Controller UX is still significantly behind what it was a year ago

[(PSN)EmperorLeachicus]

So, it’s been just over a year since the virtual cursor was introduced to consoles/controller users as a whole.

Despite most of these problems being present since the addition of the new UI, they have not yet been addressed or fixed, so I thought I’d bring them up here again. Some of these are bugs that need to be fixed, but some are also features that have been highly requested and not included, or included when they are not beneficial, so I thought I’d post this as feedback rather than a bug report. Here are just a few issues with the new UI/UX:

- You still can’t scroll using the D-pad alone. On any other game, including Warframe before this UI, if you are navigating between options with the D-pad and you reach the bottom of the screen, it scrolls. In Warframe, the cursor hits the bottom of the screen and stops, meaning you have to awkwardly scroll with the right stick (which can be very imprecise, particularly on large screens like the Tennogen page of the market). This has been an issue since day one and was brought up several times in the virtual cursor feedback megathread, but to no avail.

 

-You still have to double-click on arcanes (and all Operator cosmetics) to select them. DE very quickly realised that clicking to preview an item (such as a frame or weapon) in the arsenal and then clicking again to equip it worked very poorly, so they separated the functions across two different buttons. Unfortunately, they only applied this to the main arsenal screen, and both Arcane selection and Operator cosmetics selection still do not have this feature.

 

-On the Operator customisation screen, none of the arrows beside slider bars work. This applies to the face blend bar and all bars on the sigil customisation, and leads into the next issue:

-None of the Operator customisation sliders can be clicked and dragged. Holding X (PS4) on the “handle” of the slider does absolutely nothing, instead the only way to move the slider is to click on a different part of the bar. You must also click far enough away from the “handle” to not click on it’s dead hitbox, meaning there is next to no precision in using the slider.

- The new market UI requires hover-over for Warframe and weapon stats, and separates them all into different areas, each of which has to be hovered over. This is drastically worse than the previous design, because now instead of having all information on screen at once, you can have at maximum 1/6 of the information you need. Also, bafflingly, you can’t seem a frame’s main stats (health/shield/armour etc.) unless you hover on the plat purchase button, which is not only unintuitive (since you wouldn’t click purchase until you’d already decided to buy the frame) but also inconvenient, as you can’t see the stats if you go straight to buying the blueprint. This means that on console/controller, you have to spend about a cumulative 30 seconds cursoring over each bit of information separately instead of just opening the page and having all info available. This wastes a lot of time and in my opinion should be reversed.

- Fortuna vendor item purchases have an arbitrary purchase button in front of them (I assume this applies to Cetus and syndicate purchases as well). When you click on an item, there is a purchase button. When you click that, there is the window where you select the quantity you want to buy, and a second purchase button to actually buy the item. The first purchase button in this screen is completely redundant and serves absolutely no use, it just wastes time.

- There is no longer an option to not use market discount vouchers. You used to have separate options for buying an item with or without a discount voucher in the market. Now, that feature is gone, meaning that if you want to buy a blueprint but you have a voucher, you have to waste the voucher on the blueprint price, or wait 3 days for it to expire.

- The dual colour channels for energy and emissive colour channels are so small and hard to hit with the controller cursor that I often hit the wrong one.

- L1/L2/R1/R2 shortcuts no longer work for increasing purchase quantities by 1/to max in menus such as nightwave Nora cred shop or syndicate offerings.

There may be other issues as well, but these are what I can remember off the top of my head.

 

Now, I could go on a long rant about how this UI is clearly not suitable for consoles, and how much slower the use of any menus has become in the last year, but I won’t, that wouldn’t be productive. At this point, I’d just settle for it actually working properly. (Just adding auto-scrolling with D-pad would make a world of difference for QoL and would bring the UI back to where it was previously). I love this game and I love you as devs, but this UI is becoming more and more frustrating to the point of making me far less enthusiastic about the game (I quit for about a month after its initial implementation, it was so frustrating/slow/tedious).

 

Please, DE

Edited June 16, 2019 by (PS4)EmperorLeachicus
Added quantity change shortcut issue