General feedback: rollback the UI

I hate to complain to you guys but woke up this morning to find everything swapped around on the menu.

Didn’t take long for me to find everything but everything about it is incredibly small for no real reason.

I didn’t see anything wrong with the white toolbar at the top of the main menu that uses the most of the screenspace. What did this fix?

I don’t see any benefit from this minimalistic UI, especially when most people playing are on a 1600x900 or higher monitor.

I can only suggest rolling that back or giving us the clientside option to.

The white toolbar had these options: Play, Inventory, Help, and Settings.

  • Inventory was moved to below your player profile, as it’s more about your profile and progress (much like the Units).
  • Help was moved to Tutorials and is directly on the main menu now.
  • Play was removed because play only took you back to the main menu list, which with the removal of the top bar options, there’s no point anymore.
  • Settings was kept on the top so you can always access settings no matter what menu you are in.

Basically, the change was done to remove the tab based top menu, so that the vertical list main menu is the only menu type. This ensures the menu will have the same flow as the rest of the main menu options, while also reducing the clutter (there’s no reason for “Inventory” to be such a large button and “Play” can be confusing to new players).

The rest of the menu changes were to improve the Game Worlds access. One of the major complaints was that it took many clicks to get into a Game World and another common complaint was that it was hard to see if there are any Game World menus. These were valid complaints because the existing menu you had to click into Game Worlds (or use the shortcut) then open a menu for just one of the Game Worlds, then click Find or Create. You couldn’t see Game World servers easily because of this. The new menu lets you easily find Game World servers, and click through each Game World without having to back out, then navigate back in, and there’s an easy to find “Start Game” option. Other changes were to reduce the amount of description text on the Game World menus as a small blurb would get the idea across, along with pictures of gameplay (soon to be videos of gameplay). In later revisions we’ll be adding Game World tutorials that go deeper into how the games play and the game rules in a more informative manner, but that should be it’s own menu within the new Tutorials section to avoid complicating the Game World menus.

These changes are made to make the menu more useful and serve its purpose in clear ways, without complicating the entire process.

We also test our UI designs on the most standard resolutions, 720p, 1080p, and 4K (2160).

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