Several UI suggestions (with a bit of gameplay) for next patches/options/revisions
Hello. After several hours with the game, lots of suggestions to improve certain areas (specially menus and UI) have come to my mind. Hopefully most of these are quite easy to implement:
- Let's start with the main Pause screen. It's beautifully designed but not too comfortable. For quick accessibility, a wheel menu like in Dragon Age: Inquisition would be better (keeping the beautiful design of TW3, of course). Also, implementing button shortcuts in the menu could help (e.g: in pause menu, X button goes to inventory, Y = map, R2 = Alchemy, etc).
- The inventory menu is beautiful but, honestly, it's worse than in TW 2, which was already a bit cumbersome. The different categories (equipment, consumables...) make sense but are not specific enough. I would suggest to add several categories like oils, traps, subweapons, alcohols, and ALL, a category to see EVERYTHING you have on inventory.
Also, a 'SORT' option is needed, to sort inventory by time obtained, weight, cost, weight/cost, etc
The consumables that increase vitality need to show HOW MUCH vitality you can recover, not only how long the effect lasts.
- Scrolling through the different submenus (Inventory, map, etc) with LB/RB is not really intuitive or helpful. However, scrolling through the inventory categories WOULD BE very helpful. I'd love to have that changed or optional, honestly.
- The Alchemy menu would be faster to check if the categories where at both sides of the screen (so it's quicker to find and see the one you are looking for) and the details could simply appear at the bottom. Sounds like a minimal change, but everything related to 'speed and comfortability' in menus and UI is vital.
- And, finally for now, something VERY IMPORTANT in my opinion regarding combat: the menu wheel is unnecessarily slow and cumbersome having to press A button to confirm. Please add an option to change behaviour to holding the button and release on the option (like 90% of menu wheels do). It would be faster.
Another suggestions regarding the Wheel menu would be adding the option to change sword there (like a Sign). Not only would that be clearer, that would also free the left/right D-pad buttons to change signs in real time (I would love that addition and think it would be great).
- Also, before accessing meditation (both from the wheel menu or from the start menu) it would be very important to add a reminder of the alcoholest bottles you have remaining..
BTW, having different size icons in the equipment inventory looks a bit strange. Maybe the guys were planning to make also a 'space limitation' in the equipment inventory, so Geralt doesn't go around carrying 5 armors and 12 swords? If that's the case, would be a beautiful thing to recover in my opinion, making the game more realistic and serious (Geralt doesn't seem to me like the guy who would pick 20 cheap swords up from fallen enemies just to sell them for nothing at a shop).
What do you think, guys? More suggestions to add? Do you think it would be for the better, or worse?