Nested tooltips are the future!!

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Birdos

Second Lieutenant
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Mar 11, 2016
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Is what is said when I saw them in Jon Shafer's "At the Gates" some years ago. I'm glad PDX is starting to implement them, they are an absolute gamechanger and made me want to go blind into the tutorial instead of watching 6h of "Beginner Guide" on YT like I did with EU3 TheTurk321 series or Arumba's "CK2" Tutorial Series. But there is so much more to cover!!! And so much more UI work to do!!!
  • No concepts are yet explained. Most (if not all) of the blue text in tooltips is not explained in any way!!
  • No tooltips present in event text (people, provinces, concepts, positions, etc.).
  • "Go to" function does not highlight the province in any way, while the event tab covers half of the screen!
  • Clickable items within tooltips are just bold instead of also chosing a lighter color variant so you can actually identify them in >480p resolutions.
  • Many things are not explained in the tutorial in any way (eg. Missions!).
  • Many tooltips do not show relevant information, nor do they explain anything
  • Gamespeed is represented dark red against dark grey in very thin stripes in the upper corner. Noway to easily identify what speed you're on.
  • Army Icons are sometimes too big to allow province click, show mapmode tooltip, etc.
  • Caracters are presented with first name, so you don't know if they're important at all.
  • Character portraits have no element to identify them easily wit their famiy (color of clothing, symbol, background, etc.)
  • ...
A grand strategy game is 20% concept and 80% implementation. Implementation is 40% backend and 60% UX. UI is 90% of that UX, so UI is f***ing important!!!

I have played the tutorial (played 5h of 1.3) and the first 2h were impressively good, but after that I started to notice all these unexplained things and found myself looking for any explanation trough a myrriad of tabs witout finding an answer. That has to change if you want me back at all.

"Nested tooltips" is the single most powerful tool for gaining new players in (grand) strategy games, because they allow you to customize your learning curve: teaching you what you want, without feeling overwhelmed or left in the dark; you decide how deep you want to go into the rabbit hole. But they have to be complete for that, if incomplete they're extremely frustrating!


PS: I could easily provide 20 more detailed instances where UI or game explanation is lacking (have made 11 bug reports today), but (knowing PDX from Stellaris) there is no way I'm doing any more of your QA job for free without even a guarantee that you'll even read it. This patch brought me back and got my hopes up, but in the end it p***ed me off even more. Most of these things have easy fixes without too much effort, whhich makes it even more frustrating.
 
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