Dev Discussion #36 - User Interface

In my opinion, the greatest UI/HUD I've ever experienced was in Metroid Prime . Now, this is a First Person Adventure game rather than an MMO, of course, but I feel a lot of the basic elements would work great in Ashes. So to break down what I like:

The icons on the bottom-right represent every primary weapon type in the game; the one you have active is in the center, and the other three are permanently visible in their slots after you unlock them. Swapping from one weapon to another is done in a single button press (in this specific case, flicking the C-stick in a given direction, since this was a Gamecube game), and every icon has a clear visual distinction that makes it easy to track via peripheral vision, minimizing cognitive load and making it easier to develop proper muscle memory.

The bar with the "135" and the icon next to it is your total amount of missiles, a secondary weapon accessible at all times. The bar will deplete relative to your missile percentage in addition to the number going down - I like having both a number and a bar visible, but the important thing here is that the number is independent of the bar instead of being 'inside' of it like we've seen in Ashes; in my opinion that method just makes both the bar and the number hard to parse, whereas in Metroid Prime it is quite easy to gauge.

Importantly, the missile count is positioned to the left of the bar, which puts it closer to the center of the HUD; this makes it easier to track the number with peripheral vision, and the number + icon actually drift closer to the weapon icons on the bottom as you run low on missiles, giving your brain more opportunities to track it intense fights. While it's not shown in this screenshot, there is also an unobtrusive "Missiles Low" warning that will come up below the missile icon in a yellow-orange color, when you are below roughly 10% of your ammo.

On the lower-left side of the screen are all of the visors (UI overlays) you can choose, and the same elements apply here as with weapon selection; every icon has a distinct shape from the others (though I find the lack of distinct colors makes these a bit inferior to the weapon icons), and it's as easy as pressing a single button. Either way, I appreciate having all potential options visible from the same UI menu, and I appreciate all of the icons clearly standing out; this made developing the muscle memory for switching between, for example, standard vision, thermal vision, and X-ray vision on the fly very easy.

Obviously, in Ashes we aren't playing as someone in hi-tech space armor who has a bunch of cool visual modes to use, but I like the idea of 'support' abilities and 'offensive' abilities being clearly grouped into their own sections; this makes it easier to compartmentalize which buttons do what, and the closely grouped nature of the buttons (in this case, the Gamecube controller's D-pad and C-stick) minimizes cumbersome hand movement in stressful situations.

This could apply to keyboard setups too; I play a heavily modded Skyrim install with my keyboard, and I specifically have all my combat-oriented hotkeys bunched very close to my WASD keys to minimize hand movement. Hotkeys that are less time-intensive, such as opening the map or the equipment menu, are bunched off on a different section of my keyboard nearer to my mouse-hand, and any buttons I anticipate having to hold down for a long period (such as the sprint button) are partitioned to some keys on my gaming mouse.

Essentially, I'm really lazy and want every possible option clearly accessible and easy to track, which made playing Metroid Prime an absolute pleasure. As for some of the other UI elements I like here...

The orange stuff on the upper-right corner of the screen is the mini-map, and that exact choice of location and coloration means that it takes your eyes a bit to move to that location on your screen, but if you specifically want to look at the mini-map, it stands out easily. This, in my opinion, is the best possible setup for mini-maps, which I have found needlessly obtrusive in pretty much any other implementation. I find that I don't actually need to reference mini-maps THAT often and mostly just use them to make sure I haven't gotten lost, or to find an exit to an area quickly, so for me Metroid Prime's mini-map has exactly the right amount of screen and color real-estate.

The Energy bar on the top is your health, with the little blocks representing "total health bars". Note again that the bar is positioned towards the center of the screen, making it much easier to track with peripheral vision, while also being large enough to get a detailed assessment with a quick upward glance if you need.

The circular indicator on the upper-left is an enemy radar; while at first glance the position of this radar might seem a bit too out-of-the-way, enemies will show up as vivid red-orange dots that, again, stand out easily in peripheral vision, and in my experience this is enough information to work well in tandem with hearing, to gauge where enemies are.

Given the limited amount of abilities/hotkeyable things characters will have in Ashes, I feel this type of setup would work rather well, and would love to see something like it in future updates

Overall Ashes of creation has a fairly minimal and customizable ui. It should stay around the lines of what was in Alpha. However, after thinking about it quite a bit, I have come to the conclusion that Ashes would be best served breaking the mold of the modern mmo ui by taking pointers from Minecraft's UI in 2 key ways.

The first change should be to the positioning of the health and mana meter to the bottom of the screen, just above the hot bar in a very minimal lowkey fashion. Minecraft is a game who's highest zone of activity is concentrated on the cross hair and it really excels on keeping the relevant information close to the zone of activity by having hearts (health) and haunches (stamina but could easily be replaced with mana). Ashes similarly plans on making the crosshair a possible main combat focus point and will have many reasons to interface in this mode. A lot of the user attention will be fairly close to the center of the screen. Keeping health and mana managed is an important skill in an mmo, that will be all the more pressed upon by the fact that anyone can join the fray at any time. Taking away your attention from the center of combat increases the difficulty of management artificially and can lead to a lot of needless strain and less awareness of enemies surrounding you. This also frees up ui space on the top left corner to fit ashes higher party count without cluttering the middle left of the screen. No one wants obstruction from the party information, but making the party info smaller than it already is will just leave to needless physical strain.

The second change should be to the inventory ui. Minecraft's equip and inventory ui is flawlessly simple, clean, and easy to intuitively understand. As Ashes' currently stands the inventory and equipment ui is separate, despite the fact that you need to interact with the 'character sheet' ui as a separate window in order to change your equips. In Minecraft every slot for the equipment matches up with where it is on the body, and it's all accessible in the same menu. If you really needed to switch to an item outside your main hotbar on short notice, you can easily have things set up so that you can quickly switch items out at a given notice, and there are shortcuts for quickly swapping out equipment to the relevant slot.

Ashes desperately needs something similar. As it currently stands in the Alpha equipment and inventory are separate windows. This would be ok in a standard mmo, however, Ashes has plans for having the ability to switch weapons in combat while also having a small hotbar compared to other MMO's. This means that making equip changes needs to be accessible in the same menu or user frustration will be quite high. I understand the desire for the 'character sheet' to display your equipment info, and for that info to be juxtaposed to the current equipment and character appearance so you can get a good visceral connection between stats and gear built u. But Ashes needs a similar screen that has your character, the equip-able slots, and your available inventory on the same window for simplicity and function sake.

It also needs the equip slots to better match up where they are equipped relative to the character. This is a somewhat challenging fix in the current layout, but still doable if you change the order of equipment slots and where the weapon and secondary weapon slots are located. First of all move the gloves and the waist slot to the left half of the equip area. Then move up the accessory slots to the very top of the left hand area of the equip ui sliding your main weapon, then ranged, then shield slots vertically as if they were any other equip slot, Now that you have more room at the bottom, the right hand side of the ui can therefore go in this order of slots: Head, shoulders, torso, arms, gloves, waist, legs, feet. From there all you need to do is scale the equip slots to be closer to the size of the accessory slots. This gives you a much cleaner and understandable order of gear that minimizes fumbling around. It also has the side benefit of making the weapon and shield slots close to the right edge of the equip screen such that if you had a ui window like the character sheet with your inventory slots you could easily place your secondary weapons in the inventory slots closest to the equipped slots for ease of drag and drop if need be.