Started checking out Last Epoch since so many people had nice things to say about it, looks pretty interesting so far and it'll hopefully scratch that arpg itch for some time! ...but the UI...
I understand that early game and UI/UX has probably not been the highest of priorities for the project, and it's all about endgame grind, but inconsistencies, poor accessibility, and such do give the game a bit of a cheap and offputting feel to me. Plus I guess I'm a bit of an UI/UX nerd~
Here's a list I compiled of all the things that came to mind in the first few hours of gameplay:
- inconsistent controls, not all screens and panels can be exited with ESC
- slider controls have different widths even on same settings screen, and you can see that the master volume slider is even a little bit off alignment (https://i.imgur.com/uqKJN74.jpeg)
- there is generally a poor contrast, including padding/margins around controls, which doesn't help the dark grey "help" descriptions stand out from the background (https://i.imgur.com/uqKJN74.jpeg). these contrast problems are all around the ui, and they're made worse in multimonitor setups when you have something brighter on another monitor, which kind of blinds your field of vision and sense of contrast if another monitor has darker content
- the mouse cursor sometimes drowns into things, it'd be great if there were options to resize and/or recolor it to stand out more
- the inventory screen has some readability problems, for example rarity coloring in inventory screen is exceedingly subtle, so much so that it's hard to distinguish between yellow and grey (plus the yellow and grey colors blend into the inventory slot frames themselves)
- made a small change where the rarity colors are accented more, and greys no longer have colored backgrounds, just to show what kind of a readability difference it would make (https://i.imgur.com/X9wGY1u.jpeg)
- clicking on dialogue just skips to the next line instead of revealing the whole line, you're made to sit through the whole text reveal effect even if you are a fast reader but still want to read the whole dialogue; it would be preferable (imo) if a single click would just show the entire line and then a second click would skip the finished line, instead of one click already skipping to the next one
- tooltips appear in inconsistent places; hovering over my abilities, they appear like a few hundred pixels off to the side, and hovering over debuffs on enemies they appear in the very bottom right of my ultrawide monitor
- (de)buff icons on enemies are also super tiny, i'm sure it'll become second nature eventually to parse them visually but as a new player who wants to know what they mean and represent (and wants to hover over them for more info), it almost feels like a bug
- if i have the inventory open, and there is an npc or something underneath the inventory panel, mouse cursor will change into a speech bubble
- when i hit "exit game", the game throws a dialog that asks me if i want to reset(?)
One might argue some of it is subjective, but I think putting some extra thought and polish into the UI would elevate the game a bit more and make it feel like a high-quality finished product with no indie jank.
PS. I don't mean this to be a negative post in any way!
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