The new UI for TSW3 is definitely an major improvement, but it is still unfinished at some points, has a number of clumsy solutions and still is more complex that can be done. I think we NOT need e complete revamp, that would be a big waste, but a number of improvements in the updated areas, and even more in the areas that were not touched in this upgrade. I do it in parts and we will see where it ends. In the first part, the two screens for Mastery. These screens can be accessed through the Dtg Live menu, which reveals this menu page: This leads to two pages, one for the Mastery tasks and one to activate/deactivate the mastery tiles. let's start with the tile activation screen: This screen shows a tile for each route for which you completed the appropriate mastery tier. It has some issues in design: - Scrolling does not work in a natural way. - There is no filtering, only sorting from A-Z or Z-A which is rather useless. What can be done here is: - Improve scrolling - Add some more filters, the route selection filter, but maybe as well a filter that selects routes with activated or deactivated tiles only. This one way to solve this. The other way (better into my opinion) is to get rid of this screen completely. The button can be integrate din the other master screen, which is now only used to show tasks and progress: This screen also lacks filtering, which should be simple to implement, at leats to select one or more routes. More can be done here. You may want a filter to show incomplete mastery only, or only the routes you own. It shows completion status in the tile and that is great. It could easily show also the tile activation status here, so there is only one page where you need to look.. There is a bug in the mastery screen. Sometimes it did not grab the actual status from the server, so you see tasks that seem incomplete, while you know better. This should be improved. You can click on a route to see the details: The tier 1 rewards are give a lot of space here. I would recommend to restrict this to one tile, which can be a bit bigger. This would make it possible to show all rewards on a single page. Now sometimes you need to scroll to see the tier 2 rewards, which is not very obvious as it can be completely hidden. I think this also would be a good spot for a button to activate or deactivate the tile. If you click at a reword, you see a popup screen: You see, this one is not very informative. The text is similar for each decal, so why not summarize it in one screen? There are other good solutions as well. That's it for now. Love to hear from you.
And above all, correct errors. Oakville and LGV, do and redo the scenarios several times and I never get level 2. And only on these two.
Light grey as a highlight colour has to be the most bizarre and confusing thing I've seen in a video game UI. Even odder as a colour choice given that bright yellow is used to highlight other parts in the menu system.
You're absolutely right in that. It is one of the bad decisions. We will come to talk on this topic later.
Also the terminology could use some work. I click Mastery Rewards and the page that opens is called Configure Overlays. Why isn't that page called Mastery Rewards? Why do I even want the option to turn these on and off? And why is it accessed here instead of from the route screen itself? And why are some of them called things like "Frigate" and "Elephant" with no reference to where I can find them in the game?
I’m currently on a mission to complete the masteries on all the routes I regularly play on (almost done - literally only have 5 miles on WSR left to unlock the last reward!), and the mastery menu has frequently caused confusion. It often doesn’t load correctly, shows incorrect challenge progress, earned scenery tiles don’t show up immediately in the activation menu and the game has even crashed while attempting to view individual challenges a few times. It’s definitely the weak point of the TSW3 menu UI - along with the store section perhaps, which has bugged images, weird grouping/sorting and confusing navigation on PlayStation at least. But I don’t really use that menu as I commonly make my add-on purchases directly in the PlayStation store.
You can turn them off, but that is not the point for this thread. This thread, and the next ones is about how the UI for TSW can be improved. Please stay on topic.
Certainly it would simplify things, and save a screen, if the Mastery Reward on/off button were just included on the route's Mastery page, rather than devoting a whole 'nother screen to them. Also: one of the biggest complaints about the post-Rush Hour loco selection screen was that it stuck the diorama inside a train shed, so that you couldn't adjust the weather sliders and see what you were getting. Well now there's no diorama at all, so weather is completely guesswork.
Thanks for your comment. It is off-topic for this episode, but there is more to come on the UI topic and I will definitely mention it there.
This 100%. I mentioned it in another thread. Who thought grey was a good idea? On windows systems especially, grey is reserved for not available, un-selectable, etc.
