My problems with the MHW user interface

[Bummer6]

After over 200 hours of messing around in this game, I can say with utmost certainty that the user interface is absolutely terrible, and I'm making this thread as a way to vent, but also to see if others feel the same way on some of these issues, and see if someone can offer up justifications for these design decisions.

First of all, one of the newest additions to the game. Layered armor and layered weapons...
It feels like these two very similar features were designed by two completely different UI teams with two entirely different opinions on what "layered" means. Layered armors work as another set of armor that you can put on to change the appearance of the underlying armor and you can freely change the base armor without it affecting the layered armor. Layered weapons, however, work as an augment to a single weapon, meaning you have to apply the augment to each weapon you want to change individually. Not only does this mean you have to grind a lot more, but it also means these very similar features are located in two completely different places and are not even accessible from the same menu. I would personally like to see layered armor and weapons settings located in the "change equipment" sub menu, but I'd honestly be happy as long as they're both accessible from the same place.


Another thing that I've found more and more bothersome the longer I've played is how difficult it is to figure out what rewards you get from event/optional missions. Often times, you have to look up the rewards on the internet because the game flat out does not tell you what you will get for completing the quest. If a mission has a unique reward, I would like that information to be clearly displayed, because most events and optional missions aren't worth your trouble, and there's soooooo many of them at this point.

On the subject of missions. It feels like the whole ranking system for missions is way overcomplicated.
you have low rank, high rank and master rank, then you have a star rating system ranging from 1-9 for low/high rank, and then a separate star rating system for master rank ranging from 1-6, and all of these star ranks relate to the difficulty. This honestly wasn't so convoluted before iceborne happened, because after that they basically just stapled on a brand new ranking system completely separate from the normal one which made the whole thing a little bit confusing when you're going back to find a specific quest.

I don't have much experience with them, but just looking at the menus relating to insect glaive and bowgun gives me a major headache, although I can't say much more about them since frankly, the menus and the interface have kept me from ever touching them.

The entire interface of MHW is just menus within menus within menus that you're forced to go through constantly. I'm not suggesting features should be removed, just organized in a more intuitive way that doesn't come across as so obtuse to players who aren't veterans of the series.

So that's my rant. These are just a few things off the top of my head that have been bothering me lately, but I'm sure I could do a more detailed analysis of the entire interface to find way more stuff that could be streamlined a bit to cut down on the time spent navigating menus.

I'd honestly appreciate your opinions on this. Do you agree that the UI could do with some quality of life improvements? If not, I'd love to hear your justifications of the decisions made by the developers of MHW.

[Sui Generic]

100% agree. The UI is a convoluted mess that further obfuscates an already complex game.

[Dextro Custos]

I agree with you, the UX is terrible, and sometimes the UI has too much visual information

[Bummer6]

Originally posted by Dextro Custos:

I agree with you, the UX is terrible, and sometimes the UI has too much visual information

Definitely. I feel like the game just vomits information into your face, and like 10% of it is useful, so you have to flip through layers and layers of stats that you never look at in order to get to the stuff that actually matters.

I'm not a veteran Monster Hunter player, but I do love Monster Hunter World. I think it's a fantastic game for what it is, but the user interface is real hard to swallow for new players and even for someone like me who's played the game for hundreds of hours, I still wrestle with it from time to time when I have to do something I don't do very often, like augmenting a weapon or trying to figure out which event quest gives me cool armors and stuff and which are just pointless filler.

[River Victor]

MHW UI is indeed terrible. The gameplay is great but the UI is confusing as hell.

[lexilogo]

The UI definitely isn't ideal, but one thing I would like to note: All Event Quests that say "Special Material Rewards" in their Quest Description are ones that provide something you can't get anywhere else like Tickets to craft specific items. This is still CERTAINLY not ideal as they could easily display the same information on these Quests that they do on the Capcom website (eg. "this quest drops lots of ores", "this quest has a higher chance for rare materials") but it's something.

There also IMO isn't any such thing as an "Optional mission that isn't worth your trouble" because for beating all LR/HR Optionals and MR Optionals both you get a unique extra Optional Quest. If it doesn't have the Completed mark next to it you should get around to doing it at some point.


I also don't think Insect Glaive is so bad as while Kinsect customisation being in its own Smithy menu is jank (it would make more sense if it had a unique vendor who said "Oh hey, this is a service for Insect Glaive users, don't bother with this if you prefer other weapons", as Kinsect upgrading isn't exactly something you do regularly), it really isn't any more complicated than upgrading other weapons.

Bowguns are another story, though there isn't that much more you can do as it's inevitably going to need a big spreadsheet to show all the different information you need to know when modding a bowgun.



If I had one simple suggestion for MHW's UI it's that a lot of things could and should easily be moved to the realm of NPCs. Guild Card customisation for example is something IMO has pretty much no place in an obscure tab of the menu and giving it to an NPC in the Gathering Hub would be much better game design.

[mewlynx]

Layered weapons are bound to the weapon and aren't freely interchangable on a whim, you have to actually remove the layered effect to apply another. It would have been nice to just have it be unlocked similar to layered armor sets where you permanently unlock it to be used on any weapon in the class, but it's nothing major.

Event rewards do need to be more clear, but most of the time you can just read the description of the event and it'll say if it rewards a special material at the end. Iceborne events are better at this than base game was.

Quest difficulty rankings is pretty contrived, but it's nothing major. They could definitely make it more intuitive to understand as opposed to just having to rifle through each difficulty tier to find a specific quest, but honestly how often do you end up having to do that? If you do your optionals as they pop up, this is basically a non-issue.

Glaive UI is extremely straight forward, actually. Bowgun is a little more complicated but again, it isn't anything major. If anything, having to constantly be swapping between radial menus to craft ammo is the real learning curve.

[Egro]

UI have been terrible from the first game.

[ᔑᓭ∴ᔑリ⊣]

my least favourite part about the layered system is the inability to preview stuff... trying to make some fancy armour set but flicking back and forth between the two pages to mix & match the individual parts gets frustrating after a while lol. maybe im just too used to doing that from the actual smithy menu tho [shrugs]

[𝓇𝒾𝓃𝒶𝒶𝒶𝒶𝒶]

UI is indeed terrible and not very user friendly, it's one of those things that can really kill the game for new players. Sadly it's nothing new for the franchise and I'm willing to bet nothing will change in the future.

[AaronBurr42]

You don't like every part of the game? Your opinion is objectively wrong since Monster Hunter is perfect and any changes would be appealing to casuals.
But for real it's bad. I couldn't understand how the radial menu was supposed to be customized, which really held the game back for me during the first few dozen hours. The nested menus are probably more console-friendly, but kinda suck for PC players.

[Shang Tsung]

i like the ui .

[Malfeasance]

Originally posted by Bummer6:

you have low rank, high rank and master rank, then you have a star rating system ranging from 1-9 for low/high rank, and then a separate star rating system for master rank ranging from 1-6, and all of these star ranks relate to the difficulty. This honestly wasn't so convoluted before iceborne happened, because after that they basically just stapled on a brand new ranking system completely separate from the normal one which made the whole thing a little bit confusing when you're going back to find a specific quest.

Not sure if you've played previous games, but this is how the series has pretty much always been, except before G-rank and the online hub were split off from the single player in a completely different area. This is the first time to my knowledge they've not only not done that but also haven't re-released the initial game to include it, instead making it a downloadable DLC.

I personally don't have a problem with the UI as a whole, but skill proc notifications really get my goat. At the very least there should have been an option to hide these like almost everything else on the UI. It's a completely redundant system - I know when spare shot procs because of the ammo indicator on screen not going down. I know when peak performance is active because of the sound and particle effects as well as the fact that my health bar is full, and they could have just added a separate icon for it above your health bar with the rest of the indicators.

As of typing this I actually finally found a mod to remove them which I'll be installing as soon as I post this. I've looked before but I guess didn't phrase my searching correctly.

Besides that, the only other thing I'd wish for is a better deco organization system, because constantly going through the list is annoying. Granted I play with a controller anyway so maybe some of it is just that the menus being more designed for console in mind. This is the first Mon Hun on PC after all so there will be growing pains.

[Bummer6]

Originally posted by lexilogo:

The UI definitely isn't ideal, but one thing I would like to note: All Event Quests that say "Special Material Rewards" in their Quest Description are ones that provide something you can't get anywhere else like Tickets to craft specific items. This is still CERTAINLY not ideal as they could easily display the same information on these Quests that they do on the Capcom website (eg. "this quest drops lots of ores", "this quest has a higher chance for rare materials") but it's something.

There also IMO isn't any such thing as an "Optional mission that isn't worth your trouble" because for beating all LR/HR Optionals and MR Optionals both you get a unique extra Optional Quest. If it doesn't have the Completed mark next to it you should get around to doing it at some point.


I also don't think Insect Glaive is so bad as while Kinsect customisation being in its own Smithy menu is jank (it would make more sense if it had a unique vendor who said "Oh hey, this is a service for Insect Glaive users, don't bother with this if you prefer other weapons", as Kinsect upgrading isn't exactly something you do regularly), it really isn't any more complicated than upgrading other weapons.

Bowguns are another story, though there isn't that much more you can do as it's inevitably going to need a big spreadsheet to show all the different information you need to know when modding a bowgun.



If I had one simple suggestion for MHW's UI it's that a lot of things could and should easily be moved to the realm of NPCs. Guild Card customisation for example is something IMO has pretty much no place in an obscure tab of the menu and giving it to an NPC in the Gathering Hub would be much better game design.

Fair points all 'round. As I said, I never gave insect glaive or bowgun a try because from an outside perspective they look daunting, even though I'm sure that as you said, insect glaive probably isn't as complicated as it seems. If the kinsect stuff was moved to a separate NPC or was integrated a bit more smoothly, I probably wouldn't even have mentioned it.

Even if all optional quests are worth doing, I still would like to see what I will get from each one. It just seems a bit odd that you're expected to do all this extra stuff (some of which is literally just busywork, like carrying a thing from point A to point B without fighting anything or going from gathering node to gathering node finding a certain number of a certain item) without knowing what your reward is.

Thanks for taking the time to justify your points. You certainly offered some added insight that I did not have before.

[Bummer6]

Originally posted by Malfeasance:

Originally posted by Bummer6:

you have low rank, high rank and master rank, then you have a star rating system ranging from 1-9 for low/high rank, and then a separate star rating system for master rank ranging from 1-6, and all of these star ranks relate to the difficulty. This honestly wasn't so convoluted before iceborne happened, because after that they basically just stapled on a brand new ranking system completely separate from the normal one which made the whole thing a little bit confusing when you're going back to find a specific quest.

Not sure if you've played previous games, but this is how the series has pretty much always been, except before G-rank and the online hub were split off from the single player in a completely different area. This is the first time to my knowledge they've not only not done that but also haven't re-released the initial game to include it, instead making it a downloadable DLC.

I personally don't have a problem with the UI as a whole, but skill proc notifications really get my goat. At the very least there should have been an option to hide these like almost everything else on the UI. It's a completely redundant system - I know when spare shot procs because of the ammo indicator on screen not going down. I know when peak performance is active because of the sound and particle effects as well as the fact that my health bar is full, and they could have just added a separate icon for it above your health bar with the rest of the indicators.

As of typing this I actually finally found a mod to remove them which I'll be installing as soon as I post this. I've looked before but I guess didn't phrase my searching correctly.

Besides that, the only other thing I'd wish for is a better deco organization system, because constantly going through the list is annoying. Granted I play with a controller anyway so maybe some of it is just that the menus being more designed for console in mind. This is the first Mon Hun on PC after all so there will be growing pains.

While I am aware a lot of the things I complain about are things that have been in the series from the beginning, I don't think that means it's perfect and can't be improved. In fact, I'd say sequels should improve shortcomings of the previous titles, especially since MHW has managed to reach an audience that previous titles never touched, so it ends up being many people's first experience with the series.
I personally started with Monster Hunter Tri Ultimate on WiiU and many of my complaints apply to that game as well.

Not saying you're wrong to like the UI. If it doesn't bother you then that's great and I'm happy for you in that regard, but I definitely think there are things that could be done to smooth out the experience for people like me without harming the experience of people like you who don't mind the current interface.

[pRaX]

It's a Japanese console game. What did you expect? I hope we get something better with MHW2 but I wouldn't bet on it.