TGDM

I know I haven't really played in a while but... Several people linked me this thread and I am just ??? The first question you should ask yourself when designing the UI is if the information on the screen delivers necessary information to the user. If you were to look at a Relic selection screen and all you saw was a grid of Nx3 of the same exact icon +/- a few with varied levels of refinement, would you know which Relic was which? Would you be able to quickly select the one you want for your mission? What information can the user get out of the current screen? What information should they be able to get? On PC, the search bar solves a lot of those problems. On consoles I hope it helps a bit too, though it's definitely more annoying to input text with a gamepad than a keyboard. Item labels off by default is ridiculous. Like, even as you claimed in the OP that you question it 90% of the time then try to play it off as if yeah no big deal I play with them off teehee... What the hell? And now stuff like the end of mission screen having a big ol' wallpaper image for the sole purpose of eating up space so that information about your drops and rewards get obfuscated behind scroll menus (with item labels turned off, of course). Who is the interface made for? Who tested out these UI elements and liked it? Isn't a crucial part of a loot-based game the ability to determine your loot? Are you relying on the gameplay loop of rewards obtained during the mission to be more satisfying than the tally at the end? Seriously, I can't make out what the design goal is here. Aside from trying to do something visually different/novel for the sake of doing so. Some items work for iconography and some don't. Some items have rather unique images which you learn to associate with over time. If you've been playing for a while, you know how to identify the Argon resource image and don't necessarily need a label for that. Makes sense. It stands out because it's different. But then you have items which share icons or are only vaguely distinguishable from one another. Items which are different in name and name alone. In an inventory-management type of game like Path of Exile it makes sense to hide the stats until you mouse over something, but resource accumulation is something you need to tangibly understand. Imagine if all of the T1 and T16 maps in PoE all used the same icons. No differentiation in color, symbols, texture, framing... Nothing. That's what the Warframe UI is like. The design philosophy seems to be painfully rooted in some kind of form over function mismatch. But criticizing is easy, creating is hard I guess. There are so many good examples from recent years in how to do UI design which can be visually pleasing and still delightfully functional. They don't have to be mutually exclusive. There's also no mention at all in here about the limitations of UI design in Warframe. How many interfaces are treated as objects rather than UI elements (multiple scaling and foreground issues), how some features can actually be affected by gameplay physics (velocity can throw the menu, knockdowns can shut down the menu as you try to open/pause), how different gameplay states (warframe/operator/archwing) have different UI interactions as well (ranging from activating objects to opening maps). Hell, how we're still missing a lot of core functionality with keyboard shortcuts like the good old ctrl+a, shift+end, or ctrl+backspace/arrow keys. How inputting text and then adding a movement input as soon as you hit enter will attach that movement input to the end of your submitted text line.w The UI was not ever Warframe's strong suit. It was always just a "good enough" solution which let you get to the core gameplay loop of shooter fun. A lot of changes have been made in the past few years to put more emphasis on perpetual reward systems for longer term grinds. Obfuscating / hiding information to help players tangibly track their progress seems like it will have the adverse effect of making their runs feel less rewarding, that it's more of a chore to track your progress than it is to measure how far you've come. I know that this post is just a vain effort of catharsis. I've only really seen DE respond directly to hyperbolic negativity in terms of actually making changes. Memes have a better chance of invoking a positive change than constructive criticism. It's just kind of depressing to see things go even further along the path that pushed my interest out of the game. anyways tl;dr: I look forward to the eventual UI update which removes the names of mods from the mod card drops :^)