The New UI: God Help You, Behavior
as a graphic designer i must say, without any kind of malice, this designer needs to be let go immediately. such bad design it's laughable. well, it would be funny if i didn't spend 10 hours a day for years on this game. if behavior doesn't change this i'm probably out for good. it's that poor.
a. the circular survivor profiles are a bad idea. they present spacing problems (see: ugly/incorrectly spaced obsession claws, close player name spacing) which are poorly worked around.
b. the survivor pictures are a BAD idea. no one wants to see those old pics every game. knowing who is who on your team is of 0% importance. no one cares. we have objectives to do. no killer needs to see a pic of the person they're chasing. there's only 4. it's not rocket science to keep track of.
every survivor picture has different colors and look terrible together. this is design 101 stuff. (the designer should instinctively know this. if you don't, you need to find another line of work.) those pics were old and boring years ago and i don't want to see them now; let alone every game. gross. (can we also talk about how they look like they were cut out in ms paint? see: claudette's hair, bill's image size; is he 3' 10''?)
c. the red/injured color on the profile pics are a bad idea. it doesn't work on any color scheme level, looks stupid and doesn't give any good/fast information. is that person hit or did they turn into ronald mcdonald? i can't tell. at least make it purple. the "slash" icon addition looks even worse.
d. also, player names are not of any great importance. pro tip: if you need to use italics to make your roboto bold font look better, you're moving in the wrong direction. looks like a band-aid to heal massive wound. doesn't work.
e. the black border/background around player's names, skill checks, "remaining," "repairing," is ugly/useless. 1999 called. they want their design back. there was no issue with it before. it was clean/readable/modern.
f. HOOK COUNTING IS NOT NEEDED. i assume this is where it all started from. that's not to say it wouldn't be fine to include for new players, even though that information would still be wasted on them, but it needs to be done tastefully. i find it funny that players on this very forum can design flawless/better ui within a day. unacceptable. as if my objectives would change even 1% because my teammate is on death hook. if i can help them i do so; it makes no difference what hook they're on. it's irrelevant. why everyone thinks it's personally useful in any way is beyond me. either they don't pay attention (new players) or they want something simply for the fact that it's "more." one has to memorize a lot more than hook states in this game; totem locations, gens locations (popped or not/live-dead zones), basement location, survivor/killer current positions, etc. a hook counter looks nice for watching tournaments on twitch when you tune in mid-match, but is arbitrary in your own trial. one should already know.
here's a @Yogerman1997 draft that's simple, elegant, updated & a far superior design:
g. anyone have a doctor game yet? the madness level on the hud has changed from cool tv static to being redesigned by a high school student who traveled back in time 20 years and made it in flash. pathetic.
h. the struggle bar is FAR too slim/small. what were these meetings like?! "okay guys, take everything that gives actual relevant information and make it smaller, then take all the fluff and make it huuuuuge!"
i. why am i not informed when a survivor is picked up?! are you serious?! are we being trolled...
j. hot take: i don't need my item image to be gigantic. i know what i have. maybe this game has a large goldfish player base i'm not aware of. the one thing i don't need to look at happens to be the largest thing on the hud. it's bigger than a perk image for christ's sake.
k. personal opinion: countdown timer getting more opacity the closer to 0 seconds on perks is ugly/useless.
in other news,
the survivor animations you spent money designing were a waste of time. apparently everyone turns into a 90 year old man when they are injured. this was one of the updates i thought you guys might pull off. worse.
the changing of vertical camera angle is one of those ideas that may have sounded good on paper, but is bad. so... now that i'm in the dying state i guess i'm hindered in continuing to see/plan what's going on. guess i'll just watch youtube while i lay here? fantastic.
why do i not jump in the hatch anymore? i just run across it in place like this is a beta of some new game? anyone?
the biggest draw for me when i started was that your design team did such an exceptional job. they did stellar work. now, little by little, i feel like it's becoming a game version of hoarders; a mound of crap everywhere that looks bad and is useless.
my advice: hire all the original designers back with double pay. have them fix/update everything PLUS the new map color schemes (they all look the same).
me, i think i'm gonna take a week off for the first time in 3 years. i can't look at this.
Comments
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100% agreed. This is hard to watch. I think they're intentionally killing the game.
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My eyes are bleeding since they change maps, so yamaoka macmillan and autoheaven look like SAME. This change... I would be very very very rude and vulgar. Pretty bad job.
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I posted this in another thread (as you can see, I currently can't make new threads (I did nothing too bad, just been swearing a lot)), and I'd like to take the opportuniyt to ask your opinion as a graphic designer if this would be better:
The items/ability would either go with the perks or where I put the circular hook progression right now.
As the circular hook progression is on the new HUD it seems to just be there to tell you if you got enough hooks for an iri emblem, which here would be covered with the emblem progression.
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Seriously agree
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@MeltingPenguins your markup is just about what they're going to have to do. they're going to (or lose half the base) put it back, raise up the players and put the useless "hook counter" under it.
as everyone already knows, if they're insistent on images they'll have to use the adept pics. it's the only choice. how those colored pics actually made it into the game is so colossally stupid i'm at a loss for words.
your "states & hook timer" would have to share the same screen as the images somehow, like before. it would eat up too much screen real estate on top.
your "emblem progress" is a very interesting idea! as it's not required information, one could look at it at one's leisure. big thumbs up.
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I agree on this.
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Now I'm wondering... I have these claws/tendrils there around the hookcounter. Would it make sense or be too clustered if THEY would double as hookcounter with the statuses between them. Like they'd go from semi-transparent to white and then snap inwards when a survivor dies.
Or have the 'hook counter' underneath the images as two tallymarks and have the portraits desaturate and go slightly transparent and overlay them with the statusicon?
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I seriously don't want to play this game anymore. The update is so useless! Why do we needso much on the screen!? I can hardly see what I'm doing! Also my feng is super buggy and the animations are absolutely garbage. I really hope the devs listen and remove this update because 90% of the community hates this update
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This is the post that finally made me sign up to the forums because of how strongly I agree with everything you've said.
I'm also a graphic designer with around 15 years experience, and frankly this UI is laughable. You've hit the nail on the head with each of your points. It honestly looks like a first year student (at best) designed the whole thing and nobody was there to tell them to stop.
The whole thing is a complete mess and needs a serious rethink. The "designer" behind this new UI is far from fit for the role and either needs serious supervision from someone who actually knows what they're doing, or removing entirely.
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This feels like a perfect marriage between the new & old UI. Granted, I despise the new UI, but this feels like it could please a lot of people at BHVR, if they're dead set on spreading out the UI like butter.
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less is always more in design.
i feel like the major problem with behavior is that no one at that company is actually competent at playing their game. this is a game much like chess; it literally takes thousands of hours of play to reach any sort of skill level. they need to have a mandatory 10 hours a week play time for all employees working on the project. after a year the updates might become better/useful.
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The New UI feels drastically as if it is solely there for someone watching to judge the game. As in it's intended for esports. And then they apparently went and made the audience UI in custom matches even different.
Like... why?
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I just think the entire UI feels completely disjointed and looks they've attempted to go for form over function, then completely failed at that as well.
The entire point of this UI was supposed to be the ability to feed information to Killers and Survivors easier, instead, I literally cannot tell what is going on. I can't tell when Borrowed Time or other status effects happen. I can't see the struggle timer at all, so have no idea how long I have to save a person before they hit Phase 2, or die. I can no longer tell if my item is empty at a glance, because the empty bar is now just a lighter grey. Pretty much every single design decision is the complete opposite of what it should be.
The portraits should just be the Adept icons, an asset they already have and would fit in much nicer with the sylised themes of the perks etc.
I honestly cannot understand how anybody looked at this and thought "There, much better!"
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@Jenkybob she definitely seems like someone without a lot of experience. black text borders? really? "so you can read it!" we can read it.
i watched her speaking about it in a q&a video. she seemed pleased. at the very least she doesn't hold to the same sensibilities as it's tone. she seems to want a very colorful and bright aesthetic, but that's the last thing this game should have. and to her credit she succeeded; i can't stop looking at her bright colors. the problem is my team's dead because i can't stop looking at her bright colors.
i don't even blame her. someone signed off on this. she doesn't know how to play, i'm sure, not in any meaningful way anyway. someone thought this was okay. behavior, for two years i've been griping about going up there and working (fixing) to family and friends. i have 5000 hours logged. gimmie a call and i'll be on a plane tomorrow to help with what i can. love this game.
i'm trying not to be totally harsh, as design skills take years to curate and refine, but she needs to be designing projects with less stakes for a few years, not dbd.
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I think the major problem here is what I'll refer to as "trickle down incompetence". The lack of experience from the UI designer wouldn't be so bad if there was a senior designer overseeing the whole redesign, with a clear vision in mind and the ability to turn down poor decisions. The fact that none of the superiors at BHVR seem to have the slightest clue about anything regarding their own game only amplifies the situation.
Yes, the design is bad. Yes, we all dislike it. Yes, it's absolutely not her fault. I've definitely thought I'd done a good job on projects when I was younger, inexperienced, and still learning, only for them to actually be poor quality. The difference was that I had someone with experience who guided me and helped me improve the project, resulting in something great in the end. This clearly hasn't happened in this situation.
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