Just on that second point, Blackheifer - are you aware that there's a button that will expand your inventory up, to show off more of it and cover the rest of your character sheet with it? It doesn't necessarily fix the issue, but that will let you see more at once, at least.
That aside...
As much as I spoke mildly and favourably about the new UI in the synopsis, actually playing with it for a while leaves me with a distinctly different impression.
- It takes up way too much of the screen, and there is no way to scale any of it.
- The mini map is a particularly bad example of this, but the hot bar itself is far bigger than it needs to be, compared to the screen.
- The character sheet looks nicer, certainly, but it's still very large - and now we no longer have the pop-out option to have our inventory on screen, but with most of the screen free; we've LOST that functionality.
- This means that if you are, for example, trying on a few different armours and trying to look at your character as you do it, you actively have to fight the UI; the large character window, the nesting tooltips which cannot be delayed, disabled or detached to a fixed location, and the rest of the oversized UI elements means that it can legitimately be a struggle to change your equipment and look at your character on screen as you do... and yet you want to do this, because the doll in your actual character sheet is now much smaller, so looking at your character directly is actually the better option - if only you could do it comfortably.
- As others mention, the Throw element is a mess that just spews out your entire inventory that you then need to scroll through awkwardly to find what you're after... and this is at the very beginning of the game, before I've even collected a lot of stuff.
- I often felt that trying to look at, access or do something had become an oddly multi-step process of "first I have to do this, then this, now that. Okay, now that I've changed that, I have to go back, and back again, and then..." and it felt as though there was no simply, fast and efficient way to achieve it. There was often, it seemed, only one way to do a given thing - such as clicking a specific button, and normal gaming precepts hadn't been observed in this regard.
- One example: if you have any kind of filter on your inventory (such as armours), you can try one one easily enough, but you can't, now, drag the armour you're wearing off to unequip it; not with the screen like this. You first have to either clear the filter and return to your base inventory, or you have to unequip it by the right click menu. It's clunky as balls, and counter-intuitive to boot.
- Speaking of normal gaming precepts... As well has the character panel being scale locked, taking up approximately 1/3 of the screen when open, and being broad as well as tall.... it also steals complete priority, which means that if a new window is brought up - such as an examine window (also large, and also impossible to resize), it pops up Underneath the character panel, behind it, despite being the active and more recent window, and will generally be entirely illegible until you close the character window first - in many cases, this is unavoidable, because you needed the character window open to access the item that you are inspecting, which you can only do through the right click menu on the item while it's in your inventory or on your person; it's a design which literally fights against itself in these cases.
It looks better, on the surface, but looks are only UI-Skin deep; it doesn't actually function smoothly or cleanly in practice right now.