I think I said this about the TSW4 menu as well, but now it's getting worse. The home screen is obviously designed with mouse in mind: just point to the box you want and click on it, and boom! you've made your selection. On a console though, this is very very difficult, more difficult than it was in TSW4! I have to check the margins to see which box is currently selected, so I can use the thumbstick to navigate. Except for a slight change in colour and a slight change in size, the currently selected box is not easy to spot. And considering that the number of boxes may actually change ("Resume Journey" could be present or not, "Resume Last Played" could be present or not), the home screen navigation is very very hard. So, if anyone knows who designed this, maybe DM me an email address, so I can tell him/her/they how I feel about it. Thanks!
Yes.I am in my seventies and with glasses on still find it very difficult to see which box I have selected. Please make colour more obvious.
Last year's UI was an improvement of the TSW3 UI. But this year there is no improvement. We are back to TSW3 UI inconsistencies on consoles. I wish I could lock up the entire DTG crew for 30 days with only controllers and just 1 keyboard at the office
Hi Guys, I also find the menu very hard in seeing what box I have selected. And whats with this purple colour that's been added. (XBOX Series X User)
I was about to post the very same message. DTG said they put huge ugly cones on Platforms for accessibility but dont bother making a decent UI with selectable tiles ... Playing on Xbox btw
Purple was definitely a strange choice, dark colours just make everything much harder to see and use and I’m my opinion less appealing. Whilst it’s not terrible like the TSW 2 Rush hour UI and colour scheme it’s still not the best. I think we should stick to bright colours in future, bring back the screen from TSW 2020 or something.
I am actually relieved to see the back of the blinding white and yellow on white of TSW4, but whoever handles layout and UX needs to be taken aside and given some additional classes.
Whilst on the UI what about these aweful opening screen pages we get hit by? Bright Yellow and blue. And the map
Someone or someone(s) is stuck in the '80s, what I'm seeing here is Psychedelic almost, and giving (Saturday Night Fever) satying alive vibes with John Travolta in his white Tux. Like your "Quote" t.a.turner Would like to use some time, if you don't mind.
Hi, Its one I found many many years ago. It origin was used by John Wayne Another one: “I have tried to live my life so that my family would love me and my friends respect me. The others can do whatever the hell they please.” – John Wayne
The menu is indeed very poorly designed (I am on PlayStation). It is almost impossible to see which tile is selected.
I absolutely welcome the new colour scheme that doesn't LITERALLY BURN MY EYES like TSW4, but it 100% needs a high contrast mode, and it's STILL designed practically exclusively for mouse.
But if on XB mouse is not an option until you get in the cab to look around and then its like trying to squat a fly. I think the main problem here is as you can see from the below image I have added a border to you can see what section I am talking about, unless you are sitting on top of your monitor, but like me sit away from TV screen it's very hard to actually see what section has been selected. All you got is a very fine outline which in some cases match the section making it even harder to locate.
I'm looking at this image on a 32" monitor and can bare see what is selected, Who thought this was a good idea, and who signed off on it that it was okay to ship like this? Anyone with eyesight issues will have nothing but trouble here. Like ME... This crazy...
As I say, it needs some kind of high contrast mode, because as it is, it's super hard to figure out which panel is faded and which is focused because there's very little difference between them. Your screenshot definitely looks WORSE than the PC version looks to me (And the PC version desperately needs more contrast itself). I wonder if there's a difference in the brightness values and the bloom applied because on PC there's more of a glow to the turquoise outline. Starting to also wonder if this is a case of the devs doing all their work on HDR displays and not accounting for most players having their systems output in SDR?
The main difference for me is the size. If you follow the edges, one box is slightly larger than the others. That's the one currently selected. BTW, I do not see much difference between XBox Series X and PC in terms of how the main menu looks like. I play both on the same 32in 4K monitor. I haven't played TSW on PC since early days of TSW3, but trying to collect the route tasks on Frankfurt Fulda route on XSX was impossible. The choppiness literally made me nauseous. Since there are no sliders to fix this, I just installed TSW5 on PC with just the FTF route, turned the settings to Medium, and it was almost playable. There are still moments when the game freezes, and then the RTX3090's fans go 100%: this seems to happen when the army of passengers are unleashed into the scene, shortly after I fast travel to a new station.
IMO I find the UI in TSW4 more usable compared to TSW3 with regards to identification of the current selection, but yeah it is quite bright though. I get that DTG wants each release to have its own identity. But we seemed to have regressed into the set of the next Austin Powers movie, with this lovely lavender psychedelic colour palette. Yeah baby, lavender is in this year. Well it might be all rage on the big screen, but probably all the wrong rage on the small screen. Actually I can't look at the load screen still photo above from t.a.turner, for more than 2 seconds before I start to trip out. Seriously there are many simmers like me who are not so comfortable visually with non-standard colour palettes, especially when the current selection is not highlighted so clearly. Developers seem to only include core accessibility options, which I guess is understandable. But in my case it would be nice sometime in the future (when the release has settled down), rather than completely rewrite the UI (which is probably not feasible post release) to instead have an accessibility option setting to select from either the TSW4 colour scheme or TSW5 colour scheme (both already written code) or a new basic monochrome/low colour contrast scheme (as others suggest, surely just a simple change), all with clearer highlighting of the current selection. I can't tell you how many times in TSW3 I got lost in the UI because I couldn't see where I was in my (small) list of routes & locos, and that was with a mouse on PC. I also play on PS5 so I have the usual labyrinth puzzle challenge to work out how to get to each option quickly & efficiently and try to see what option is currently selected when navigating. In the meantime, since I don't have a spare set of indoor sunglasses handy, with inbuilt ultra-violet lavender filters, I guess I'm gonna have to use the contrast/colours setting on the tv screen, to adjust the contrast while loading & in the menu & switch itback when in the cab. Inconvenient, but in my case most likely necessary. I need to wait to the weekend to DL TSW5 to see what works for me. And for all those herbalists & botanists out there, in case you are wondering, I have nothing against lavender. I'm sure its very relaxing in chamomile ice tea, just not so relaxing in UI by DTG. Sorry, just trying to lighten up the subject.
Now I am looking at them side by side I think it's just a result of the resolution of your screenshot meaning that a load of the additional detail is lost in the upscaling 300% to fullscreen, I think the bloom is still there, but it's a lot more overpowered by the purple at such a low res. But I 100% still stand by saying it needs the ability to up the contrast on menu elements, because as it is, it's very hard to notice the minor vibrancy increase of the art in the focused element, and the outline can be a bit too subtle. Much as I appreciate the UI not blinding me like TSW4's did, they probably overcompensated in making it softer and easier on the eye. The menus rely far too much on motion and not visual elements to draw the eye. I will continue to argue that honestly, something more minimalistic is needed. Where the text is the focus, not all the clutter of information overload in all these random images. A menu should be compact, simple to navigate with minimal inputs, and make it IMMEDIATELY obvious what every selection is. Just because you have screen space doesn't mean you should inflate everything to fill it just have a single simple piece of TSW5 cover art fill 80% of the screen and have the menu buttons take up the top left corner or a row in the bottom. Giant tiles in console UIs are the worst legacy of the motion control fad and most devs have got over them by now, after even MS gave up on trying to unify UIs between Windows desktops, XBox, Surface tablets, Windows Phones (Remember them?) and Zune (lol).
Let's not forget that on the preview stream it was specifically noted how much easier it is to get to routes now, just two clicks without even having to move your mouse! What wasn't mentioned is that on console it now takes an extra movement, probably because no one at DTG plays on console, which explains a lot of the UI decisions, really.
The loading screen too dark,, i would like to see train pictures as the game loads, plus I want to be able to choose the pallet thats used in game the purple is to dark and difficult to see, how about giving us the allowing us to change it in the menu, maybe a choice of Red, Orange, Green and Blue.
TSW2020 was hands down the better of the UI options, IMHO it still elegant, sometimes LESS is better The first loading screen leads to a very short set of videos. This Route selection is okay would liked it to be clearer but still very nice I really need to get back into 2020 Simple Elegant, Clear
They check the forums daily. Sometimes even outside working hours. More so the moderators. I'd say they're pretty much aware of what we say on here. But more often than not they stay silent.
This is the part which baffles me. They clearly see console users as a significant and important customer base they want to maximise retention of, or they'd not keep going out of their way to keep the game going on Gen8. But they then treat that segment of their players as an afterthought when it comes to the actual UI and controller-based interaction with it.
