The announcement stream said that the UI would not be changed from TSW3- but that isn't absolutely true. DTG did make one change to the UI, which addressed a coomon complaint and represents a nontrivial QOL improvement: The highlight color has been changed! Now, the selected option is white, whereas everything else is black. It's actually intuitive!
I'm not sure if this is worth a whole new thread. Should we pop the champagne for TSW4? Or should we have expected something as trivial as this to be a week 1 patch to TSW3? I wasn't around when TSW3 launched, but the forum posts are dated.
Yes, instead of popping corks we should be releasing hostages. Hopefully they have retained the UI artist for a period after launch for any things they get horribly wrong this time. We can’t wait a full year for another much needed fix after we identify it on day one. There is bound to be at least one such error. I see the NEW tag is still a thing. I wonder if that will still be showing all content as NEW when TSW5 comes along. All my TSW3 content is still NEW after playing it all many times.
I only just got used to the TSW3 UI being grey to select. Its going to take me a year to get used to selections being the right way round again.
The current grey highlighting is surprisingly confusing even after all this time, so good news to hear it’s changing! Just that one change is of more use to me than most of the ‘headline’ upgrades like photo mode etc.
Even CP77 is getting some simple UI overhails as part of the free 2.0 update, not paywalling it behind the DLC. Like any TSW bugs I rate the chances of a fix that has not been announced with great fanfare and used to attempt to justify a paid update as "Slim to none"
Wait.. is the new UI really not changing other than a colour change? If so, they could have at least tried to make it look different and at least pretend they're selling you a new game.
No, the UI is not fundamentally changing. And Matt made a good (IMO) point in the keynote: Investing time in a reskin of the game's UI is not really well invested time if it's working well already. And the UI is really not something that people wanted to see changed as far as I saw here.
I don’t like to be picky and it’s probably a good thing it got changed but I think white may not have been the best choice, it still blends in quite well and that is the kinda thing that this problem was. Pink would or something similar would probably be the best for easy indication, however for reasons of being more “professional like” maybe a normal blue or perhaps light green/red would have worked better. Just some thought I had when I seen it got changed in the stream. i haven’t actually experienced any issue with the current, but I can see how it’s an issue.
They already had bright yellow highlights elsewhere in the UI. It would have made sense to use that. Still shaking my head at how they could have possibly built, looked at, and presumably passed beta testing without anybody saying "hey, light grey isn't a good highlight colour!"
At least they seem to have finally learned that after the disaster that was the Rush Hour UI “up”grade. Agreed. White is a bit better but I have no idea why they didn’t go with a bright colour. I have a feeling that white isn’t going to make things much better on console but I’ll see how it goes when the game comes out.
The white will contrast with the background. The color scheme now follows the correct design language. The background in the UI is dark. The white will highlight what you choose. This is the way it works in every software or in any other game you play. The UI looks different enough. There are other images used which makes it look like a totally new version of the game. IMO they used better looking images as the UI looks way better in TSW4 than in TSW3.
Black and white is the hud's base pallette: No interaction. A strong colour would signify outside user interaction. Anyway, most annoying is the default to last save as I keep hitting it by mistake.
DTG is hyping so minor improvements like this buttons highlight, that it makes me thinking: is that it? that's your great achievement? That thing took you 8 months?
Sorry, but I will disagree with you here. The unselected images contain white text on top of the photo background. This looks fine for most of them, but looks terrible for the Creators Club, where the text is on top of the light blue sky, and it's very hard to see. I much preferred the TSW3 style, where the text has separate background from the images, and it's easy to read. Another way they could have done it would have been with a text shadow, making sure that the text is readable regardless of background. There are several techniques that can be used to make sure text is visible regardless of background, all applied in the wonderful world of subtitles. See below how the white text is clearly readable even on top of a white background. The only thing they should have fixes was the terrible choice of gray selection colour in TSW3. How would you ever pick gray to be your selection colour, when gray has long been associated with an "unavailable" choice?! To the point where an unavailable option is called "grayed out".
TSW3s UI was a case of if it isn't broke don't fix it. TSW1 and 2 UIs were fine with the green then blue for selection. 3 was a disaster and should not have taken a year and a new game to fix. It was a big complaint from players from day one, it should not have passed beta testing imo.
I see what you mean with the creators club. Indeed the white bar that will appear when you select it should have been a transparent dark when not selected as in the screenshot. The easiest way to solve that is to choose another image for creators club as an easy fix. But the TSW3 UI was wrong. It was very confusing on console as I never saw what I was selecting with all the white bars. This is way is better on console as you actually will be able to see what you are selecting.
