Can this terrible UI design be next on the chopping block?

[elektrizikekswerk]

That's probably my mod (mentioned above), not the base game.
And yeah, it doesn't handle "groupable" things very well as separate alerts precisely because only one (separate) alert of a given type can be shown at once.

Oh - I thought that was a vanilla feature. I know that I have some mod installed which should expand some game settings but, to be frank, I didn't notice any difference and thought the mod wasn't working properly. I'm quite sure that these setting were also there before I had installed that mod. But I might be remembering it wrongly here...
In that case my post is rather irrelevant for this thread - but your mod should, after the downsides have been sorted out, totally be part of the game

 

[durbal]

Genuine question: does it matter so much to appeal to a new player at the expense of UI quality? A new player will hopefully not stay new for very long, and I am not sure why a menu with many submenus is less daunting than a set of icons representing the same submenus.

The thing is, I'm really struggling to figure out how the situations button is even better for new players. It's less obvious than alert flags like in EU4 (it doesn't even look like a button) and hides the information.

UI elements to guide new players should be an addition to the existing UI. I think most people are used to seeing an option like 'Show beginner help tooltips' in games anymore.

 

[kernco]

One thing that would address a lot of my pain with Current Situation panel would be to allow items in it to be pinned to the outliner. Generally I always want to see things like goods shortages and expensive government/military goods.

 

[Gort11]

Genuine question: does it matter so much to appeal to a new player at the expense of UI quality? A new player will hopefully not stay new for very long, and I am not sure why a menu with many submenus is less daunting than a set of icons representing the same submenus.

Yes, it's extremely important for new players to be catered to. As Hagerhink says, it's very easy to lose a player in the first hours of their play, and if that happens it's another bad review, or a Steam refund, or someone who doesn't buy any DLC.

I don't love the situation report thing and I think I'd prefer HoI4-style specific icons at the top of the screen, but it's not the same kind of dealbreaker that a new-player-unfriendly UI can be. I completely understand the focus on the new player by UI designers.

 

[Leoreth]

So, from my perspective - What does the current system do well, and why?

• Significantly less overwhelming, especially for newer players. During user testing the game being overwhelming was the most common complaint for first-time players. I understand that to most of you here this is not a very strong argument since you are generally very experienced PDS players, but as a UX Designer the overall experience of the first 10-20 hours are critical. If we lose someone here, they are most likely gone forever.

I understand that concern, but I think you are making the mistake of having an overly narrow definition of overwhelming and then addressing that exclusively, instead of understanding the root concern and then solving that.

What you have achieved here is identifying that some players feel overwhelmed by a large number of notifications. You have solved that by hiding these notifications and trading them in for an "check engine" light that is constantly flashing yellow. How is a light that is constantly alerting you to issues, even moments after addressing the issues it is alerting on, less overwhelming? You are in a constant state of either feeling like you are willfully ignoring a problem, or in a constant state of pausing and checking and dismissing alerts or fixing their cause. That is HIGHLY overwhelming. But I guess it is equally overwhelming to players regardless of experience so it solved the problem that new players feel uniquely overwhelmed.

But even more than that, I would offer the hypothesis that new players feel overwhelmed not because there is an arbitrary number of alerts, but because they are being drowned in alerts that they have no frame of reference for, don't know which ones are important or not, and don't know how to act on those that are important. THAT is what makes it overwhelming. You can cheat and address the symptoms by hiding it away in a useless report button but then you have failed to address the actual needs of the new player.

Most glaringly the "Current Situation" button does not help at all in communicating which issues are important and which aren't because both types of issues are folded into it and hidden inside the black box that you need to spend tedious actions (contributing to the overwhelment) to look into and figure out which they are. Both types of issues inside the CSB also receive the same type of alert (notification icon), in fact it is in constant state of alert, and it is impossible to know if a triviality or important concern caused the notification.

All of this together teaches people to ignore the contents of the CSB and nothing else.

• Allows for clearer separation between "This should be fixed immediately" (Alert) and "You should probably look into this" and "You could look into this if you want to" (Current Situation panel). Even though this is signaled in our other games, like the Red/Yellow/Green system in EUIV, that separation is much less clear, especially for newer players, but also to players with color blindness.

There is important stuff going into the CSB that needs to be fixed immediately. Good shortages being the first thing that comes to mind. If your design goals were to put things that the player should only optionally look into if they feel like it into the CSB it failed spectacularly. I would love to ignore the CSB because everything about its tediousness makes me want to do that but I cannot really afford to.

Also this goal clashes with the annoyance of the constant and unending alerting (notification icon) on the CSB. Which is it? Do you want me to constantly be alerted to its contents or only poke into it when I feel like I have nothing else to do?

Lastly, "we do this because of colour blindness" is really becoming the lazy UX designer excuse you can pull for anything recently. As if it's completely impossible to communicate the importance of a notification using BOTH colour coding and another design element that is readable to colour blind players, such as border width or shape or elaborateness etc. "You are asking for distinguished UI elements but you gave an example using colours so we cannot give you distinguished UI elements" is both a strawman and an admission of not being good at UI design. Not to mention that PDX trotting out the colour blindness excuse rings particularly hollow when there are still entire lenses in the UI that are red/green colour coded - diplomacy and trade come to mind.

• Less stressful for players who feel compelled to "clean up" their Alerts. This one was a surprise to me when we identified it during user testing. We have since seen a lot of players taking (sub-optimal) decisions "just to get rid of the Alert", which is very much an undesired outcome.

Like above, when people report they feel stressed due to being compelled to clean up their alerts, it is not a solution to take away their ability to dismiss/clean up their alerts. I don't even know what to say to explain this extremely obvious point.

You have to realise first that you as the UX designer are causing the desire to clean up. People don't feel compelled to clean up because they love cleaning up. We hate cleaning! We have to clean up after you. Because you are drowning us in alerts and leaving us unable to ascertain their importance. We have to clean up so we don't get completely lost in the weeds. You let us down once when creating this bad way of presenting alerts and it is not a solution to let us down again by not letting us dismiss them.

This is the UX designer equivalent of someone visiting their doctor saying "it hurts when I move my arm like this" and the doctor responding "don't do that then". Thanks!

I have to say I feel very overwhelmed by the number of alerts and notifications that the game is throwing at me, primarily inside the CSB, and the lack of any ability to say "I don't care about this" or "this is intentional actually" (aka the Nick Offerman "I know more than you" meme) is overwhelming me, the fact that I know that I might be currently missing an important alert because it is hidden inside the CSB and drowned out by a number of other zero-information alerts is overwhelming to me.

• Anything can be added to the Current Situation panel without support from Art, and most of the time without Code. The realities of production planning is something that is easy to forget about, especially when looking at the implementation of a system from an outside perspective.

I don't think anybody is asking for fancy paintings in the notifications. They are notifications. They need to be functional.

Also, it seems this is another treating-the-symptions-instead-of-the-cause issue. Apparently there is a commitment to have dedicated art for top-level notifications. It seems this exist because someone thinks having dedicated notification art is important (I don't, but that's beside the point). But there are not enough resources to produce this art. So instead the notification gets shoved into the CSB where it's fine to have no art.

Okay, but what has been gained? Nothing about the nature or importance of the notification has changed. Why is not having art in the CSB okay but not having dedicated art in the main screen is not okay? If it is not okay to have no art for a notification, considering its importance or context, why is a solution to shove it into the CSB where it also has no art?


In summary, I don't really agree with this characterisation that it helps new players overall. In my view, it is instead just one way to treat symptoms of issues reported by new players by creating different problems for them in the long run, and hindering them to learn about the game and which information is important, which isn't, and how information can be acted upon.

Secondly, the only reason that there even is a conflict between the desires of new players and experienced players is because your entire UX philosophy seems to be structured around the central idea of taking choices away from players. I know from my own experience that there is a dominant school of thought in UX design that taking away choices from users is a good thing, because UX design as a profession is dominated by the needs of app developers who are intent to streamline their processes and funnel people into clicking buttons that make the owner of the app money. Applying these principles to a video game that is about having fun can only have adverse consequences.

We already had to have this discussion when it comes to message notifications, where the initial PDX position also was that players are supposed to have no control and that the devs know best. That position has been soundly proven untenable and fortunately Wizzington has since walked it back and we are finally given the tools to customise this, which is beneficial for the playerbase and the dev team alike. I had hoped that this outcome also caused some reflection within the team about the importance of customisation and player choice but apparently not.

We still have to listen to explanations that mention a random focus group and what they liked and didn't like and whatever they didn't like had to be taken away from everyone, end of story.

It's fine if you want to make the outcomes of these observations the standard setting that ships with the newly installed game. I can understand. But give me the tools to customise my playing experience. Let me freely move types of alerts inside or outside the CSB. I won't complain about boilerplate art, I promise. Let me say "don't alert me about things like this". Let me right click dismiss an alert in a way that does not make it come back four ticks later. None of these are too much to ask and people will keep complaining as long as you treat them as if it is.


Lastly, it's very telling that one of the first things that happened in this thread is that someone compared it to flag occupation. Because both of these feel like they were the brainchild of someone on the team who refuses to admit that their great innovation is not as liked as they thought it would be. It's the only explanation I can think of why complaints about them get constantly ignored or shut down with a condescending "we think this is great actually kthxbye" and it requires mobilising what is essentially a letterwriting campaign to get any kind of serious response on.

 

[Leoreth]

(Columbo voice) Oh, one last thing. You're probably going to take this as personal bias on my part but when I saw the title of this thread I immediately knew it was going to be about the CSB.

I didn't even have to click to check what was in it. I guess in that sense the thread already has better UX design than the Current Situation Button.

 

[Bearjuden]

A lot of interesting stuff was shared, and I recognize these are thorny problems. I do want to take a moment to thank you for

1. engaging with us on it
2. working on the problem

Because it's complicated! I like to think nobody here is trying to screw over new players specifically, and that we all want a streamlined experience. And it is very often thankless, despite the fact that the UI and UX is imo the single most defining thing for how players feel about the game. I mean, hell, it's in the name.

Three specific comments I wanted to offer in response, about experiences I've had with both this game and in places relating to past games as well:

Less stressful for players who feel compelled to "clean up" their Alerts. This one was a surprise to me when we identified it during user testing. We have since seen a lot of players taking (sub-optimal) decisions "just to get rid of the Alert", which is very much an undesired outcome.

There is at least one notable change in V3 relative to previous games I find curious in this context: in V3, you cannot dismiss alerts. The easiest way to clean up your situations in EU4 is to just right-click to remove the ones you don't care about. In V3 that seems to be gone, which when one of the issues you ran into is a need to clean up alerts, just...seems odd to me. Like the above posters, I would often add diplomatic interests in regions just to get rid of the situation (that blasted gold number has done more to get me into the mindset you're working against than almost anything) until I realized I can just remove them with a right click, the benefit of which being that you can get rid of the situation and not get spammed with diplomatic plays. Despite knowing in past games you could hide alerts, it took me quite some time to realize situations are the same. I don't know if it's because alerts can't be dismissed like this, but...well, regardless, figured I'd share that experience (and tidbit of knowledge for anyone who didn't realize).

This isn't anything close to a panacea - knowing that I have states with low market access is important, and I'm not going to remove that just because it's spammy, it just pains me to have to go into the button to keep accessing the list of which states are low (I would suggest moving the actual list to the outliner, so even if you have to look at a situation to see that it's happening you don't have to continually refer to that situation to also see what states it's talking about and how bad the problem is) - but it helps.

...in retrospect I'm not sure this was aimed more at hagerhink or everybody else like me who was adding interests just to clear the SB, it kind of morphed from one into the other as it went on, but...eh.

Anything can be added to the Current Situation panel without support from Art

This just kind of depresses me. Not only is text the less graphically efficient way to convey things, it can also really help sell the atmosphere. In CK2 your alerts were not only smartly designed, but the design changed by who you played as - the basic image would be the same, but if you were a country in western Europe, you got stained glass, while if you were a Norse pagan, these all reskinned to wood.

It's just among those little things that really sold how you were playing a different role now. Paradox's 2D art looks so good. It's sad to see that removing it is considered a benefit to the game.

Good point, missing sorting is definitely not ideal!

It's something of a chronic misstep by the game, in my experience, that things which should be sortable, or even just sorted in some default, unaffectable way, aren't. Conquer state wargoals are not sorted by state name. Goods bought to service needs, from the pop screen, are sorted by neither name nor cost nor the need they are working to fulfill (ie, I cannot see all of the household items goods next to each other). As mentioned, situations for missing state capacities are not sorted by the capacity deficit (in real terms or as a percentage), or local GDP (you might want to fix your economically biggest states first, even if they don't have the biggest problems) or even just state name. I'm not sure if it's difficult under the hood to do a sort, or they all need to be handled individually, but if possible it would be good at some point if someone did a pass of all the places where you might see a longer list and figure out "what are the most common metrics that someone might want to sort this under?"

 

[Merrivale]

I so wish I could remember which Dev has/had this Mencken quote as their signature (Wiz?, Johan? EDIT--Aha it is @Wizzington) but I think it perfectly encapsulates what has happened here (and in information flow to the player in general since EUIV):

'For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.'

You have an admittedly complex problem here of trying to thread a needle between giving players the information they need to play the game and overwhelming them, particularly new ones. The same thing was brought up about message settings, BTW, that it was overwhelming to new players. The simple solution is the one that was taken: remove message settings entirely (being rectified) and cram all of the notifications into one button so no one will be overwhelmed by seeing them. But, IMO, it was clearly wrong, on all counts. As has already been discussed, instead of calming people by removing visual sources of angst, you've instead created a situation of either high panic of missing something important in that button counter and having to constantly check it or high frustration if you don't check it and do miss something.

You can't hide the complexity of this game away. The way to bring new people in without sending them off screaming is by holding their hand through the process, not by hiding everything in a box. A tutorial that finds a way to incorporate all of the notifications and what to do about them insures new players will understand what is happening. I get it, tutorials are brutal for a constantly changing game like this and eat dev time that could be spent elsewhere. But if you are worried about new players, it is the only way.

I think another famous quote, this one from Steve Jobs, is applicable too: “It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.”

 

[Pass_West]

You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

 

[Oglesby]

Thanks for this reply.

After having read all of your replies I just want to summarize my perspective on it, and give you some insights on some the design considerations and decisions made along the way.

So, from my perspective - What does the current system do well, and why?

• Significantly less overwhelming, especially for newer players. During user testing the game being overwhelming was the most common complaint for first-time players. I understand that to most of you here this is not a very strong argument since you are generally very experienced PDS players, but as a UX Designer the overall experience of the first 10-20 hours are critical. If we lose someone here, they are most likely gone forever.

Think of this like a bicycle. You have attached training wheels to help with beginners learn how to ride which is good. Yet you made it so they cannot remove the training wheels from the bicycle which is bad. What was once a learning tool is now a hinderance. I think Stellaris went too far and made every little thing an alert (alert for every build ship, build, etc.) which would be overwhelming and then CK3 swung the pendulum too far the other way and hid everything away.

• Allows for clearer separation between "This should be fixed immediately" (Alert) and "You should probably look into this" and "You could look into this if you want to" (Current Situation panel). Even though this is signaled in our other games, like the Red/Yellow/Green system in EUIV, that separation is much less clear, especially for newer players, but also to players with color blindness.

As others have mentioned, and as other games have done, shape helps to clarify where color alone can be an issue. I think EU4 did it best, they did shape of flag, color of flag, and placement of flag were all used to denote importance. Image on flag was to denote what the issue was.

• Less stressful for players who feel compelled to "clean up" their Alerts. This one was a surprise to me when we identified it during user testing. We have since seen a lot of players taking (sub-optimal) decisions "just to get rid of the Alert", which is very much an undesired outcome.

More stressful for those that need to clear the ! notification. I also feel EU4 did well in this regard by allowing you to click away the alerts (either temporarily or permanently). Also this leads back to the hard to tell what is important.

• Anything can be added to the Current Situation panel without support from Art, and most of the time without Code. The realities of production planning is something that is easy to forget about, especially when looking at the implementation of a system from an outside perspective.

And everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer. I do appreciate that it is no longer the wall of text that was part of CK3 but it is still bullet points. I would think that easy to use, understand, and interact with would trump easy to schedule and implement when dealing with the UI/UX.

Identified shortcomings of the current system:

• Violates the "Right information at the right time" UX Pillar at times, and sometimes in several different ways. You should never feel like you are missing something because it is hidden "too deep" in the UI, and most of the time this can be polished away.

I think that nested tooltips fall into this same 'handy tool' issue causing things to be nested too deep. There are plenty of tooltips that appear to 'nest' information that would be more useful on the tooltip. (The construction 'construction point usage' using a sub-tooltip to show why 15.6 construction points are worth 20.0 building points.) Can we put the infamy score and reduction rate next to 'icon' and 'icon name' and not make me hover so I can see it in a tooltip?
I would also look into the 'modifier' tabs on buildings and nations as I am not sure that wall of text has been useful for other than to say, yep that is a big list.

• Dismissed entries keeps coming back even though they have been dismissed, which is very frustrating, and a particularly evasive bug.

I think this could be more from the lack of hysteresis on production sources. For example a trade route toggling back and forth between productive and not productive because of the effect on usage/cost between the two levels.

• Less efficient, especially for experienced players. Less clicks are generally a good thing. This should be improved.

I would say less efficient for all players, though new players are less affected by efficiency.

• A lack of customizability. For instance, High Tensions or Expensive Government Goods might be fine for one player, but urgent for you. You should be able to better decide this yourself.

Though it seems like the direction we are heading is more flexibility. (Note: I do not think I have yet to play a game where High Tensions was ever urgent or something I worried about. Do you have a suggestion of who to play where this could be?)

• The number of items in the Current Situation panel is Too Damn High. Some of the things in the Current Situation panel could be presented and signaled "in context" in other places of the UI instead. Some things even actually are, but still have an item in the Current Situation panel, which just increases the noise. Most of the time, this can be solved by iteration and polish.

I think this is because of the 'easy to implement' portion of the current situation button.

I would add a few more shortcoming

• Reliance on words instead of iconography make it take more time/effort to decode the situation
• As a result of it being a bullet point list it chews up a more limited vertical space as opposed to using the more

 

[DominusNovus]

It is definitely not on the chopping block, as it does deliver on some of the design goals we set out to achieve with it.

That being said, there are definitely things that can be improved with the Current Situation panel and Alerts in general. For 1.2 we are doing a pass on Notifications, where we are improving the content of the Notifications, their frequency, and have added Message Settings. I would very much like to do a similar UX pass on the Current Sitations panel and Alerts in one of our future updates after 1.2.

Quick question: whats your philosophy for what to do when your design goals and what the players want to do are at complete odds?

You know the adage about how to design paths in a university? Let the students walk across a quad until paths naturally form, then pave the paths. Seems that a lot of Paradox devs would pave first, then spend their time putting barriers across the grass, higher and higher, to prevent the students from walking where they want.

 

[ClavintheGreat]

Since clearly the same route as flag occupation needs to be taken here:

I officially would like to register my dissatisfaction with the “Current Situation panel”. Bring it in line with HoI or EU where I can clearly see what needs to be done without having to open a giant window that takes up the top middle of my screen.

 

[Lys91]

Yes, it's extremely important for new players to be catered to. As Hagerhink says, it's very easy to lose a player in the first hours of their play, and if that happens it's another bad review, or a Steam refund, or someone who doesn't buy any DLC.

I don't love the situation report thing and I think I'd prefer HoI4-style specific icons at the top of the screen, but it's not the same kind of dealbreaker that a new-player-unfriendly UI can be. I completely understand the focus on the new player by UI designers.

You are ignoring half of the sentence . The problem is they have been making changes/decisions at the expense of information accessibility. They have skewed the design too much in one direction. So yes, the UI may be simpler than some other PDX games (arguably), but I have to go through multiple tooltips or submenus to get the information needed. This quickly turns the game into a chore (or makes it frustrating because the "why" is hidden away). Players don't stop playing after the first hour (maybe), but I am not sure that is enticing them into buying DLC either. This particular example is not a dealbreaker, but the general UI design philosophy has armed the game in many places IMHO.

 

[MathyM]

This is the UX designer equivalent of someone visiting their doctor saying "it hurts when I move my arm like this" and the doctor responding "don't do that then". Thanks!

It's more like "it hurts when I move my arm like this" and the doctor then makes it so it hurts everywhere when you move any body part, in any way, and you eventually forget where you were supposed to be feeling pain in the first place.

Oh, and your arm now also takes an extra click to move.

 

[DominusNovus]

I'm curious what the revenue projections are for a given game vs its associated DLC. Because if the company expects to make more money with the DLC than the base game, then annoying long-term players to make things more approachable to new players seems backwards to me. But maybe the initial game is where most of the money is, in which case, alienating long-term players isn't as big of an issue.

 

[RayOfWill]

I find the Current Situation button to be one of if not the worst thing CK3 introduced, and was disappointed to see it ported to Vic3. When I play these two games, I find myself checking it constantly to ensure I don't miss important information. While I would like the ability to define what should go in that button and what should be a proper notification, to be frank if given the chance I would eliminate it entirely. I vastly prefer pre-CK3 notifications.

 

[ac566]

I find the Current Situation button to be one of if not the worst thing CK3 introduced, and was disappointed to see it ported to Vic3. When I play these two games, I find myself checking it constantly to ensure I don't miss important information. While I would like the ability to define what should go in that button and what should be a proper notification, to be frank if given the chance I would eliminate it entirely. I vastly prefer pre-CK3 notifications.

I use the mod "Better Alerts" which basically does this. When playing on 1.2 beta it even has a bug where the CSB doesn't work and I have not missed it all.

 

[yenot]

Thank you for answering! That did indeed clarify your reasons but I still am not convinced that the Situation Button helps achive those goals.

• Significantly less overwhelming, especially for newer players. During user testing the game being overwhelming was the most common complaint for first-time players. I understand that to most of you here this is not a very strong argument since you are generally very experienced PDS players, but as a UX Designer the overall experience of the first 10-20 hours are critical. If we lose someone here, they are most likely gone forever.

To illustrate why the SB does not IMO help here, here is an intentionally grotesque example: "The first time players of our Flight Simulator were overwhelmed by the amount of the levers, buttons, and displays, which is why we decided to hide most of them into the Flight Control panel. Of course, if an experienced player decides to check the altitude or turn the autopilot on, that might be easily done via accessing the Panel".

If it is unimportant, it may as well be cut from the game. Unimportant stuff is either flavour (and nothing in the SB is flavour, at least according to what I remember) or fake complexity (and why have fake complexity when there is plenty of opportunity for the true complexity in this game).

If it does not require immediate attention but I may want to keep my eye on it - well, I want to keep my eye on it, not dig through the menu to find if something important happend after the last time I checkd this menu.

If it may be something with the potential to ruin the run - well, I want to know about that. CK3 hides titles lost on succession and land inhereted by outside power hidden and this is far more frustrating than having those buttons shown when I don't care.

My first personal experience with CK2 and EUIV alerts was along the lines of "Look, the game shows me what I need to look at while playing. It says coutries X, Y, and Z have disputed succession - there probably is a mechanic that enables me benifiting off that". By hiding information from the players you might have in fact made the learning curve steeper for a subsegment of players.

• Less stressful for players who feel compelled to "clean up" their Alerts. This one was a surprise to me when we identified it during user testing. We have since seen a lot of players taking (sub-optimal) decisions "just to get rid of the Alert", which is very much an undesired outcome.

Again, I will start with an illustration. You know what is one of the most stressful Paradox game experiences for me currently? CK3 artifacts. They are useful. They tie into other mechanics. it's so easy to equip one of those to get one more domain slot or a bit more prowess.

And then there is this little annoying thought in the back of my mind. Something bad might happen. A sword crumbling to dust before that one crucial duel. An above domain limit malus at just the wrong time. Need to check if all is right. Click the button, find the artifacts alert, sift throught a list of similar looking names obsessing whether I need to waste pressious gold to fix it or it is indeed expendable.

The crowded alert row is known worklog that I might want to take on. The Situation button is worse than that, it is an unknown worklog where I first have to do metaphorical work to first access it and then read all the bullets to find out what's going on.

Plus there is no way to have a completely clean upper row and, as already mentioned by other people here, not being able to clean it irks some of us.

• Anything can be added to the Current Situation panel without support from Art, and most of the time without Code. The realities of production planning is something that is easy to forget about, especially when looking at the implementation of a system from an outside perspective.

That is true and that I can relate to as someone who had his project dependent on a completely separate team. Having your job frozen due to someone else's clogged backlog while the angry crowd on the forum demands changes now is definitely not nice.

Please remember though that everything has a cost. Well, not everything, maybe, but this particular streamlining is associated with my added cost of reading whatever is written in text without clear iconography.

My cost is miniscule, ofc, but it is incurred every single time I look into the SB contents. And that is not only me - every single player bears this minor cost of having to read what may be far more efficiently shown. The example I presented above with CK3 artifacts is made even more unpleasant by the fact all those artifact names look identical on the first sight. Many of those are not extremely distinguishable on the second and third ones as well. What on Earth is Wrath for Neapolis and how precisely magnificent are the Magnificent Regalia?

Lots of text that is not fun to read is a turnoff. For me personally, it is far greater a turnoff than any number of banners with icons an the top of the screen.

• Less efficient, especially for experienced players. Less clicks are generally a good thing. This should be improved.

Here I believe that there is no differentiation between the new and the old players. If the player is unexperienced and does not know where to look for stuff, the closer the information is, the better, moreso than for the experienced one.

 

[TrainMachine]

• Significantly less overwhelming, especially for newer players. During user testing the game being overwhelming was the most common complaint for first-time players. I understand that to most of you here this is not a very strong argument since you are generally very experienced PDS players, but as a UX Designer the overall experience of the first 10-20 hours are critical. If we lose someone here, they are most likely gone forever.

Yeah, okay. During the first 10-20 hours, I didn't much mind the engine light, and now I find it infuriating. So I guess it worked as intended?

• Allows for clearer separation between "This should be fixed immediately" (Alert) and "You should probably look into this" and "You could look into this if you want to" (Current Situation panel). Even though this is signaled in our other games, like the Red/Yellow/Green system in EUIV, that separation is much less clear, especially for newer players, but also to players with color blindness.

You've got a funny definition of "You could look into this if you want to", then. I have yet to play a campaign where I wasn't constantly looking into some of those things, typically starting from Day 1.

• Anything can be added to the Current Situation panel without support from Art, and most of the time without Code. The realities of production planning is something that is easy to forget about, especially when looking at the implementation of a system from an outside perspective.

That you can trivially make the engine light more annoying is not what I would call a glowing recommendation.

 

[3arat]

So, from my perspective - What does the current system do well, and why?

• Significantly less overwhelming, especially for newer players. During user testing the game being overwhelming was the most common complaint for first-time players. I understand that to most of you here this is not a very strong argument since you are generally very experienced PDS players, but as a UX Designer the overall experience of the first 10-20 hours are critical. If we lose someone here, they are most likely gone forever.

That's deeply surprising take.

For a complex grand strategy game, a successor to famously Excel-like production, coming from a studio touting its love for intellectually challenging games, there was feedback "the game is overwhelming in the first hours", it was treated as "critical". It's like treating seriously "too much game overs" in a roguelike, "too much shooting" in a first person shooter, or "too many cars" in a racing game. FPS developers don't lose people who are overwhelmed by fast mouse movement because that audience doesn't buy such games in the first place. It was poorly selected focus group, wasn't it? Don't tell me this reasoning was also behind originally hiding pop needs into nested tooltips!

Edit:

the Red/Yellow/Green system in EUIV, that separation is much less clear, especially for newer players, but also to players with color blindness

(As a partially colorblind person, I find this statement in this context shocking. EUIV flags have three different shapes (!), whereas Victoria 3 heavily relies on colorized icons everywhere in the interface (!!).)