I'd like to Shareplay a higher level character eventually... (Gaming)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, February 24, 2016, 16:08 (2992 days ago) @ MacAddictXIV

I imagine the full release will come with agent training or something to help show everyone what's going on in the UI (because it certainly has a lot of different pieces of information on screen at once)

I should hope so!

but in general it is actually very intuitive once you've deciphered it.

Let's take a moment to just think about what you just said... Okay, now that's like saying "Robbing a bank is really easy once you get past the guards and get in the vault!"

I have never played it, so I can't judge. But just from your description, that's anything but intuitive.

I get what you're saying. I should have explained better.

All of the information you want is in intuitive places. You just don't know what the icons mean so you're not aware that the information is there. Once you decipher the icons, the response should be "oh, wow, okay, that's exactly what I hoped that would be."

Examples:

Your ammo, health, skill cooldowns, and active grenade are all in a little floating window next to your guy, just below where your crosshair is. You barely have to look away from your target in order to check those things, which is awesome. Your ammo display shows, stacked vertically, rounds in mag, remaining rounds for that weapon, rounds in your other weapon's mag. Until you know what those three numbers are, it's not totally clear what's going on, but once you figure that out, the placement makes a ton of sense.

On your mini map, there are all these different symbols: Green pentagons, purple squares with vertical lines, purple squares with three dots, blue circles with white stars... what is all that? Oh, it's encounters (like world events), loot containers, division tech containers, and cell phone/data collectible items. Learning the map key helped immensely.

Huh, why does this guy in the darkness zone have a red skull over his head? Oh, I see, it's to tell me he is killing other players. Why yes, that is information I would like to know as soon as I see the guy on my screen.

Floating Orange arrow and line... waypoint and nav marker for getting you where you want to go...

My point is that when you know what the thing is, the placement of it makes perfect sense. It's exactly where you'd want that information to be. Anything you want to access during play is right on your screen. Anything you want to access every now and then is in the pause menu, and anything you access only once or maybe twice (like settings) is probably a few menus deep.

As a former UI designer, I am SUPER impressed with the UI of The Division, and the more I got to play the game, the more impressed I was.

So you are saying the UI is very well done, but the communication for what the UI is is really crappy :-)

Exactly!

I imagine that the full release of the game will have some kind of tutorial that explains all of it.

There was also a bunch of small touch things I really liked, such as sprinting while climbing up a ladder double-times it and sprinting on the way down slides. Or you can click the left thumbstick while aiming to switch which shoulder you're holding the gun at so you expose yourself as little as possible around corners. You can even do the switch while ADSing with a scope.

The only control thing that stuck me as weird was that you can crouch behind objects, but if there's no object nearby you have to stand straight up. I feel like you should at least be able to take a knee, and boy would I love to be able to go prone.