Let's talk UI and why the new one has problems.

NGL, I'm pretty... shocked to say the least, that this new UI was pushed into release despite it's glaring very basic design flaws and the universal negative feedback (and no, thos feedbacks aren't just the usual fear of change that people have).

I get that your explanation is that you wanted for everyone to play it to get their actual hands on experience, so here's mine : It's legitimately way, WAY worst than what I thought it would turn out to be just by watching streamers using it.

The new informations it provides (hook counter and portraits) are good, but the way the UI has been fragmented and scattered across the screen is baffling bad and feel very amateurish to say the least. What happened here? How could have have got validated and pushed into production then released without anyone noticing how bad it was?

It contain 2 MAJOR and very BASIC design flaws.

First is the way everything is scattered for no reason on the screen, thus forcing the player eyes to jump all across the screen just to be able to access the situation, which create an insanely bad experience for any players during a chase (or just in general tbh).

It's especially bad when you realize that the previous UI got its layout perfectly right.

What information do you need to access the game state?

The number of generators, the number of Hooks, the health states of the survivors, your ability/object state, your status, the presence of any effect related to perks or addons (Thanatophobia, Prove Thy Self, etc etc), your perks state/cooldowns, the action score (bold, hit, killer blinded etc etc) and the action prompts (use skill, repair, etc etc).

The previous UI managed to pack everything in 2 big groups, by basically having everything related to the sate of the game on the bottom left, everything related to your current status as a player on the bottom right and with the actions at the center of the screen.

On the other hand the new UI did the exact opposite, it split the information as much as possible, dragging the generator on the very topt, and made it smaller, and added the very unnecessary "REMAINING" word next to it, thus not only making it less readable, accessible and more cluttered at the same time (quite a feat, ngl).

Then it moved the survivors health states on the top left, stacked vertically, with their name and hook counter on the side (I'll get back to that point in a bit).

They new display the survivors portraits, which is a welcomed addition that give the players an information they had to tab out to get before, but the way they did it is kinda clumsy and goes against the very unified style of the rest of the UI, a way to avoid that woud have been the way Yogerman1997 showed on another post:

The real problem comes from the way it displays the survivor status and how it's not only inconsistent and not very easily readable.

A wounded survivor has its head basked in red light and covered with a red and white scratch. The problem is, that red scratch is distractedly bad and don't really match with the rest of the UI style. I think it mainly comes from the fact that it's a pretty messy amalgam of 2 colors rather than a simple solid shame of a single color (like the obsession claws around the survivor portrait.

Then comes the downed, sacrified, killed and hooked survivor status that totally remove the portrait, thus creating a pretty strange inconsistency, and removing some information (not the most useful one, but still).

Thos status could have been displayed by having an icon either over the portrait (like the scratch) or on its side (where the names are currently).

And speaking of the names, there's no reason for them to not stay horizontally centered under the portraits like they used to be, it would reduce the overall space taken by that UI block.

I also want to raise what I think is another problem here (but it could be just a matter of preference): I do not think the way the number of hooks next to the survivor portraits is the most logical.

I tend (and most people I talk too seem to be of the same opinion) to think of the hooks as some kind of health meter. How many "hook" do I have left before dying. Not how many time did I got hooked.

For some reason I think it would have made more sens if survivors started with thos marks and lose them after each hooks (like you lose a life) rather than having them show up to indicated the number of time you got hooked... But that's probably just a question of preference I suppose.

The fact that this block is so far up and left, far away from your item/skill and at the opposite of your build/status is making sure that the player eyes will have to do the maximum amount of movement to gather the information they need, and this is a very basic and obvious UI mistake.

Then as previously mentioned you get your item/skill at the bottom left, alone, and bigger, probably way too big for its own good, with the item/skill charge meter on the far left of the screen while the useless add-ons are lined horizontally on its right.

This means that the add-ons, the most pointless information you could need at any moment in the game ar closer to the center of the screen than the actual useful information of the state of your item/skill. What makes it worst is that instead of having the two add-on stacked vertically next to the item/skill to have them use the same height than it, they are now lined horizontally, bigger (but not as big as the item/add-on), which mean they take now way, WAY more space.

To this I want to as a simple question: Why?

Why not having the add-ons stacked like in the previous UI? Why not having them on the left to push the skill/item closer to the center of the screen and improving the overall flow of the UI?

Then comes the bottom right with the perks, not much change there, except the fact that, like the rest of the UI, they are now bigger and further away from the border of the screen, creating an overall feeling of extreme UI clutter that reminded me of a mobile game.

Why is everything so big, and more importantly, why is it so far from the screen border?

And last but not least, the action score, that somehow migrated all the way to the top right side of the screen, alone, which mean that if you want to take a glimpse to what score you got, you'll have to look away from the rest of the UI and the game itself, and you'll have to do it fast, since thos things don't stick around for long.

Again, here's a simple question : Why?

Why did that element needed to be pushed so far away from the rest, especially when it's in the category of UI that should seen by the player but not looked for (like the damage numbers in a RPG).

So yeah, here it is, here's a detailed account of the UI change of why they are a failure overall.

A simple feedback on how to fix it is sadly insultingly simple :

Got back to the previous layout.

The old bottom left block was almost perfect, it stacked the survivors horizontally with their name under it, had the number of generator left (without the need of a word, just an icon) present and appropriately big, with the skill/item next to it, with the add-ons appropriately small and stacked vertically. And on top of that you had the action score lined on top of it.

It was extremely efficient and was just missing the number of hooks and the airport of the survivors, both things that could have easily been added to that block without the need to break it apart.

If you really wanted to improve that layout, looking into bringing useful elements at the bottom center of the screen like the item/skill under the current action possibles would have been a decent lead to explore.

Breaking the UI apart to scatter it on each corner of the screen on the other hand is objectively the worst possible idea you could have.

I'm not the type to whine about my condition, but I don't have the best eyes ever (an optic muscle problem), and having to constantly zoom them everywhere across the screen is legitimately giving me head-hacks, and it seems that I'm not the only one in that case.

I strongly suggest to the devs to look into some eye tracking test for their UI (and run test with it on the old UI) to see what the new one is forcing people to do compared to what they had to do before.