Why does everyone hate the new Ui?

I don't "hate" the new UI. That would be an overreaction.

But because everything is spread out all over the place, it is much harder for me to see information I want.

I play on a 50 inch monitor (4k resolution), and it was much easier to get information when most of the data was close together. Now some stuff is lower left, some left, some upper left, some top...all the way around like a giant wheel.

To me the purpose of a heads up display is to have information easily accessible. Searching all around for each different thing is less accessible than having it together.

Eyestrain from looking everywhere, icons like exhaustion is difficult to see on first glance.

It's not about "hating" the new UI, it's about expressing opinion that they shouldn't have changed something that never needed changing in the first place. Sure, the hook count & portraits are cool, but that's as far as it will get.

Nobody asked for a new UI.

That's not what I meant

A few minor changes such as the portraits & hook counter doesn't make a UI completely different. If anything, it's literally the same UI with a few quality-of-life improvements. Here's an example of what they should've done:

Instead, they moved the UI to a completely different spot for no reason other than it might look better. Many people including myself hate having to look at the tippy top of our screens just to see basic info. Not to mention, they made struggle/and mending timers almost impossible to see.

I'm not saying nobody asked for the small changes, I'm saying nobody wanted a completely new format. It was not necessary & could've remained the same with those few tweaks.

This new UI fiasco is honestly very interesting to the point that I plan to use it as an exemplar of 'Graphic Designer UI' for interface design courses.

Basically, its very visually flashy in a way that screams "I am a flashy UI," which is why you see this sort of thing a lot in fiction. Think how Ironman's helmet shots tend to have screens all over the place, it doesn't exist because that would be convenient for Tony Stark, it exists to tell you, the viewer, "Ironman is taking in a lot of information!'"

In real life however, good UI design is intended to be invisible and compact until you need it, at which point you can quickly see it and absorb the information from it. It takes up as much space as it needs to in order to be readable. Sometimes you want your UI to quickly update players so you have elements jutting into the 'main area' but usually this is done through color. This isn't really an 'opinion' or 'beauty is in the eyes of the beholder' thing: UI design has been a science for like 60 years at this point with ######### like Bell Labs or the US Airforce doing rigorous scientific experiments with both user fatigue and information retention/absorption, because as it turns out when we were making airplanes having stuff be quickly readable was important, and when we were making early phones misdials sucked. So we got really good at it real quick.

Lets take an example your likely looking at right now if your on windows, a very basic bit of UI you interact with so much you might forget its UI: The Taskbar! The taskbar is located very centrally on your screen SOMEWHERE, but you can choose where it is! Its most likely at the bottom, but some of you renegades like it at the sides or top. Doesn't matter, its ONLY in one place. It doesn't wrap around, because the point of the taskbar is to let you quickly glance down to see if any of your icons are lit up to say they need your attention, and to see what you have open. Icons are, on most screens, about the size of a fingernail these days, and most graphic designers for apps understand how to make a readable icon: Non-realistic stylized imagery usually with 3-4 colors and geometric shapes: You don't get any photos, you get a dark blue gradient circle with a white line going through it at that breaks at an angle for the steam logo, or an orange square with a semicircle in the center for your PDF reader. So I can mostly tell what I have open through shape and color. Less relevant information, like if a pinned thing is open or not, are smaller bits of information that are still visible but take up less space. For example, I can access my volume any time from my toolbar, which is a much smaller section of the screen because its rare I need to mess with sound settings compared to switching windows on apps I am using. It de-emphasizes redundant information too: I probably am aware I am connected to the internet in this day and age so that icon barely takes up any space and uses color more than its shape to denote a problem. There is a reason no one talks about windows 8: Centralized UIs that focus on readable iconography based on color and abstract shapes do so much better even microsoft couldn't force this one on anyone.

DBD does almost the opposite of good practice in every way. A good example is the perks and items: A LOT of screen real-estate is taken up by unimportant information like your own perks, which you shouldn't really need reminding about too often. Its also the information located at the least busy and most clearly read part of your screen in DBD: The bottom. There is a reason a LOT of UI designs focus action at the top or bottom rather than the sides, it intrudes on the 'focus' of your screen way less. Having ironman style ######### popping out from the corners of your eyes is a cool scifi visual but there is a reason basically no one does that and why popups from the 1990's were annoying as hell things no one liked for appearing there. It isn't bad the perks are there (especially as it is a cooldown timer) but its so weird they are dramatically larger than the information used to track gamestate that contains info you can ONLY get through the UI. Items fare little better. I get the item should be larger than its addons, but its SO much larger despite the item being visible on your character, when the addons aren't. And the fact that both items and perks are so much more vibrant, centralized, and in a more valuable part of the screen real estate than gamestate tracking is weird.

It also does stuff like using detailed photo (or CG, in this case) graphics that are harder to read than simple iconography, it de-emphasizes critical information like your borrowed time/deep wound timers, and it doesn't give you enough face to focus on important things like your peripheral vision in a game where seeing stuff in the corner of your screen is kinda HUGELY important. And in a videogame having UI low is also good because it makes it less likely its going to be floating over a rapidly changing background while your moving: sure it won't always be over a featureless ground but you get less jarring change that way. A lot of the information is conveyed through more muted colors which fit the game's aethestetic more in some ways but are a readability nightmare, and stuff like a circular bloodsplatter that can fade into muddy backgrounds is a lot less useful than a more stylized visible shape based alteration.

And then there is the basic stuff, like the items and perks not being correctly aligned. Its like... such a badly designed UI that if it wasn't real I would say it looks like an unrealistic textbook example. I get I care about this way more than other people because like... its my career and most people won't think of it this in depth, but the reason people tend to do things the same way in terms of usability design like UI is because those ways tend to not be ass for your consumer. People are talking about getting motion sick and that could certainly be true (Having some of the more immediately critical information in the top left where your likely going to get a lot of transitions over complicated backgrounds like tree branches, roofs, ruins, ect is going to definitely make some people woozy) it is far more likely the overly busy UI is just over-stimulating people. The average person doesn't have nuanced language to express why this UI sucks, but they know it sucks, and it stinks in a way that doesn't just make the product worse, but makes it physically unpleasant. If your UI is so bad that it is physically upsetting to use, people aren't going to use it.

And, 100%, people would complain about this UI if it was perfect. ANY time you make a change to your interface its going to piss people off: Reddit UI change, Google chrome, whatever, you actually DO need to let people sit with it because the reaction will ALWAYS be negative at first. But holy crap this is so bad that, again, I literally plan to print this out as a handout for how not to do a UI.

Just open any interface design textbook they are different than graphic design ones pleaaaaaaaaaase this is NOT a place you flex creativity. You flex creativity in stuff like the perk icons, which are beautiful and iconic, not in where stuff is on your screen.

Maybe a picture does help the sceptics to understand why people criticize the new UI