Inventory management (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Thursday, August 21, 2014, 19:39 (3547 days ago) @ kapowaz

One of the biggest issues I encountered with the cursor navigation is that it's too easy to accidentally ‘leave’ the modal context of a given inventory slot whilst moving between them, at which point in order to go back to browsing between items you have to return to the inventory slot itself. It's particularly easy to do this if you have two or more rows of items for a given slot; you open the slot and start diagonally moving off towards the second or third row, but in so doing you leave the hotspot of the slot before reaching the destination, and so it closes.

To avoid this you have to actually move the cursor horizontally first, then vertically, which feels a bit unintuitive. They could probably have solved this problem relatively easily with a timer once you leave the area of each slot, giving you time to hit the second row before the expanded items collapse again.

I know, right? That is so annoying and it negates a lot of the "flow" and "smoothness" of the cursor UI because you can't just move it from A to B like a mouse cursor.

On the flip side, the map is something that I imagine would be a whole lot more difficult to implement with a traditional d-pad UI, and I think here more than anywhere else the cursor shines — I doubt it'd be possible to do this better any other way.

You know, if they just had it for the map, I would like it. It makes complete sense and is more enjoyable than stepping through locations one at a time. That's no reason to make it rule the UI though.