Buried away in a Pirates of the Burning Sea status update:
Another one of our new hires runs a full time usability/playability lab, where we bring in players to see what they think of the game. We’re also conducting tests of our new marketing materials, the new web site, etc. As you might expect, this kind of data is extraordinarily useful in fine tuning the game, and it’s extremely cool to watch our test scores constantly improving.
Awesome, and to the best of my knowledge, an industry first for independent MMO developers. But will said new hire have a job after launch?
Conventions are good. Assuming you’re targeting your game at an audience with a few shared game experiences under their belts, conforming to systems, controls, and UIs they’ve seen before is generally not a terrible idea, as long as you’re aware that what’s best for your game experience comes first.
So, uh, good old Ultima Online is getting a new UI in its latest expansion pack.
The interesting part is that it looks like they finally compartmentalized the inventory. No more hiding stuff from thieves by putting a book on top of it. The fact that there’s only one bag icon makes me think that you can still nest containers, though.
As long as you can still trap nested containers, it’s all good.
Wait, you can’t steal anymore, right?
It’s been a long, long time.
(via Kotaku)
“2+ years of WoW and I never knew …”
Fascinating thread. People have trouble with wholly undocumented inventory and vendor controls! A smaller set of those people have trouble with the wholly undocumented talent system! (Really, if you don’t know to look for it, that new button in the button bar at level 10 is hard to notice.) And a much smaller set of people have had trouble finding flight paths, and an even smaller set had trouble finding some out-of-the-way quest givers. Some people share some not-entirely-obvious ability interactions.
Some of these things are in the (relatively new) loading screen tips; others aren’t. Hopefully, it’ll make a good resource for future loading screen tips. Every game should have loading screen tips. Arcane, totally unintuitive shift-alt-click commands are handy, sure, but you need to know about them in the first place. I’d vote for more intuitive commands in general, but these shortcuts have a place too.
As devs, we should do this ourselves during beta. Ask the testers what they had to figure out on their own, and document it.
Is iPhone as revolutionary as claimed? Is the multi-touch interface truly breakthrough as claimed? Yes and no. Let’s take a look.
Tog on the iPhone.
I love the way that he integrates reader comments and updates within the article itself.
The rest of the site is a worthwhile read, too. Check out this 2005 list of worst “design bugs,” detailing problems from fighter jet weapon interface to menu item conventions. Here’s a great article about a dishwasher.
In other news, I took this picture of my front yard about half an hour ago. It was actually snowing, though it’s hard to tell. See also the ICEPOCALYPSE.
I haven’t left the house since Sunday evening, when I rushed out to buy Everquest 2 after learning (the hard way) that the Play the Fae trial doesn’t allow you to level past 10. MUST LEVEL.
Also, we’re running out of food.
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