I heard so many stories about players trying BDO first time and how bad their experience was because of immense amount of different shiny notifications everywhere, which distract the player and give irrelevant information-noise. Back then in 2017 i almost quit the game because of that reason, game felt cheap.
Feedback to turn off some of those notifications by default for new players is floating since many years and devs still didn't implement anything of it.
Here are very few ideas to start with:
1) Notifications. Turn off those spammy useless notifications (enhancement, sale queues) in the middle of screen by default already.
2) Top right corner. Remove most of those icons asap (keep only "Search" and "Progression/Battle Pass"). All other icons are just an old mess with no use for most of playerbase (some of those can be useful somewhere-somewhen, but such niche uses shouldn't clutter UI, put it it in ESC menu)
3) Top left corner. Consolidate all those icons. First few years there were few of them and it was fine, but now the amount is getting out of hand. There shoulnd't be anything besides Agris and Valuepack/Kama/Book, which can be again consolidated in a single "premium" icon with all needed information.
Look at New World, BDO needs something similar in terms of UI minimalism and new-player friendliness.
This was already suggested many times, and PA did not give af so faar.
Heck they only made it worse in the last year, by adding even more pointless clutter. Apparently their vision is turning their game into a shitty mobile game.
I wish I could vote for this more than once.
One of my IRL friends who tried BDO, quit almost immediately because the default user interface sucks. First impressions matter, and BDO's first impressions are like a cellphone game.
Gigantic attention-grabbing notifications at the top middle of your screen telling you, a new player who just wants to figure out how to play the game, that some stranger you don't know just got some item you don't understand? Or telling you that a whale is in the ocean? Shut up!
A ton of icons in top left, telling you things like, "hey this icon here is letting you know that you don't have an active subscription to the value pack, see how we're already nagging you to pay us?"
A ton of popups in bottom right, popping up every day with "whoa go to the shop right now, because we have sales & deals like we always do!"
A chat window that is flooded with TONS of unnecessary spam until you deliberately turn it off with 30 different checkboxes to try to filter it down to only things that are meaningful - how is that a smart idea?
Now that I really think about it, it's amazing I was able to adapt to it and forgive the user interface. It's cluttered and ugly and nags the user incessantly. I'm glad I looked past it and enjoyed the game under the UI, but the UI is very rude and unpleasant.
I agree. Considering the UI is largely the 'glasses through which we view the BDO world' it's surprising that it still persists in such a terrible state. There really is no excuse. I too shudder to think how many players have immediately been turned off the game for no other reason than the UI is an overwhelming mess, and the message that sends players about the state of the rest of the game.
Unfortunately I doubt it will ever really change though, not significantly (I dearly hope I'm wrong). You can see their thought pattern through how many things have been implemented. To improve the UI as a whole would require such a paradigm shift on their part, I just don't think that's possible.
When I first started I was completely overwhelmed and turned off everything except for hp bar, buffs, and minimap. As I understood the game better I enabled more UIs. This game is too complicated, but it's an intentional design to grab attention.
The UI has popups that go under other elements like whenever you see progress for your book, it goes UNDER your party list. If it were to go above it, it could be problematic as well. I'd like to be able to position where it pops in from.
Nobody needs to know about enhancement success/fail. Market registration is fine by default. Chat log is still buggy with all these things though.
Microphone icon is just uh... weird lol. I don't think PC has that support anyway?
Popups that say [ ] Do not show me again today SHOULD be [ ] Do not show this again, ever.
Daily login rewards should be an icon that appears next to the black spirit dice. No more half-screen popup.
Consolidation of many menu items into one singular thing. Black spirit adventure could have a tab for the hallween one from inside the game, not a separate menu entry that isn't available in classic menu mode. This tab will disappear after the season is over. Another example would be the book log, the new progress log, season log, etc... They can all be part of one system instead of being all over the place.
BDO grew quite a bit in terms of on-screen content since its release, it could go for a revision IMO.
I wonder if it’s a clash of cultures.
Korean market gets excited by being bombarded with notification and lots of options to fiddle with... They may find that exciting, were as, when I first joined BDO (West, and the expanding market for BDO) it was horrible. All these unknown notification popping up... did I need to know what they where? was it fundamental to my game and progress? is the game telling me something important? I didn’t know.
I then had to go and search the internet so I could find out what was going on (instead of playing the game and learning as I go along.. also hate it when a game makes you go to 3rd party sites as a necessity to get on with game play.. means something is wrong – not taking about game tips but fundamentals), where I found out I didn’t need to know the notification and I could turn them off (never felt the need to turn them back on)
In addition but not so important, and PA have gone a long way to addressing the ‘losted’ feeling for new players (especial new to MMOs), Having all the chat windows spamming me was confusing and disheartening. Now we have chartrooms for new players, I see no overall positive for this spam.
I remember being so confused reading the messaged when I joined (shai release). People taking about how fast they here leveling, Trash talking each other, and some really foul stuff too (so foul it was nearly enough for me to walk away from the game, yes it was reported and dealt with, but it was in open server chat, and it’s not uncommon). It was not a good first impression.
So I ignored it and tried to grind to 61 for my rewards, with my base set of items as I had no idea how the game progressed: P thankfully thats been addressed by PA with seasons. Yes, I when from level 1 to 61 without enhancing items or understanding the market place… It was my first MMO in over 20 years and I had no idea what I could do in the game (like I said PA have addressed this)
Another patch another annoyance for older players. I understand you want somehow to make it clearer for new players, but why old players have so suffer with that crap every day? I know how attendance rewards works and i don't need another layer of screen clutter which needs another click to get rid of. Stop adding things which can't be turned off.
Another patch another annoyance for older players. I understand you want somehow to make it clearer for new players, but why old players have so suffer with that crap every day? I know how attendance rewards works and i don't need another layer of screen clutter which needs another click to get rid of. Stop adding things which can't be turned
I also asked about it in another topic. I mentioned that, since I get a reminder what login rewards I will get tomorrow before logging out there is no need to get a reminder when I log in. Particularly what I got today. It's a needless feature, since I can already see myself what login rewards I already got when I log in today and what I am going to get tomorrow. Just... Sorry to say it like that, but... Delet' dis! :)
Another patch another annoyance for older players. I understand you want somehow to make it clearer for new players, but why old players have so suffer with that crap every day? I know how attendance rewards works and i don't need another layer of screen clutter which needs another click to get rid of. Stop adding things which can't be turned off.
...
Absolutely. This change is nonsensical, and sadly isn't the first by any stretch. I'm really getting tired of fighting through the UI to get to the game.
I encourage PA to take a big step back and look what a UI is. It's is primarily a medium to transfer useful information from the game world to the user in as simple and effective manner as possible. And vice versa; for the user to effectively communicate to the game world, and other players therein through it. Simple elegent design on the visible user interface is key, with detail being presented only if absolutely necessary in further layers (most commonly realised as menus/sub windows) if the user (i.e. player) wishes to explore that aspect. As the user works through each layer (e.g. main menu, then sub-menu etc) they should consistently be presented with more detail, but only in a stepwise manner and relevent to the parent layer.
Necessary complexity is fine if it's presented as a modular system where the individual can add or remove aspects of the user interface to personal preference. The most widely lauded interfaces are ones that are as 'invisible to the user' as possible. Style should be appropriate, engaging, but subtle and consistent throughout all layers. Redundancy is a huge nono, and the implementee/s should be crucified (or fired) if continually suggesting such.
Furthermore, a inferace should never be overly complicated, that just leads to confusion and sluggish performance. BD's is all three of these things. The design shouldn't be inconsistent (comprising of new and out-of-date elements), and it should never ever clip out of screen and be unreadable. These are critical terminal issues, and yet again BD's has multiple examples of each.
Honestly, if one were to present a lecture on bad UI design Black Desert's would be an absolutely keystone case study. They have a lot of work to do.