Feldon Rothgar has posted some additional thoughts and clarifications about the new User Interface facelift for EQ2 in Game Update 57 on the EQ2 Forums. After the jump…
Since there will undoubtedly be a lot of discussion around GU57 and the UI changes make up a decent chunk of the update, I wanted to start a thread specifically for feedback about the user-interface.
Please keep this thread dedicated to user-interface changes and I will be happy to answer questions about our intent and listen to your ideas and suggestions.
Please keep this in mind. The user-interface is an area of the game where you’ll have about as many different opinions as we have players. There’s no way to create a “perfect” UI in the eyes of everyone and this is why we have an awesome modding community. Prior to this update there were lots of people who preferred third-party UI’s and we fully expect as many or more to continue using them. We expect some of you to like the new changes over the old and expect many to prefer the old changes over the new.
That said, I’ll respond to a few comments I’ve already seen posted.
Character Window
The Persona and Inventory windows have been combined into a new “Character” window. This will make it easier to swap gear while viewing your stats. The overall size of the new window is not much bigger than the old windows. We remapped Crouch so we could use “C” for this window since it just makes sense. We removed the default keybindings of “I” and “P” just to clean things up. So if you want to continue using those keys, you’ll have to remap them yourself.
XP Bar
The new XP bar is not for everyone, we understand that. Our UI always lacked some sort of anchor element which resulted in a lot of floating windows. Third-party UI’s have created top and bottom anchor bars for awhile now. We decided that we wanted to create an anchor like this for the default UI. The XP bar has been designed to snap to the top or the bottom of the screen, or you can keep it centered in the screen below your hotbars. As with any window, you can always hide this window completely if you don’t care to see it. We expect our modding community to come out with all kinds of cool replacements for this bar, anywhere from minimal anchor bars filled with stats to other crazy things we probably aren’t thinking of. The nice thing is that they can make use of the snapping functionality thats built into the bar and I can’t wait to see what people come up with.
Hotbars
The hotbars have a new grab handle on the right side to balance out the spinners on the left. If you hide the spinner, the grab bar will hide as well.
Mini-Map / Compass / Clock
The mini-map now has a clock built in and indicators for your compass directions. Our goal was to minimize some clutter by removing the floating compass and clock windows. If you like your mini-map plain, you can hide the new clock elements by adjusting the frame and titlebar opacity. We left the compass in the game for those of you that want it but don’t want to keep your minimap up. However, we did remove the clock window permanently.
Tutorials
The new tutorial windows are designed to help players that are new to MMO’s as well as players from other games to quickly learn the basics of gameplay in EQII. If you start a lot of alts and don’t want to see these, they can be disabled under Options -> User Interface -> Game Features.
If you start a new character, you’ll notice that the UI is very clean now and we hope that this will be more appealing to new players. We’ve tried to make the UI as customizable as possible so our veteran players can continue to play in a way that they enjoy. In addition to the in-game customization, we hope to see lots of cool add-ons from the modding community.
I look forward to hearing more of your feedback and hope you’ll enjoy some of these changes.