PS4 UI needlessly clunky

[MrEvilness]

I got this game for ps4 for the crossbuy with the vita available. I do love the concepts for the game problem is the UI is clunky for no reason.


Buttons held to keep menus open is just wrong. selecting heroes for a party or for treatment gotta press and hold r2 to move up and down the list of heroes. What is wrong with tapping r2 to open the roster and when your done press circle to close. same goes for building upgrades.


Party formation. I am strolling though the dungeon going to hit a door and go through. press x to soon send my hero in the front of the line to the back. try to hit x again to solve the problem and the party promptly goes through the door to find that it is fighting for it's life while the front line is uselessly in the back, pushing other people out of order and depending on their list of skills could completely disrupt their effectiveness and the party takes significantly more damage than if the party held it's formation in the first place. I am supposed to be fighting the monsters in the dungeon not getting tripped up by the user interface.


A solution to this formation switching is a press and hold to get into the formation mode, Also an original formation setting to return the party to standard formation after getting scrambled about a bit in combat just to save some time and the player from some relentless tedium.


Selecting charms for heroes. now early on in the game charms are scarce so you are constantly opening and closing menus to see a list of charms and the list of heroes abilities to get the right charms on the right heroes. the layout should be modified to display the selected heroes skills along with the charms available for them. just makes sense and waste a lot less time.


party selection. when selecting a party all that is immediately visible is the heroes name class and stress level. what you need is list of abilities and quirks visible as well. When you are selecting heroes there is no reason why the character sheet should not be viable as you are scrolling up and down the list to place your heroes to see who should work with whom based on quirks and move sets. As it stands i have to hit square to open the character sheet to peek to make sure i am picking the right guy for the job then have to close the character sheet to place him. Rinse repeat. The way it is setup right now just eats away time for no good reason.

[foxhound438]

Yeah, the ps4 controls are trash, no doubt. I feel like more options should be added for controls, like toggle and which stick controls what.

[redhookjohn]

Hey! Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the PS4 Controls, as soon this control scheme will be hitting our Steam version as well.

Porting the controls for a mouse/keyboard game was no easy task and the feedback you list is helpful!

Your main point about the struggle of having to HOLD buttons for certain interactions is one we arrived at after extensive testing. The reason we went this way was because there is no cursor with a controller. Rather, cursors being controlled through analog sticks didn't feel as good as just using the D-PAD to move around the screen.

And since we didn't have a cursor on the screen if we allowed the user to toggle menu states (like you suggest just hit L2 to open a menu) we found that they would lose their position on the screen. So after testing this HOLD method we liked it as, when you had zero inputs users would know exactly where their "focus" was on the screen. When we had it set as toggles, we found that most players would get confused or lost as to where their focus was and then would start pushing buttons and not get the expected output from those button inputs.

We felt that we did a good job considering the scope of the project and that the game was not designed for a controller originally. I do appreciate you taking the time to lay out your criticisms and hopefully we can offer more accessibility issues in the future to help accommodate how players would like to control the game.

[MrEvilness]

In that case it would be appreciated to give users a choice in control setup.

I do have a suggestion on consumers being confused as to where the screen is focused. That is to only display the actove window in color. It really wouldn't inturrupt the color scheme and atmosphere while giving a not so subtle hint where the focus is on the screen at present.

[Armoured_Bobandi]

Originally posted by redhookjohn:

Hey! Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the PS4 Controls, as soon this control scheme will be hitting our Steam version as well.

Porting the controls for a mouse/keyboard game was no easy task and the feedback you list is helpful!

Your main point about the struggle of having to HOLD buttons for certain interactions is one we arrived at after extensive testing. The reason we went this way was because there is no cursor with a controller. Rather, cursors being controlled through analog sticks didn't feel as good as just using the D-PAD to move around the screen.

And since we didn't have a cursor on the screen if we allowed the user to toggle menu states (like you suggest just hit L2 to open a menu) we found that they would lose their position on the screen. So after testing this HOLD method we liked it as, when you had zero inputs users would know exactly where their "focus" was on the screen. When we had it set as toggles, we found that most players would get confused or lost as to where their focus was and then would start pushing buttons and not get the expected output from those button inputs.

We felt that we did a good job considering the scope of the project and that the game was not designed for a controller originally. I do appreciate you taking the time to lay out your criticisms and hopefully we can offer more accessibility issues in the future to help accommodate how players would like to control the game.

Who is focus testing your games? I find it hard to believe they aren't able to understand where their cursor is. Even if they did, a simple fix would be to more drastically highlight the seleced option in question. Frankly that sounds like you had really poor testers

[MrEvilness]

I'm sorry, i am trying to elicit a positive response from devs here. I outlined my frustrations with the game. I did get a quick response from a dev which is what i wanted. He was gracious enough to outline his reasoning for me. Now i only post suggestions on titles that i really liked. The theme, the atmosphere and the dialog between party members, the general concept that your party members can be fleeting. The game delivers on the darkness aspect and even though the narrator has gotten a little repetitive it has not gotten dull as i have 30 percent of the achievements since black friday. I posted because i was putting a lot of time into this game and wanted to make it better without changing the content as the weak point here is the interface between the player and the game IMO.

It does not help at all to insult the devs in any way as responding to input is on a voluntary basis and if the community is going to be adversarial here then it encourages the dev to not respond to the community.

Now i had a party wipe in a level 3 dungeon that started when one person refused to run. the melee person decided because she was a masochist that every one of her teammates should have to die with her. In this instance there was only 1 person who had a mental affliction at the time and the entire party had to die before i got another chance to run. My question is why i could not choose to abandon the party member as it has the potential random encounter where the party member comes back either dead or alive for revenge at a later point or possibly turning up weeks later in need of some RNR.

Also graves should contain more details about the character's death such as what set off their affliction that likely lead to their death for an added dark humor. Sometimes killed by other party members by either mean comments or literal backstabbing which some of the paranoid people start doing when the torches go out.

[MrEvilness]

Now i have been thinking about a hard mode in this game, where negative quirks as well as afflictions and/or valor to be not immediately known to the player. Negative quirks such as stealing or phobias slowly revealed to the player as they play with the character. I mean what idiot applying for a job would say that they are a compulsive theif? I think it would be wonderful to find out a party member is a theif in the event that they died and they were found to have a massive amount of loot. This kind of information hidden from the player at least at first will make the player just as paranoid about the party members as the rest of the party is about each other.