Comments

• After playing several games with the UI as both killer and survivor, I can say that this new UI is in no way better than the old one other than with the addition of hook counters. However, I have numerous issues with the UI:

  • The UI is FAR too scattered, my eyes have to dart everywhere just to understand what's happening, which is very bad in a game where quick decisions need to be made and every second counts. The old UI was objectively better to play with because all I had to do was look at the bottom left to gain a perfect understanding of what was happening.
  • The UI is more complex, and not in a good way. The simplistic style of the old UI was much better, it captured the tone of DBD perfectly, while the new one lacks personality in order to use character portraits (which are inaccurate most of the time anyways due to cosmetics).
  • It's SO MUCH HARDER to tell how much longer you have left on status effects, especially the red ones such as exhausted - and I'm not even colorblind. The black centers with the red/yellow outlines and then another thicker red/yellow outline around them just do not work. The previously all red/all yellow status effects with gray outlines worked much much better and were way easier to use at a glance (and again, were more stylized than the new iteration).
  • I know I already touched on how spread out the UI is, but I feel like the placement of the generator count is so poor that it's worth pointing out on its own. Seriously, top center is not where this should be placed. This should go where the survivor portraits are, no questions asked.
  • The killer hook counter is pretty good but doesn't give me as much information as I'd like. The counter still goes up when someone who is on the hook progresses from 1st phase to struggle phase, or if they die on the hook. This means I can't tell exactly how many hooks I have, which isn't great since being able to do so with a counter would be great when going for a killer adept achievement or an archive challenge that requires a certain amount of hooks. Maybe there could be two different colors for the bars, gray for the total amount of hook states and red (or another color depending on feedback regarding colorblindness) for amount of actual hooks? For example, let's say a killer has hooked 3 survivors and then 2 of them reached the struggle phase on hook - there could be 3 red bars to show that you've gotten 3 hooks, and then 2 more gray bars to account for total hook states. I think that would be a good way to present both total hook states and total hooks while retaining the feeling of killer progress throughout a match. I have to say, I wasn't expecting the hook counter to make a difference with how I feel when playing, but it actually does provide a feeling of "I'm winning/doing well" as killer, just like the gen counter does for a survivor. I look forward to seeing this hook counter improve.
  • Whenever a survivor is injured, downed, or healed, there isn't as big of an effect as there should be in order to draw a player's eyes to the corner of the screen. Previously, there was always a red blood splatter behind a survivor on the UI which would draw your eyes to the new change in gameplay. The new effect is much less pronounced and often leaves me unaware of when a health state changes as both survivor and killer. As killer your eyes would be drawn to the corner and you'd be able to quickly go "oh shoot, this person just got picked up" or "oh, they're healing". As a survivor, your eyes would be drawn to the corner and you'd be able to quickly go "oh shoot, this person is in chase, I should go for the unhook" or "oh, that person just got picked up by another survivor, I can continue to do this generator". The new UI needs something more to draw your eyes to that corner of the screen when something important happens. This principle of eyes being drawn somewhere also applies to the generator count. With the old UI when a gen was completed, the generator symbol as well as the number of generators left would grow large for a second and flash white, drawing attention to the change. With the new UI, it only flashes white, which doesn't draw the eyes enough.
  • The killer power/survivor item placements don't really feel aligned with the perk slots to me. It might be that they're higher up on the screen, but I can't pinpoint it exactly. It just feels kind of off to me.
  • This isn't really related to the UI itself and how it works, but it's another positive for gameplay that I think is worth mentioning. Previously, whenever I was affected by a perk for the first time in a match as a survivor (for example, Sloppy Butcher, Franklin's Demise, the exposed status effect given by Devour Hope and NOED, etc), I would experience a small hitch in my frames. This was very annoying and would often disorient me. However, with the new UI, this no longer seems to be an issue, and the game seems to run much more smoothly once perks like these affect me. I can only assume that this is simply because of the work done for the UI in the code, but I thought it was worth mentioning that the new UI does at the very least seem to be optimized as far as coding goes.

  That's my feedback regarding UI. Regarding survivor movement and animation changes...

  • Survivor movement simply doesn't feel as fun as it did beforehand. Moonwalking isn't the same, attempting to spin killers is entirely gone, teabagging, while trivial, isn't the same. The old survivor animations had a lot of charm while looking perfectly fine in my opinion. I think the new animations for the most part are alright, but I do prefer the old ones, and I also prefer how the old ones felt to use. Even for memes such as looking around and nodding, the new animations just lack the charm that the old ones did. The way a survivors entire body moved to look around was much better.
  • The new injured animation is flat out worse than the old one. It's so much more difficult to tell at a glance when someone is injured, which negatively affects gameplay for both survivors and killers. You can't as easily call out the need to be healed because your running animation is similar to the healthy running animation. I feel that the old one both looked better and served its purpose better in order to clearly call out which health state the survivor was in.
  • As a survivor, hits almost NEVER feel fair now. It's almost always the killer clearly missing the survivor and then the survivor getting hit anyway. It's really jarring and makes judging distance between you and the killer very difficult for deciding when to drop a pallet. I hope that this is fixed.
  • I REALLY do not like the way the camera angle moves down as a survivor when you get downed, and I also strongly dislike the new crawling movement. I much prefer the old movement for crawling, and the new camera angle is downright obnoxious and has no reason to be in the game.
  • The new animations aren't all bad. I actually quite like the new interaction animations for bleeding out, failing a self-care skill check, recovering and being picked up from the ground, and crawling into hatch (this last one is amazing, I still can't help but laugh when I see it). These animation changes are all stellar and I hope to see more like them for other interactions in the future, such as healing and cleansing totems. The animations that need work are interaction animations, not movement animations.

  That's my feedback regarding movement and UI changes. Thanks for reading and please take some of my suggestions to heart.

  in Feedback for UI & Animation Comment by TwoSoup February 10, 2021