MMOG (and other game) interface design is inhumane

[Soukyan]

Atul Varma from Humanized posted some good thoughts on the Humanized weblog about interface design in games. The post discusses a recent play session of World of Warcraft, but can be applied to other MMOGs as well. He sums up his thoughts saying,

Ultimately, many of today's video games are quickly descending into the morass of usability that is the modern graphical operating system. My hope is that the designers of these games learn from the mistakes of the GUI, rather than reinventing that old wheel and inheriting all its problems — because overcoming an inhumane user interface shouldn't be a requirement for mastering a video game.

Good food for thought. Hell, even the buttons for the formatting of posts on this site require the use of tooltips to decipher at times. Of course, depending on the browser you use, the tooltip might just read,

Code:

javascript:void();

due to lack of alt tags, I guess. In any case, I thought it was an interesting read.


Permalink to article

[tazelbain]

Easy to say UI suck.  Not so easy to fix.  But, of course, that's what they want you to pay them for.

[Soukyan]

I've been pondering about possible solutions to the UI problem. In MMOGs, the need for commands in the game is so vast that it is nigh on impossible to provide an interface that is not cryptic in some sense. Now, the aforementioned problem with determining which icon to click may have been an oversimplification of the problem for the sake of making a point, with a total disregard for the fact that there is a learning curve with any user interface. How steep that learning curve is is another issue, but there you are.

A user who frequently works within a given application will have a good working knowledge of the interface and will know which buttons to click and which menus store certain tasks and will probably even have their own hotkeys and macros created which is what brings me to my next point. Beyond developing an easy to learn and use interface, which is what Atul Varma is getting at, we need to design with the user in mind and provide a wide array of customization, particularly in complex applications, such as MMOGs.

So I was thinking back to my old MUD days and my current system administration days. Aliases. Macros. Hell, commands. There are many MMOGs that have already implemented this idea, but I think it is worth mentioning that providing your users the ability to execute all game commands in text format and giving the ability to create their own macros, shortcuts, hotkeys, aliases, etc. is the way to go. Now, I am not sure how this could have been applied to the WoW quest discussed in the article, as I don't know if the hotkey used was a one-off spell, or scroll, or potion, or if it was some other game mechanism that may or may not be easily accessible as a text command.

While text commands do not make the user interface experience easier for new users, it certainly makes the user interface much better for experienced users. The ability to label your own buttons is particularly compelling. When games are not simple enough to use a directional pad and a couple of buttons labeled A and B, we must come up with more elaborate solutions. So what about mouse gestures? Here is an interface concept that is implemented in web browsers and other applications that could be leveraged for use in games. Not all games, perhaps, but some. Why not give users the ability to assign commands to mouse gestures? Sure, repetitive stress injuries might abound, but I'm just thinking out loud here.

In any case, I can remember my first MUD ever and being totally floored at the sheer number of commands available when first learning to play it. After administering my third MUD, I looked back and thought about how much I had learned or just plain absorbed from the use of the MUDs throughout the years. At that point, I could have rattled off every command from several different codebases, but that's not the point. The point is how to get from the new user to the seasoned user with minimal pain and suffering. How do we make the interfaces better? More clear? More concise? Have we reached a dead end? Or have we just become complacent because the new MMOG has roughly the same UI and commands and we're all just seasoned players?

[Sky]

I don't really have a problem with game UIs, as long as they let you have some control over it. EQ2's is fine imo. WoW's sucked but was good if you modded it (but then had to dick with updating the mod every patch, which sucked). I did put in EQ2Map, but that's not really a UI issue, for the main UI it's all stock for me.

Maybe we just need to dumb it down to 4 buttons on the face of a gamepad ;)

[Soukyan]

I don't really have a problem with game UIs, as long as they let you have some control over it. EQ2's is fine imo. WoW's sucked but was good if you modded it (but then had to dick with updating the mod every patch, which sucked). I did put in EQ2Map, but that's not really a UI issue, for the main UI it's all stock for me.

Maybe we just need to dumb it down to 4 buttons on the face of a gamepad ;)

And that's his whole point, that WoW in his example needed a 3rd party mod installed to make the interface more extensible. The interface should be more extensible by default as is the case with EQ2. I'm in the same boat with you, Sky. I never installed an interface mod on EQ2. Perhaps it was just laziness. I don't know. And no, 4 gamepad buttons are not the answer, although even gamepads have gotten ridiculous with the number of buttons. I never played on the Wii, but it looks like it may have less buttons than others, thus going back to a simpler model of user interface design. Of course, the motion sensing stuff adds to what they can do, but any way, I haven't seen one so I can't speak to the number of buttons or the simplicity. It just "seems" that way from what I've read and heard. Back to the MMOGs, even EQ2 has the "cryptic icon" issue. Hell, Word has that problem if you've never used it before.

[Grand Design]

I'd like to see context menus more heavily used.  This would be especially useful if menus were customizable.  I'm speaking in EQ2 terms here, but it applies universally.  Imagine if, like your hotbars, you could set up your spells (abilities, whatever) in a context menu.  Casting a heal would be a right-click, downward mouse movement, left click.  As opposed to, see who is stealing agro, press corresponding function button, hit 1 (heal hotkey), find MT and press his / her function button.  In the current system, I've had to (riskily) take my target from the MT, and perform several steps to execute one spell for that idiot that wants his dps to be teh winnar.  Sorry, healer blues talking.

This is probably a personal preference, but it applies even going back to my EQ days:  I hate icons.  Icons hide the true meaning of what that particular button is supposed to do.  This is why I would make macros for any spell that I memorized.  Its much easier for me when the shit hits the fan to find the button with the big yellow HEAL on it than some rinky-dink heart icon with a pink potion and a teddy bear on it.  No matter how many thousands of times I've healed, my brain still pauses for a nanosecond and asks, "Is that really the heal spell?  And why is it so pink?"  That nanosecond could kill you.

I've always been tempted to set up some kind of voice recognition for macros, but then I'd have to admit that I'm a complete dork.  Even teamspeak makes me nervous because it reveals that Mr. Shadowknight really sounds like Steve Urkle, and so does that hot DE that I've been hitting on for the past hour.

[SnakeCharmer]

The best UI of any game that I have played so far has been original SWG.  Movement keyed with the right mouse button, actions accessible from the left mouse button, F keys for special activation instead of the number keys, a stout macro system, the combat queue, automatic camera/view movement with mouse movement, and system messages that showed up on your screen as well as your chat box...I could expand my character's and targets status bars to a big enough size that I could watch it with my peripheral vision and still watch the action in the game. 

It blended with the game better than any I've seen so far.  I didn't notice the UI, which is why I liked it.  I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate watching timers on special icons, trying to watch buffs / debuff icons on my HAM bar, etc. 

The last time I played any MMO, much less SWG NGE or WoW or Vanguard or  , I found myself watching rotating timers, the HAM bar, and such rather than watching the GAME.

Something is wrong there....

[Kail]

As anyone who's played World of Warcraft for more than a few days knows, a core part of playing the game today lies in researching and determining which of the hundreds of community-created addons one wants to install, locating said addons on the internet, installing them, and dealing with upgrading them when the game is patched and the addons break. (snip...)  All of this wouldn't be so bad if the out-of-the-box experience were humane to begin with, but it's not. The aforementioned configuration activities are, in fact, a requirement for taming the game's interface...

Bullshit.  I have a character at 70, and I never used any mods.  You might need them to raid effectively (I haven't done any of that), but that's not something you're going to be running into "a few days" after rolling your avatar, unless you're catassing to an inhuman degree.

Which is not to say that I don't think the hotkeys are out of freaking control, but that's more a problem with the "Ding/Grats" Diku system, where you must get some new fob every level or the game dies.  My Shaman has (with the default UI) something like eight different toolbars, each with twelve slots, and every one of them is full with some dongle or other (and there's still a few more items I'd like to stick to it if I had room).  That's the way the game is set up, and there is no interface short of jamming a plug into the base of my skull that is going to let me hit any one of ninety-six hotkeys whenever I need to without just slapping down an ugly pile of buttons somewhere.

[Venkman]

UI is evolutionary (whoa, deep thoughts...). WoW's UI is actually damned good, when compared to old EQ1 or, worse, old UO. iWe learned those UI's fine, but they were alienating to anyone without a great deal of desire to simply be part of this then-new experience.

I would guess that it's mostly MMO veterans that modded WoW. Like EQ2s UI, WoW's is perfectly usable out of the box, unless you come to a new MMO with preferences set up by prior experiences.

Of course, the game mechanic itself is mostly to blame. There's just so much information that needs to be managed. But I do think that we're going to start seeing that change. In reviewing the UIs from the upcoming games we know about, it seems as though a lot is changing. Maybe it's not for the better, nor the worse. But at least people are thinking beyond the hotkey bar and target lock.

[Lum]

Different people have different requirements for UIs. Using WoW as an example, a new player needs easy access to help, tutorials, and not an overwhelming amount of options on screen. A raider requires a heads-up display resembling a fighter aircraft, preferably with the interface itself changing and morphing depending on the situation. Intermediate players look for interfaces that show quest completion, help with combat efficiency, and keep your cyb0ring IMs seperate from your guild chat.

I disagree with the original author that operating systems are bad examples for UIs. I disagree mainly because users are, by necessity, familiar with operating system conventions. They know to look for right click menus, they look for window widgets in the appropriate places, they expect to get help when hitting F1, and expect a menu of some sort somewhere. Ignoring the training your users come to the door with is probably a bad idea; at least it's a wasteful one.

My main pet peeve with game UIs are ones that are ornate at the expense of functionality. Your user interface is not a good place to show off how arty you can be. It's supposed to be usable, first and foremost. One of my first reactions upon trying Everquest 1, back when it first released, was how hideous the interface was. It may have looked fantasy, but to my eyes it looked like something cooked up in Visual Basic by someone who liiked marble textures.

[sam, an eggplant]

This is an interesting article, because the author has no understanding of the medium and feels that his experience in utility design should naturally transfer to MMOs. He believes that MMOs are directly analagous to, for example, CD burning utilities, and that developers should pick the best defaults to meet the needs of 90% of the users and customization options should be disabled, hidden, or non-discoverable. That is entirely wrong. MMO players are all power-users, and power users love customization. They don't download UI mods because they're necessary to play, they download UI mods because they're power users who live and breathe the game. WoW very correctly feeds complexity to new players over the course of many hours and is a sterling example of great MMO UI.

That's not to say that players should be forced to fight the interface. His example of possessing the dragon was perfectly apt; of course presenting a player with four unlabelled icons and no feedback or direction was bad design. But extrapolating that one encounter to condemn the UI as a whole is foolish.

[eldaec]

My main pet peeve with game UIs are ones that are ornate at the expense of functionality. Your user interface is not a good place to show off how arty you can be. It's supposed to be usable, first and foremost. One of my first reactions upon trying Everquest 1, back when it first released, was how hideous the interface was. It may have looked fantasy, but to my eyes it looked like something cooked up in Visual Basic by someone who liiked marble textures.

QFT.

Developers who seem to think the UI should stand between the player and the things the player is supposed to care about (characters, objects and settings in the actual game world), or who seem to believe that the UI is part of the game world, irritate me beyond comprehension.

The only reason your UI needs some level of game-related flavour, is so that it becomes less visible and jarring when alongside the game world objects. Everything is about bringing the player closer to the game world, not standing between player and game full of self importance and bad textutures.

The current fiasco on mtgo v3 is another perfect example of how to do everything wrong.

This is an interesting article, because the author has no understanding of the medium and feels that his experience in utility design should naturally transfer to MMOs. He believes that MMOs are directly analagous to, for example, CD burning utilities, and that developers should pick the best defaults to meet the needs of 90% of the users and customization options should be disabled, hidden, or non-discoverable. That is entirely wrong. MMO players are all power-users,

He's not only wrong about MMOGs, he's also wrong about CD burning utilities for people who operate CD buring utilities for hours at a time, most days of the week.

A better comparison to MMOGs is something like graphic design or CAD software, or other professional/pro-sumer tools. If people are going to play a single game as a hobby in itself, design needs to account for their growth as a player.

The autor's example in a mmog, putting you in a new role with new icons and not telling you what they do, is something 'happy-friendly-flavour-filledy' GUI designers get wrong often. But even if those four abilities had been text options, the quest design meant you'd still be guessing which one works, the key problem was quest design, rather than overuse of flavour in a UI, or too many options.

[Venkman]

That is entirely wrong. MMO players are all power-users, and power users love customization

I disagree. The vast majority of MMO players are MMO hobbiests like we are. They are previously a gamer that finds an MMO they like and gets sucked into playing it for months and months at a time. That's not a power-user. That's someone who comes from playing games designed for 10-20 hours of play staying in a genre designed for 100-400 hours of play.

Maybe the user will eventually want to customize their UI, but this is by no means a foregone conclusion. I know plenty of endgamers who kicked and screamed all the way into CT_Raid for example, and getting the CT stuff is about as turnkey as they come.

This is corrollary to discussions about how many people are deeply invested in maximizing their total MMO experience. Think about how many people are in a guild versus how many are bothering to hit the guild forums. The greater the percentage, the more hardcore/niche the guild is, in my mind. Most times you're lucky to get 10% of your members to care that much.

People approach new games expecting to play it right out of the box. Modern MMOs are like this. So their GUIs should reflect this. I think they largely do, based on the type of games modern MMOs are. So a fundamental shift in GUI needs a fundamental shift in the total game play experience, as we've seen in the demos of TR and AoC.

[sam, an eggplant]

When you dedicate hundreds of hours to a single activity, you can't be described as casual. Hobbyists are anything but casual; that's the wrong word to describe it. They spend hundreds of hours organizing their stamp collections.

Those players may have resisted installing ct_raid, but that was an example of bad  design, since the mod was absolutely required to progress through the endgame. It's also an obsolete example, since a raid interface is now included in the game.

You're assuming that UI complexity and customization necessarily implies picking and configuring dozens of mods just so. That's not what the author was talking about. He was talking about the default UI complexity; with multiple button bars, hitting shift-2 followed by 4 to summon a hippopotamus, monitoring the status of 4 other players as well as your own health and power while simultaneously trying to situate yourself to attack the monster's backside, stuff like that. He looked over his nephew's shoulder playing his 60 in WoW, and wrote an article based on that experience rather than playing himself. While there's a great deal of attention and decision-making required in a simple diku-style group battle, it's all introduced slowly and iteratively over dozens of hours. That's not bad design.

[Merusk]

There's a much better and more in-depth blog linked in the comments to the above article.

http://www.unwesen.de/articles/wow_design_improvements_introduction  There's the link to the guy's intro article.  Some of you folks (Darniaq) will have all kinds of fun with his views on social-ties and expanding the UI as his views parallel yours.  I, however, would find most of his desired additions merely distractions and nuisances at best and damned inconvenient invasion of my personal space at worse.

 Game vs Lifestyle/ World rears its head again.

[Raph]

When I did the base SWG UI my intent was to make something that was more understandable and usable by non-MMO players. Based on the stats we gathered and the polls we did, it did OK at that -- it was greatly preferred to the other UI configs by folks who had never played an MMO before.

But we had so many MMO vets that wanted, well, EQ's UI -- which I have always considered to be terrible -- that we had to put it in as an option, and this crowd persistently pushed for it to be made the default, which eventually happened. Whereupon the other players started clamoring for it to go back the other way... you get the idea.

The design premises for the original SWG UI were pretty simple:

- move the commonest activities to the most basic interface
- chatting is more common than hotkeys
- hotkeys should be on keys for, well, hotkeys
- make everything have a default action that you reach by dbl-click and make extended options available in other ways
- adhere to GUI conventions if you can
- make everything back into a text command
- permit text-based macroing for high-end customization

but we ran aground of the fact that mouselook swallows your mouse, and so to have both mouselook and a cursor will *always* require a toggle key, and a toggle key is *always* obscure. We also ran into the basic divide between those who chatted more, and those who needed a billion hotkeys accessible quickly for rapid combat.

That said, during beta, when users were polled, the default SWG UI won handily in terms of user preference, over the three other default mappings we provided...

[Jayce]

I think he really hypes up that addons are needed, and seems to think (as some of you do) that allowing addons is either cheap (letting players do your work for you) or bad for usability.  I think neither.  The fact is, 8 million players can come up with better ideas for everything than your 50-man dev team.  Why not let them come up with UI ideas and cherry-pick the best? 

In terms of usability, I think it's genius that you can access additional usability only by knowing the current UI inside and out.  You can almost make the argument that some mods are required for raiding, but raiding by definition is meant to be a bleeding-edge activity.  To even access it you have to have driven the UI for 70 levels.  If you don't know it by then, I have no idea how to help you.

His example of Mario is false too, IMO.  You can't tell me that you knew which button, the helpfully labeled "A" and "B", threw a fireball the first time you played?  "Fireball" has both the letters "a" and "b" in it, no help there!!  However, the first time you did it, you learned it and never had to think about it again.  Likewise, I suspect the second time you do the quest he mentioned, you know how to manipulate the pet bar.

UI improvements will always be worth striving for, but short of a new control contraption for each game, you will never have zero learning curve.

[Stephen Zepp]

I think he really hypes up that addons are needed, and seems to think (as some of you do) that allowing addons is either cheap (letting players do your work for you) or bad for usability.  I think neither.  The fact is, 8 million players can come up with better ideas for everything than your 50-man dev team.  Why not let them come up with UI ideas and cherry-pick the best? 

In terms of usability, I think it's genius that you can access additional usability only by knowing the current UI inside and out.  You can almost make the argument that some mods are required for raiding, but raiding by definition is meant to be a bleeding-edge activity.  To even access it you have to have driven the UI for 70 levels.  If you don't know it by then, I have no idea how to help you.

His example of Mario is false too, IMO.  You can't tell me that you knew which button, the helpfully labeled "A" and "B", threw a fireball the first time you played?  "Fireball" has both the letters "a" and "b" in it, no help there!!  However, the first time you did it, you learned it and never had to think about it again.  Likewise, I suspect the second time you do the quest he mentioned, you know how to manipulate the pet bar.

UI improvements will always be worth striving for, but short of a new control contraption for each game, you will never have zero learning curve.

I tend to agree with just about every point you make here, as well as all the intentions that Raph makes.

Personally, I think game developers of all sorts should extend the ability to modify GUI's to as big an audience as possible. Guild Wars had at least a basic ability to move your GUI controls around with an editor, and I think that this should be the basis for future GUI development--a visually based editor that allows for any user to modify several different "themes" (not the usual sense of themes being purely graphical, but information presentation styles) of UI quickly and easily.

UI Mods don't relieve the developers from making good UI's, but they do allow customers to adjust their UI to their personal play style and needs, but currently the games that allow for maximum flexibility in information presentation also require you to be an XML artiste...and that limits the general benefit of UI modding.

One of the issues in UI modding is that the data people want to view is buried in the network stream with other data that they don't need to/shouldn't be able to view directly, and most user moddable UI's provide some form of tagging system (a meta-UI if you will) to present this data, and then an XML layer to organize the data. I think this should both be formalized (would be great if it was cross-developer, but at least should be consistent within a developer's releases), and an editor provided that allows for easy manipulation of both what data is presented, and how/where it is presented.

Finally, development groups that allow UI moddability should absolutely support that moddability. It is endlessly frustrating when a patch comes out that literally causes a modded UI to ctd, and that flat out shouldn't happen...and doesn't need to.

[Lantyssa]

When I did the base SWG UI my intent was to make something that was more understandable and usable by non-MMO players. Based on the stats we gathered and the polls we did, it did OK at that -- it was greatly preferred to the other UI configs by folks who had never played an MMO before.

It's been so long I don't remember the options now.  I think it was the base interface, but modal so I could have additional binds.  No matter what I used, I liked that players had the option to use different styles built into the game.

What I would be interested in seeing in future games is a set-up screen, before getting into the world, which let us play with different interfaces to see which we liked best.  Being able to do so before we ever contact the server gives bonus points.  Yet more points for making it possible to save the interface into a loadable file on your own machine.

[Hutch]

I think he really hypes up that addons are needed, and seems to think (as some of you do) that allowing addons is either cheap (letting players do your work for you) or bad for usability.  I think neither.  The fact is, 8 million players can come up with better ideas for everything than your 50-man dev team.  Why not let them come up with UI ideas and cherry-pick the best? 

And then, have those ideas show up in other games.

I'm speaking specifically of the H.U.D. quest progress lists that were modded into WoW, nicked by Blizzard and put into the default UI, and then showed up in the default LotRO UI.
But I'm sure there are more examples :)

[sam, an eggplant]

So nobody agrees with the article, then?

Group hug!

[Jayce]

So nobody agrees with the article, then?

Group hug!

Well, it's fun to talk about, so as food for thought it works.  But most of his conclusions are overblown or Captain Obvious ("usability is HARD"), IMO.

[JoeTF]

My main pet peeve with game UIs are ones that are ornate at the expense of functionality. Your user interface is not a good place to show off how arty you can be. It's supposed to be usable, first and foremost. One of my first reactions upon trying Everquest 1, back when it first released, was how hideous the interface was. It may have looked fantasy, but to my eyes it looked like something cooked up in Visual Basic by someone who liiked marble textures.

They should be pleasant and good looking though. That awesome fountain in before City Hall? - players will look at it once, twice if you're lucky. Healthbars? They will have the bloody thing before their eyes one hundred percent of time.

[sinij]

WoW interface is one of the worst out there, partially due to WASD movement choice. WASD has no place outside of FPS. In WoW it takes TWO hands just to move your character... what you suppose to use for macros?

[Kail]

WoW interface is one of the worst out there, partially due to WASD movement choice. WASD has no place outside of FPS. In WoW it takes TWO hands just to move your character... what you suppose to use for macros?

Eh?  There is a "click to move" toggle in the interface menu, in addition to the default key layout which lets you move around fairly comfortably with the mouse alone (you just can't strafe).  Even if there wasn't, WASD only needs one hand to work.  I can't think of a movement scheme would work better in WoW.

[bhodi]

Things that suck about the  WoW UI and design:

* Bars on the corners of the screen that must be constantly watched when the action is happening in the middle
* Being able to do better in combat by watching moving bars than the actual 3d landscape or item that I'm fighting
* Dozens of 'action' icons that all must be hotkeyed and immediately available for my character to be effective
* Actions that cannot, by default, be activated while maneuvering due to keyboard/hand distance restrictions

[Glazius]

I have to admit, one of the reasons I like CoH so much is because, like a power user, I was able to reassign every game function to a place on my keyboard where it worked better for me.

--GF

[sinij]

WoW interface is one of the worst out there, partially due to WASD movement choice. WASD has no place outside of FPS. In WoW it takes TWO hands just to move your character... what you suppose to use for macros?

Eh?  There is a "click to move" toggle in the interface menu, in addition to the default key layout which lets you move around fairly comfortably with the mouse alone (you just can't strafe).  Even if there wasn't, WASD only needs one hand to work.  I can't think of a movement scheme would work better in WoW.

Have you tried click to move in WoW? "You are out of range", "You are facing wrong way" and that just in PvE... Shadowbane had working click to move, WoW for some reason decided to sabotage it and not have auto-close and auto-rotate enabled with it and as a result its useless.

Wow, especially in PvP, requires circle strafing and overall super touchy on positioning/direction. For example you can completely shut down newbie caster by simply jumping through while spell is in progress, if you don't turn with mouse you will get 'facing wrong way' every time.

[pxib]

UI, almost by definition, breaks immersion. It's all game and zero world, and no amount of theme and set-dressing will make it feel more authentic. It should be intuitive, unobtrusive, and located appropriately to draw the player's eyes to where the character's eyes would be. Anything that isn't in use should disappear... figuratively if necessary, literally if possible. In a perfect world inventory would be visible objects carried, damage and status effects would be represented by textures and animations, abilities wouldn't have cooldown timers, only cast times, and players would all use voice chat rather than typing.

Not bloody likely. This would need to be the number one focus of the entire game design. The MMOG is too young a medium.

Until then I agree that what we want is wildly flexible and customizable UIs that let the players create what they need. They'll make gamey stuff, but the stuff that sticks will be the best there is.

[Koyasha]

That...may be a perfect world to you, but it's a game I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, especially with the requirement to communicate through voice chat.  If damage and status effects are represented by textures and animations, then I don't know instantly and completely what is happening to me.  If I get afflicted with Slow, I know what happened.  If I get afflicted by a purple thing, I have to differentiate it from several other similar but uniquely different purple things, and then hope I remember exactly what that particular purple thing does.  It's only if the entire game is going for maximum realism that we should have an interface like that, and that wouldn't be a mass-market game, it'd be one on the level of ATITD or Shadowbane's number of users (if that many).

The main problem of interface to me at the moment is the fact that - and I'm sure developers are starting to consider this more and more often - the number of abilities in the game can easily outnumber the amount of easily accessible buttons, and more importantly, easily rememberable buttons.  I have a Nostromo N52, so I have four hotkey banks of fifteen keys + a D-Pad to work with, and my main problem is not reaching my buttons quickly or pressing the right combination of keys - it's remembering all the abilities my character might have and which button or button combination they're mapped to.  We want more abilities - but at the same time we need to somehow be able to use them all effectively in a fight.  No amount of UI streamlining will make me effectively able to choose in a matter of seconds or fractions of a second between over a hundred abilities, and be able to find them and select them quickly enough, unless I have practiced this for months, essentially memorizing an entire method of control more through ingrained knowledge and reflexive reaction than anything else.  Even if introduced slowly, that's a lot of dedication from your players.

[Koyasha]

Meh, quoted myself instead of editing.

[Jayce]

/agreed with Koyasha.  Let us not mistake realism for good UI.  Let's also keep in mind that combat in real life is chaotic, confusing, hurts, and is not a lot of fun.

edited to respond to Sinij:

Have you tried click to move in WoW? "You are out of range", "You are facing wrong way" and that just in PvE... Shadowbane had working click to move, WoW for some reason decided to sabotage it and not have auto-close and auto-rotate enabled with it and as a result its useless.

I have never tried it before today, but I tested it out in response to this post.  I don't see what you mean.. it does have auto rotate, and in fact unlike SB puts a marker on the ground to show you where you clicked.  I clicked behind me, my character turned and ran there.  I can adjust (click somewhere else) mid run. I found it to be more usable.  What's auto-close?

[Merusk]

Auto-close moves you into range for whatever ability you're using.

The type of interface sinij is looking for does a lot of the work for you, so you're just pressing combat buttons in the right order.  Almost no movement is necessary on your part.  I much prefer the wsad stuff to all that bull.  (Oh and SB did mark where you were moving.. it just went away after you clicked, I guess that's what you meant?)

And therein lies yet another problem.  The movement interface alone can make or break a game for some folks.  There is NO universal UI anymore than there is a universal set of game mechanics.   So much of this conversation is opinion and personal preference, but the original author (and the article I linked) treated it as if it was some sort of cosmic law, and couldn't fathom WHY such things weren't implemented differently.

[Lantyssa]

I have to admit, one of the reasons I like CoH so much is because, like a power user, I was able to reassign every game function to a place on my keyboard where it worked better for me.

CoX is one of my favorite UIs as far as remappability and function.  I rebound everything.  Their keymapping interface is a lot better now though, making manual binds not quite as necessary.

[Akkori]

I love my Nostromo... and the SWG launch interface was the best I've seen yet. Why? It was simple, low-key, and unobtrusive. No gaudy riots of color. I was upset when they not only put in the nasty one that is in now, but even *removed* most of the mono-color simple line drawing icons that I liked. Hell, at one point I was serously tempted to create a printed layout that would lay or hang in my line of vision that contained the macro or button for the skill I wanted to use. Then I could run "fullscreen" so the GUI would not be seen at all.