation that suits me. Same is true to the min and max zoom.
• Also it might be considered cheating by some, but active object highlighting is a really great feature. I think it's up to the player to decide if he likes to make his life harder or if he likes to find objects without looking for them minutes after minutes. My time is precious to me and so I dislike time wasters which doesn't give me fun. I guess I'm not the only one thinking this way.
• The skills bar could hold more skills, it would be great if the possible size of the bar simply scales with the resolution. I know there are people with notebooks and resolutions like 1366x768 but there are also many people with FullHD and even bigger screens.

However, this thread is meant to discuss such things, not to demand them. But I hope, with some constructive critic, the game might get one or two new features which wouldn't had made their way into the game without the community and devs talking about it.

While the Textsize is ok for me (but barely so on 1080p), it surely wouldn't for others, so:

• Variable Font sizes at least a bigger one for visual impaired people

Oh, I almost forgot: besides the problems which are clearly related to the alpha status like the fog of war always reseting I would think it would add a large of amount of comfort if

• the Map get labels of PoI and buildings discovered by the player

I like maps which are really useful to orientate myself and find places I'm looking for.

I agree with having more skills on the skill bar. I like how it currently supports hotkeys (1-9) for those who use the keyboard. Having something like Neverwinter Nights style modifier+hotkey would double/triple/quadruple the number of skills (like Shift+[1-9], Ctrl+[1-9], Alt+[1-9]).

Indeed. It would be even better if the keys could be customized, but 1-9 (or 1-0 or even the keys right to the 0) works really good as time has shown on hundreds of games. The modifier idea is quite good esp. if the skillbar represents the new skillset after pressing the modifier.

Not sure if strictly UI related, but I think the trade option could be placed more prominently with vendors, maybe add a dialogue option as well.

The camera has a fixed angle to make it easier for the map and model designers.

Skills have cooldowns, and it costs nothing to press K and drag fresh skills onto the skill bar. You can use that to replace skills which are currently in cooldown. It wouldn't hurt to have extra skill bars, but I don't think it's that big a deal.

I also think the ability bar as it stands is too limiting. I like the simple layout as it is without cluttering the interface with too many additional bars, so if we could have a small up and down arrow to the right of it to give us a second, third, or fourth mapping for the ability bar, that would be great.

I guess so, but it's not very intuitive from a modern game perspective. The about 30° cone is painful for my playing habits. Can't speak for others, but it would surprise me if I'm alone on that one.

A good user interface shouldn't take you to a point where you do things that feel like a workaround. The modifier/qualifier solution sounds very good to me and the idea about up/down buttons to switch between skillsets sounds also good. At the moment the skillbar is very limited if you like to play a generalist, a character with many different skills. Reordering the skillbar every half an hour or so is a bit cumbersome imho. ^^

They had said so during the Kickstarter, so some of us at least knew what to expect.
But yes, I guess if you don't know the reasons, you might be surprised that it's not possible to adjust the camera more.
Since the maps and assets are designed that way, I don't think there's a real chance to change it though. Actually it can be better than a free camera because it forces designers to put some care into designing the maps in a way that nothing important will be hidden -> you have automatically less need to move the camera.

Anyway - one feature request from me:
Please add a way to change between characters when trading.
At the moment both have seperate inventories that can't be accessed without closing the trading screes, selecting the second char and initiating trade again (or did I miss something?).

Really? Since 1.045, It seems closer to 90°.



I like the idea of the up/down arrows to switch skill bars as well... but on the other hand, it might be a balancing factor. If they add an AP cost to swapping your active skills, that wouldn't work with a second or third skill bar. It depends on what they want to do with it.

some initial UI/UX related feedback:

• Some form of UI toggle would be amazing. eg. ESC to close all floating panels/exit any current conversations. and/or Space to hide them all, and Space again to show what you had visible.
• The camera/view should not be able to be altered when the map is visible. Currently if I move the cursor to the edges of screen whilst the map is visible it moves the camera. (edit: this does this when any dialog such as a book or note is displayed)
• Map would benefit from better definition of walkable/non-walkable areas. At present it all tends to blur into similar looking zones.
• Consistency in font usage and sizes. I prefer the "Journal Updated" text and scale more then that used when an exploration achievement is found. Also this Exploration font is far to big compared with when it is used to indicate entering an area. (I'm relating sizes as I see them when running the game at 2560x1440)
• Conversation text could be scaled down for NPC's talking off in the distance. Their conversations should be seen as background noise rather than important information.
• Some indication of already used conversation options would be nice (and im sure is just an untackled alpha thing)
• Some kind of highlighting tabs in the Inventory/Character Sheet to indicate unspent skill/trait points
• Auto-closing of container UI's when a character walks away from them (or as above ESC to close all of them.) These UI's also tend to stack right on top of one another say when you open two barrels. Ideally they should always offset from other panels currently on screen.
• TBH I would prefer an option for simple container UI's as well. Not a fan of the stylised chest/barrel/basket containers and would prefer something akin to the Inventory styling, but could just be me
• Saving the game shouldn't display a dialog requiring me to click OK once it's finished. Just have a "Game Saved" message similar to the "Journal Updated" status text. Get us back into the game as fast as possible please.

Overall I really like where the game is headed.

Yes, it has increased, but it's less than 90°. ^^
However, I missed the part about that this is an intentional design choice and so I have to accept that. It would have been nice, but it's not dramatic.




Maybe the skillbar could at least change between an combat mode and an non-combat mode. So things like unlock could be in the skillbar among others without rearranging the skills everytime which is annoying and doesn't add anything to the game.


At some point Larian added Item Highlightning by pressing the ALT key, yay. That's the strange part about playing an alpha: some things you mention are already on the todo list but hasn't been finished.

Hm, I ask myself how Larian is selecting wishes to be included into the game. If we all repeat points from others a thread gets quickly cluttered and difficult to read by the guys collecting feedback.
For example I also like to see El Zoidos suggestion, about the possibility to change the character trading inside the trade window, making it into the game. But would that help to get more attention?

If someone from Larian is reading this: is there maybe the possibility to give us also feedback which of our feedback would make it into the game? Nothing time consuming, maybe a small list as sticky or something like that. Points which you are unsure about could be marked as such and so the players could give input about that to give the devs an impression how much a feature or change is looked forward to. This would help to safe time for the players and the devs as well because the same things wouldn't get discussed or wished over and over again. I'm absolutely aware you have much to do getting the game done, but in this phase of development where the last changes come in it would be helpful I guess and maybe someone close to the team like Raze could act as information proxy to save time.

My suggestions concerning the GUI:
1. Make the skill bar many layered - as you get more and more skills and items they can no longer fit in one bar. And it becomes annoying to use items from the inventory or skills from the menu. Make a scroll button or something to scroll to the next bar. Take Neverwinter Nights 2 for example - the skill bar there had 9 or so layers to fit everything.
2. Enable the ability to mouse scroll the camera in any direction when the mouse is hovering on top of one the UI windows, for example to scroll down when the mouse is on top of the Skills bar. Right now it is only working when it's not on top of anything.
3. Make the default End Turn hotkey - Space. It really is the most intuitive key for this command.
4. Finish implementing inventory tabs by item type and make a Sort Items button within a tab, so that we didn't have to search through the whole tab for some items below.
5. Make it possible to switch between characters inventories during barter. It's really annoying to move everything from one character to the other who's better at bartering.
6. Make an option to share gold between characters in single player, i.e. gold is one common resourse for both characters. And fix gold stacking.
7. Better tips, tricks and item descriptions. I still haven't figured out what to do with all those ingridients.
8. Fix inventory switching between characters. Right now I can switch the inventory but not the character with portrait change in the invenory window, or switch chacracter but not the inventory with character window on the left.
9. Colour differently already spoken lines in dialogues.

I'm sure someone already mentioned this, but I'd find it really helpful to be able too open up the inventories of both characters side by side.
It would also be nice to have hotkeys displayed on the skillbar, so that I can easily see which hotkey triggers which skill.

Concerning the camera angle, there was a nice presentation at the Game Developer Conference from a Diablo 3 developer about the way they modeled the landscape: the trees for example are only pseudo-3d, so they only look nice when looked at from a certain angle. If Larian is using a similar technique, a fully rotatable camera might simply not be possible.


Btw, am I blind or did my homestead button disappear? I used it once but now I'm not able to find it...

My only concern/problem with the UI is fairly minor. I think that the dialog option you pick should NOT be displayed while the dialog resulting from that choice is displayed.

That said, I fully expect that to be changed. Having all of the dialog options visible at all times seems a necessary step for the development process, as making sure all of the dialog functions properly is important (so you want to keep the mechanics as simple as possible until everything is working 100%).

Which is really good for an alpha. In the WL2 beta, for example, virtually all of my suggestion tickets are about the UI. Like, seven or eight specific things where I say, "you NEED to change this."

Agree with all these suggestions. As for the different kind of containers complain, they are part of the Ultima-vibe this game is trying to recapture, so they definitely should stay.



100% in agreement.



Make it possible to switch between characters during conversations (assuming that they are not separated) would be even better. Of course, only in single player. Otherwise, players should be able to go around with one character while speaking with the other one.

Hi all, just an idea, but it would be cool if the feedback tool by crashing would stay in the game and it would pop up in the final version too. Ok, I don't think there will be many issues with crashing later, but no game can be perfect, and this could help you to make it even more better.

Some ideas while playing the game:

• Visualtion for AoE-Spells. Currently only the "inflected" Targets as highlighted (red), what becomes hard to determine with green background and lot of "targets"
• The "end round" Button and the "leave battle" Button are located to close together and the symbols are missleading. I often press the "end battle" instead of "end round"