Yep, and use color to indicate if it's better or not. So you can keep the section of the UI which shows how derived stats are calculated (what a lot of us want), but also use color to show what is changed in comparison and if it's better or not (which Beamdog wants).
Right. We do that now, in fact, so you know it's possible. I'm not sure how easy it would be to highlight the modifiers, though, instead of just the final stat.
Aye, which is why I ultimately suggested a win-win for all with a toggle switch between new and old. If the devs are still saying that this can't be swapped on the fly in-game, then how about a complete different .exe that we could run that have the different UI's in place? Give these games 'launchers' that run first and let us choose from which one we want to play.
This sort of functionality exists and as we can see from the differing Beta/Vanilla versions on steam - it's quite possible for this to occur simultaneously. I personally wouldn't care about anything pertaining to save game compatibility as I wouldn't ever want to swap over to the new one anyway.
Just a thought and an idea, since the devs still at this point seem pretty adamant about forcibly making these changes on my behalf without even asking for my consent.
Or since this new interface is so much more modifiable and the community should be able to mod the "new skin" UI to look like the "old skin" we're so fond of, how about the new UI come with the "old skin" as default built upon the new UI framework. You can also provide the current "new skin" for those who like it and to demonstrate to modders how to modify the UI in the new framework.
Aye, which is why I ultimately suggested a win-win for all with a toggle switch between new and old. If the devs are still saying that this can't be swapped on the fly in-game, then how about a complete different .exe that we could run that have the different UI's in place? Give these games 'launchers' that run first and let us choose from which one we want to play.
This sort of functionality exists and as we can see from the differing Beta/Vanilla versions on steam - it's quite possible for this to occur simultaneously. I personally wouldn't care about anything pertaining to save game compatibility as I wouldn't ever want to swap over to the new one anyway.
Just a thought and an idea, since the devs still at this point seem pretty adamant about forcibly making these changes on my behalf without even asking for my consent.
The problem with multiple EXE files/versions is that it creates code duplicity, increasing the amount of work to change UI related things.
You also have the problem with how do you run an exe differently on iOS.
Im actually curious how the new system runs on iOS, even know I have never play it on there.
One way to get around it may be to add at least temporally in the same section where we have the 2.0 beta opt-in add a 1.3 op-in which essentially lets you play the old patch with old menu once 2.0 goes live. Sure you wont get any of the bug fixes or new classes and it wont let you play SoD. But people can at least play with the old menus then turn off the opt-in as there going into SoD. Not a perfect solution but would at least fix the issue of people being forced to update on steam.
I suggest this as it sounds like that even if Beamdog says right now "we are changing it" it will most likely not be there on release and would be a patch later on. So basically its a band-aid to keep people happy until such patch arrives.
Updated: Changed ISO to iOS... lol xD thanks @Franpa
Truth be told I didn't even think of or consider mobile devices. I'm a PC gamer through and through and can't even imagine trying to play these games on a touch, considering how frequently and second nature all the keyboard shortcuts and commands and hotkeys are to me.
You also have the problem with how do you run an exe differently on ISO.
Im actually curious how the new system runs on ISO, even know I have never play it on there.
One way to get around it may be to add at least temporally in the same section where we have the 2.0 beta opt-in add a 1.3 op-in which essentially lets you play the old patch with old menu once 2.0 goes live. Sure you wont get any of the bug fixes or new classes and it wont let you play SoD. But people can at least play with the old menus then turn off the opt-in as there going into SoD. Not a perfect solution but would at least fix the issue of people being forced to update on steam.
I suggest this as it sounds like that even if Beamdog says right now "we are changing it" it will most likely not be there on release and would be a patch later on. So basically its a band-aid to keep people happy until such patch arrives.
I finally got a chance to play a couple hours with the beta, and I have to say my opinion of the new inventory is further improved by it. That table and its comparisons turned out to actually be a really nice addition. I love seeing the easy comparison of the most meaningful stats when I pick up a new item. If anything, the one suggestion I would have is to add a row for APR rather than hiding it in the damage (I think?) tooltip. It took me a bit to find it, and APR deserves to be top level info. I can't say that I miss the jumbled text boxes of substats (that don't have any actual game effect other than adding up to the numbers that are shown) at all.
I didn't notice any lag, though my PC is built for modern games and therefore pretty powerful. I'm also not really a fan of the way items stick to the mouse cursor when you pick them up now (they used to center under the cursor, but now you grab whatever part you clicked), but that's super minor.
Other than that, regarding the flavor, it's actually not as bad in game as it appears in the screenshots in my opinion. It didn't really bother me much at all. That said, adding some visual flourish back to it would still be very welcome.
And so we learn - once again - ui is for using, not for looking and assuming ... Add some style, consider proposals for improvement (but not plain revisionism on the base of being used to bad only) and let it be a real 2.0 that way.
The differences are pretty apparent to me. Feels like a lot of wasted space on the new UI (and I liked having the AC/HP/Thaco/Dmg #s in more visually distinctive slots rather than just squares).
There are UI changes to the other screens, but this specific thread is about the inventory screen only, and we've been asked to stay on topic. There are other threads about the Spellbook/Record/Save screens elsewhere, and about opinions on all the changes overall.
Another minor flavor I had not noticed till we side-by-side them, but the flavorful color for your gold has turned into another bland white. Little things, but they all add up.
[edit] also worth noting that the comparison above is not quite ideal as you are comparing a sorcerer full of kit, with a fighter out of candle keep who therefore gets 4 weapon slots, but the comparison is otherwise good.
As someone who has been looking forward tho this for awhile...I really hope yhose UI screens are not representitive of the quality of the rest of the game because they look...terrible.
Totally loses all charm of the previous UI, the big empty blocky spaces around the text in the upper right corner just feels really uninspired and amatuer. Im not against the function and indeed it sounds like some great ideas but the design is really poor. Some mock ups here are an incredibly huge improvement. The character screen in paticular has some mock ups that are 100x better than the official one. This all screams iphone/ipad functionality and has the same damage as the final fantasy Ios games with horrible UI's and actually lost sales on PC because of it.
I actually think I will keep BGEE,BGIIEE and IWDEE unpatched for the meantime, even as an IOS user I don't think I can suffer that design when the current ones do a good job of increasing functionality and keeping the taste of the original.
Everybody who thought that Character screen and Inventory Screen looked acceptable should really sit down and ask how they can improve quality control because this look would have been shot down in a college graphic design class and picked apart for all it's problem. Really poor show.
As someone who has been looking forward tho this for awhile...I really hope yhose UI screens are not representitive of the quality of the rest of the game because they look...terrible.
Personally I don't doubt the game itself will be fantastic. Sure not everyone is happy with the UI but the gameplay and story are really what we are all here for. Time will tell but im pretty confident that overall it will be a wonderful experience
Beamdog's problem - what I've come to realize has always been Beamdog's problem, right from the start - is that they insist on spending time, effort and resources making changes nobody asked for. There was no great outcry to nerf the assassin and blackguard, or to change the fonts, or to add sprite outlines and colored selection rings. Rather than ask players if such changes would be at all welcome, the devs commit to them and then are dumbfounded when reception is lukewarm (and that's being generous). So now they get to waste even more time, effort and resources backtracking and trying to find a comfortable middle between the changes they want to make and the threshold players are unwilling to cross, while cutting the corners that actually matter.
Beamdog's problem - what I've come to realize has always been Beamdog's problem, right from the start - is that they insist on spending time, effort and resources making changes nobody asked for. There was no great outcry to nerf the assassin and blackguard, or to change the fonts, or to add sprite outlines and colored selection rings. Rather than ask players if such changes would be at all welcome, the devs commit to them and then are dumbfounded when reception is lukewarm (and that's being generous). So now they get to waste even more time, effort and resources backtracking and trying to find a comfortable middle between the changes they want to make and the threshold players are unwilling to cross, while cutting the corners that actually matter.
@shawne ... We have a fierce incompatibility on many things about the EEs with you.
But the reaction of this forum on the new UI and some balance changes make me think that there's some truth in your words, quoted by @Flashburn here.
Beamdog's problem - what I've come to realize has always been Beamdog's problem, right from the start - is that they insist on spending time, effort and resources making changes nobody asked for. There was no great outcry to nerf the assassin and blackguard, or to change the fonts, or to add sprite outlines and colored selection rings. Rather than ask players if such changes would be at all welcome, the devs commit to them and then are dumbfounded when reception is lukewarm (and that's being generous). So now they get to waste even more time, effort and resources backtracking and trying to find a comfortable middle between the changes they want to make and the threshold players are unwilling to cross, while cutting the corners that actually matter.
I will speak up for the devs on this point. They want to make the game better. If you make incremental small changes, over time you can smooth out and tweak an existing experience, but if you want to make it fundamentally better, sometimes you need to take big risks, and make big changes. Steve Jobs was the most obvious example of someone who understood that you don't make great products by asking your customers what they want, because they haven't seen your grand vision yet. If you want to make a significant improvement in something, you need to take bold, big risks.
You also need to deliver a coherent vision, so the new thing supplants the old in the audience mind, and unless you are truly inspired, it will take a lot of work, feedback, and many iterations to tune the new experience just-so. Apple were in a special position that they possessed a good group of folks with a strong sense of aesthetic that allowed them to do all that iteration in-house, so the first you see is the final vision. BeamDog are inviting us into that feedback process with the public betas - although clearly the vision is mostly complete at this point.
As I said elsewhere, I welcome the bold initiative - I just hope we can invest the necessary feedback loops to deliver a vision that the larger player community shares. (And it is always hard to judge the community as a whole, when we mostly hear for a small sampling of loud voices, my own included )
I'd also like to bring up that we already have a grand vision: the one from Bioware. And, granted, not always, but sometimes, when Beamdog asserts their own vision, it tramples the original one. With each change that's not quite an enhancement, with every frivolous decision that alters something about the original game arbitrarily, the original vision becomes more obscured, and less grand.
But biowares vision was not perfect either - it was based on good ideas, paradigms that existed in their time, and a time table to get those games easy and out. I don't say what they did was bad, but it was far from a perfect piece of art where every stroke added would make it worse. That's not too wildly draw on that painting now with whatever falls in beamdogs hands, but it's not that the painting must stay untouched because it was Mona Lisa.
To further use your example, neither is the Mona Lisa a perfect painting. Yet, I don't think many of us would support the decision for the painting's current caretaker to start adding their own brushstrokes to it, to make it "better", even if they were a very skilled and respected artist.
They can, however, make sure that the painting is kept in a dry and well-protected place, and that the lighting in the room is perfect for the visitors to get maximum enjoyment out of the work of art that's being displayed.
But wouldn't that be what was left of the games when bioware abandoned them with their last patch? Enhanced edition means to enhance something, not conserve or restaurate it. (We are overstretching the metapher of a painting already ... Of course "enhancing" a painting is nothing anyone would do)
Yep, that's where the metaphor fails. Regardless, I want to get my original point across, because the goalposts seem to keep moving: the Enhanced Editions should be "enhanced". They could even be "added to". They should not be "changed" or "subtracted from".
What is and what isn't an "enhancement" is, of course, subjective. Which is why Beamdog should take special care to make sure that what they're doing isn't diminishing the experience of those who play their games, a lot of whom also seem to care about the original vision laid out by Bioware.
Beamdog have, in the past, referred to themselves as "curators". Arbitrarily making changes that do not fall within the purview of bugs/glitches is not curation. That's how you end up with this:
What's next, nerfing the Inquisitor's innate Dispel Magic because it's too OP and takes out mage enemies too quickly?
Just to point out, the information break-downs that people are talking about wanting back aren't a feature of the original games; they're a part of the Enhanced Edition's original release. So it may be a little disingenuous to point to the new Inventory screen layout as a sign of something that's been "subtracted" from the original games. You can't subtract something that wasn't there to begin with.
That being said, this is still all good discussion. My only caution would be to keep it in the realm of the practical. Less grand-standing and analogy, more presenting of points.
Comments
If the devs are still saying that this can't be swapped on the fly in-game, then how about a complete different .exe that we could run that have the different UI's in place?
Give these games 'launchers' that run first and let us choose from which one we want to play.
This sort of functionality exists and as we can see from the differing Beta/Vanilla versions on steam - it's quite possible for this to occur simultaneously.
I personally wouldn't care about anything pertaining to save game compatibility as I wouldn't ever want to swap over to the new one anyway.
Just a thought and an idea, since the devs still at this point seem pretty adamant about forcibly making these changes on my behalf without even asking for my consent.
Everyone is happy!
Im actually curious how the new system runs on iOS, even know I have never play it on there.
One way to get around it may be to add at least temporally in the same section where we have the 2.0 beta opt-in add a 1.3 op-in which essentially lets you play the old patch with old menu once 2.0 goes live. Sure you wont get any of the bug fixes or new classes and it wont let you play SoD. But people can at least play with the old menus then turn off the opt-in as there going into SoD. Not a perfect solution but would at least fix the issue of people being forced to update on steam.
I suggest this as it sounds like that even if Beamdog says right now "we are changing it" it will most likely not be there on release and would be a patch later on. So basically its a band-aid to keep people happy until such patch arrives.
Updated: Changed ISO to iOS... lol xD thanks @Franpa
I didn't notice any lag, though my PC is built for modern games and therefore pretty powerful. I'm also not really a fan of the way items stick to the mouse cursor when you pick them up now (they used to center under the cursor, but now you grab whatever part you clicked), but that's super minor.
Other than that, regarding the flavor, it's actually not as bad in game as it appears in the screenshots in my opinion. It didn't really bother me much at all. That said, adding some visual flourish back to it would still be very welcome.
Where are other's screens? I remember seeing something that looked like a handbook but couldn't remember now.
[edit] also worth noting that the comparison above is not quite ideal as you are comparing a sorcerer full of kit, with a fighter out of candle keep who therefore gets 4 weapon slots, but the comparison is otherwise good.
Totally loses all charm of the previous UI, the big empty blocky spaces around the text in the upper right corner just feels really uninspired and amatuer. Im not against the function and indeed it sounds like some great ideas but the design is really poor. Some mock ups here are an incredibly huge improvement. The character screen in paticular has some mock ups that are 100x better than the official one. This all screams iphone/ipad functionality and has the same damage as the final fantasy Ios games with horrible UI's and actually lost sales on PC because of it.
I actually think I will keep BGEE,BGIIEE and IWDEE unpatched for the meantime, even as an IOS user I don't think I can suffer that design when the current ones do a good job of increasing functionality and keeping the taste of the original.
Everybody who thought that Character screen and Inventory Screen looked acceptable should really sit down and ask how they can improve quality control because this look would have been shot down in a college graphic design class and picked apart for all it's problem. Really poor show.
But the reaction of this forum on the new UI and some balance changes make me think that there's some truth in your words, quoted by @Flashburn here.
You also need to deliver a coherent vision, so the new thing supplants the old in the audience mind, and unless you are truly inspired, it will take a lot of work, feedback, and many iterations to tune the new experience just-so. Apple were in a special position that they possessed a good group of folks with a strong sense of aesthetic that allowed them to do all that iteration in-house, so the first you see is the final vision. BeamDog are inviting us into that feedback process with the public betas - although clearly the vision is mostly complete at this point.
As I said elsewhere, I welcome the bold initiative - I just hope we can invest the necessary feedback loops to deliver a vision that the larger player community shares. (And it is always hard to judge the community as a whole, when we mostly hear for a small sampling of loud voices, my own included
They can, however, make sure that the painting is kept in a dry and well-protected place, and that the lighting in the room is perfect for the visitors to get maximum enjoyment out of the work of art that's being displayed.
Enhanced edition means to enhance something, not conserve or restaurate it. (We are overstretching the metapher of a painting already ... Of course "enhancing" a painting is nothing anyone would do)
What is and what isn't an "enhancement" is, of course, subjective. Which is why Beamdog should take special care to make sure that what they're doing isn't diminishing the experience of those who play their games, a lot of whom also seem to care about the original vision laid out by Bioware.
What's next, nerfing the Inquisitor's innate Dispel Magic because it's too OP and takes out mage enemies too quickly?
That being said, this is still all good discussion. My only caution would be to keep it in the realm of the practical. Less grand-standing and analogy, more presenting of points.