21 interface issues (with lots of pictures)

Battleborn Battleborn General Discussion
#10

Update:

  • added section about missing icon
  • added section about low quality minimap frame
  • moved to general discussion (was in beta forums)
  • cleaned up the post for easier reading

Count of the issues that have been addressed since the beta: 0
Number of acknowledgements from the development team: 0

I like reporting issues, but the total lack of any official reply to any of the reported issues is disheartening. We only get replies from mods (“Nice post. Really nice post.”), but the PR team from Gearbox/2K is either nonexistent or on very long holidays. This makes me want to stop reporting and just move on to other games.

1 Like
#11

Great feedback (the pictures help a lot!) I certainly agree most with 3, 6, & 7.

  1. I also don’t understand the numbering order for the loot packs, which are out of order (like you showed). Also, the RED text color for the unlock level is hard to read, especially when it runs over the silver lock graphic behind it.

  2. The endgame screen displays for way too long on Xbox One, too. Sometimes we’ll sit for 30 seconds or more just waiting for it to go away. This also happens after a story mission and you get the “Mission Complete” screen. It might be because there are background items loading, but it’s at the very least odd that there’s no indication of what’s going on.

  3. Gear descriptions are indeed confusing. And thank you for mentioning those of us who generally don’t play MOBAs or who aren’t familiar with some of the abbreviations. Some items just aren’t clear for those of us who don’t have a lot of experience with these type of features. I know time will improve it, but some items just aren’t clear about what they do in general, regardless of abbreviation.

Thanks for the well laid out post!

1 Like
#12

Update:

  • marked 8 as fixed. Yay!
  • added: narrow name on leftmost pedestal
  • added: incorrect score when enemy surrenders
  • added: unnecessary wait for map vote when the result is set in stone

Not sure what to do with the 3rd point, as there were some changes, but ordering is still not consistent.

#13

Yet another update…

  • updated 3 with more recent screenshots
  • added: keybinding+ordering inconsistency
  • added: keyboard icon prompts are just ugly
  • added: stretched font in order popups
  • added: Characters sub-tab is not accessible if Alani is already unlocked

The list is now 16 items long, with one of them marked as fixed.

It would be great to know if the issues are known to the dev team and how deep in the tickets bin they are. @scottv, would it be possible to get a reply to fuel my nitpick engine?

1 Like
#14

Just stumbled over this topic and OMG you did an amazing job!!! Most people start to complain about seemingly “big issues of this and that OP or broken” but his is actually constructive and right on spot! :heart:
I hope the Devs look into this!

#15

You’re hired!

But seriously, why haven’t they hired you yet? Do you consult?

This is amazing feedback. The effort here is off the charts, and I applaud you.

If I may add one more nit-pick, the whole gear interface is fucky on PC. If you mouse-wheel-scroll the bank page without clicking in it first, when you do click, it reverts to pre-scroll as you click. Janky as hell. If your cursor moves even a single pixel while you’re clicking on an item, the game assumes you want to drag n drop the item, causing the interface to shift into big arrows pointing all over the place. And the default keys for selling and confirming are awkward for a WASD Keyboard.

Maybe the awkward selling is intentional to prevent accidental sales, but it feels like there should be a better solution than “make it suck.”

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#16

Update:

  • added: 17. minimap scaling and uncropped minimap content
  • added: 18. another color issue in gear descriptions
  • added: 19. lag when scrolling through gear if it’s sorted by rarity
  • added: 20. weird character rotation due to 1:1 console port
  • added: 21. unable to focus loot packs with the mouse
  • modified summary and increased spacing between issues

Sure, I love pointing out 1 px misalignment issues any time of the day. :wink:

#17

Beautiful post

#18

This annoys me so much… A video of it here.


Don’t actually remember if I filed the support ticket, will file another one none the less.

#19

This is a good list. We’re aware of it. Our list internally is larger than this.

Some of these items, like the Victory Screen lingering, are there because they are dependent on back-end services and loading times (as guessed by Sornub). Some of these, like inconsistent mouse spinning, are so minor they are at (and will probably remain) at the bottom of the priority list.

For the last three months, we’ve been working non-stop to make improvements to the game, create new content, and take care of issues. All of those tasks are prioritized, many of them on a week-to-week basis. I will ask our UI designer and QA teams to verify that all of these issues are documented and prioritized. Given our current workload, the the non-game-breaking state of these issues, they likely won’t happen soon.

10 Likes
#20

Thank you Jythri. A response is always great to hear.

#21

Most are not game breaking but I really do hope that UI issues would get a little more attention. Especially keybind prompts and buggy targeting that actually directly impact user experience.

As a general rule in life, you have a lot less to fix if you do it right in the first place. A lot of these things could have been avoided if a little more care was put into this stuff.
I appreciate all the thing you do, really, but I get very nit picky when it gets to UI and HUD and from AAA devs (for AAA price) I expect a little more.

#22

Seems obvious and easy from the outside, doesn’t it?

It never is, though.

5 Likes
#23

It really does, doesn’t it… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

But sometimes what you might need is a loving kick on the butt.
We all believe in you guys, you are doing an excellent job and Battleborn is one of the most fun I’ve had with a game in a long time.

#24

We have no shortages of kicks in the butt, loving or otherwise.

I do appreciate the communication though. Wish we could do everything instantly.

2 Likes
#25

Haha. The community is a bit rough, isn’t it?

1 Like
#26

While this isn’t going to fix anything, I could probably shed some light into maybe why some of these issues ARE issues.

  1. Font inconsistencies - It’s a custom font, meaning it won’t have the full character set of a generic font and stuff like a user’s name can have a wide variety of characters. I’m using a font that’s similar to the Battleborn font for all my guides (which I have to apply a bunch of styling hacks to get it looking remotely like the actual font) and I have to remove any accent characters like in El Dragon’s name because there’s no character for it in the font. I’m not saying this is the only reason, but it is probably why some things are using the generic font.

  2. Minimap scaling - Possibly bound by texture dimension constraints. There’s also only one texture for each map which probably uses a mipmap for the minimap resolution and not all maps are going to look as good at lower resolutions using auto-generated images.

  3. Gear Card descriptions. This is done manually for each gear instance instead of pulling from a global set of strings, so lots chances for human error. There’s like 780+ items to go through and I’ve seen quite a few inconsistencies while working on my Gear Search app.

#28

This is a good insight. These are definitely some of the reaons.

On Font inconsistencies, some other fun ones you left out:

  • Localization - We have do deal with every text field being possibly 40% longer in German when translated. So, every time you see text in the game, be it in a description paragraph or a button, we have to assume almost half again as much text has to be able to fit in that area. Multiply that with the custom font issue you mention above, and we have some challenges. Sometimes, there is a “best” solution, not a “good” solution

  • Splitscreen and 4:3 - Our UI system doesn’t have fancy “move it where you want” capabilities like other engines. So, we design it once, for eveything. While our splitscreen implementation isn’t my favorite, many of the issue of UI layout come from the attempt to compromise layout between normal view and splitscreen so that we don’t have to spend more time implementing further custom solutions. We CAN do custom solutions, but they are time-consuming, and we have to choose how much time we spend here instead of other UI or polish. And we still are required to support 4:3 aspect ration because the PS4 -can- play in that aspect ratio. It’s a requirement from Sony, so we have to implement custom solutions there as well.

  • Gear Card descriptions are partially automated and partially manually done. That said, as you mention, there are a lot of them. This iteration of the gear system came on fairly late for us (just before Christmas, in fact, after feedback from the CTT). While it builds on previous designs, it was a fairly thorough overhaul. Our internal testing said it was much much more interesting than previous versions, so we went with it, but it did lack some polish time that we needed.

This isn’t even all of what we deal with. :slight_smile: And don’t get me wrong - this is our job. We signed up for this, and for the most part, love what we do. So, I’m not trying to make anyone feel sorry for us. Poor, poor toy makers! But, the technical and project problems are real, and tough. As a creative director, you spend the last year of development slowly watching many of your favorite ideas die to lack of time, and have to make daily choices of whether something is good enough to keep without polish or if if we should cut the features. Those decisions are very hard to make before the game goes to the community.

The best I can say is we tried to make the best decisions possible. And, we’re still working on improving things we didn’t get to touch during core development. Hopefully, over time, we’ll get a lot of these rough edges polished off.

8 Likes
#29

Aww. Can you guys have a stream at some point where you discuss ideas that didn’t make it in the game?

#30

Btw OP, this one is likely due to the extra sections (that we didn’t know about until the Premium Taunts and Skins went live) being hidden while the alignment is still checking against the full sub nav width. All of Battleborn’s UI is built with Scaleform which is basically an optimized version of Flash for game engines, so if you’ve ever played around with it in school like I did, you will know the whole sub nav is probably sitting inside a MovieClip which I think would retain its full width even if sub elements were hidden. It is more complicated than it looks and would only be an issue for someone (after the Marketplace went live) who has bought all the Skins and Taunts (aka very unlikely), which I think would make it a very low priority issue.

[edit]

I’ll just add here (for anyone reading my posts after the fact) that none of the things I have mentioned are meant as criticisms of the Gearbox devs or anything like that. They are meant to give players a better idea what can contribute to a seemingly “simple issue” and the of the kind of work that is actually involved for someone to go in and fix them. :sunglasses:

1 Like