The answer will be "we are aware of these issues but don't have time/don't give a damn", but whatever. Pox needs to have many design kinks ironed out. A flawed, incoherent design seems loveless, careless, thrown together. This entails: - Some of the interface seems modern in style (for example the rounded shapes of the artworks), but most seems more appropriate for a fantasy setting (like the straight lines used otherwise, or the simple square icons). You kinda need to throw out the modern parts or the design will always seem unfinished. - Another large part of that, to me, seems to be self-awareness of being a card game. Hearthstone went all-out with "this is a game about cards, not about real champions", while Pox kind of dosn't know what it wants to be. Personally, I think the nature of being a game should be emphasized more, for example by bringing back (optional) rune bases (ideally, multiple designs, like, circular, square, wood, metal ...). To pretend to be a "real deal" it would take a lot more graphical and animation fidelity, and far better sound assets. - A lot of the text is in hilariously ugly or unfitting fonts. The fonts should be legible, but also belong into a fantasy setting. The font the stat numbers are in, for example, is just awful. The main font that is used in the hover-over-popups and such is ... tolerable. It isn't great. - A design that catches the eye and remains memorable has to be unique and connected to what you are doing. Many games have the great feature where your interface design depends on your faction - a concept that would be perfect for Pox. I know that it would be an investment, but having eight different interface arts with faction-specific design elements - masks, leaves, thorns, whatever - would bring a lot of flair. - A lot of the rune sprite art is kind of neither here nor there, coming back to the reality-vs-game-awareness-thing. Especially the "new" 3D-runes just don't look like game pieces, they look like they wanted to look real and failed horribly. To be a bit more positive, the map art redos were a great step, imo. All of this is horribly rambled and not put together with a lot of care, because I know that nobody will listen much, but the general sense is there.
IMAGIRL has a superior thread for that, I was more trying to give a design and impression perspective.
Someone spoke about this before especially the need for ACTUAL costuminzation. When Gedden was talking to PS4 about the game he mentioned we could costumize our champions and in my head im like wtf is this guy talking about? I guess he meant abilities but there isn't ANY type of costumization at all unless you have the reskin version of a champ.. He also said garu cub will grow into a full sized bear? What?
That whole interview made me uncomfortable to be honest, gedden just looked nervous as hell. I really like the idea of a faction based interface. I'm not a fan of bringing back bases because it seems pox wants to steer clear of the concept of this being a tabletop game and more towards, hey this is a collectible card game. I don't mind the text font so much as I do text errors and things that are unclear in pox. The new maps with the flowing lava and the dark marsh map with the detailed water both seem to lag every time I play on them. At first I though maybe it's my graphics card or monitor, upgraded both too only find out its just pox things. Once they get that fixed, I'm assuming it had to do with the sound thing again, I would love some similar maps. I never really look at the figures in-game as I'm usually playing something else when I play pox. One thing I do look at though is the art on pox runes, which I loved when I first started playing years ago but when we introduce things like corgis I get annoyed. Good post though
Most of the UI is really old, there were some updates at some point, but most of the pieces are original UI and there are limited options with the old client in terms of functionality and placement. With the PS4 launch there'll be a new client with new UI so any UI discussion is kind of moot. That said, don't expect that to be perfect out of the gate, we are trying some new stuff and the UI has to also work for console. Pox Nora is, in a way, a tabletop simulator, and cards happen to be a good way to represent/visual stats and effects, but in terms of gameplay there is no reason why the champions are cards on a grid. They are miniatures. At some point, it was decided that bases made the game look archaic and old and they were removed. It's been one of those things that some people liked and some people don't. Don't think it makes a huge difference one way or another at this point. As explained in the other thread, adding the option is not easy, and would require writing an entirely new system to support dynamic bases and possibly rewriting some of the graphics renderer to facilitate that type of layering. It's not trivial. At the same time, these kind of options are used only if they are the default by the majority of players (75% of players in most games never even open the Options menu). We'd actually need a lot more than 8, because of splits - alternatively, we could have 8 and people just pick one, but again, this is the sort of feature that's "cool" to have, but functionally doesn't do much and most people would use the default. I don't know what you are talking with the rune sprite art - it's literally been the same method with the same artist for years now. Back around Maljaran Frontier there was some experimentation with 3D sprites such as Arctic Garu and Voil Progenitor, but there's less than a dozen of these. ~ If the PS4 launch goes well and Pox gets more players, a lot of these kind of things become less cost prohibitive to do (as the cost per user goes down the more players you have).
There's just one artist for all the sprites? Some look so good and some look ... not so good. I guess small sizes of sprites aren't as easy as big ones. I have big hopes for the PS4 launch, but it seems like a chicken-and-egg-problem: If the game looks fancy, more people will come and stay, but only if people have already come and stayed it becomes reasonable to make the game fancy ... I wish I could present some genius plan for getting around that right now, but I don't have one. I do hope you manage to, though. I'm glad that you are intentionally going with the miniatures-look (as opposed to realism; I hardly had the impression that there were so few 3D champions, they must have scarred me mentally). Maybe there is some elegant and relatively easy way to bring "flair" into the game. Maybe the skin of the main UI outside the games could provide the design space to make Pox more ... charming, more characterful? I dunno, I'm not a graphic designer.
I hope the new UI allows for a variety in map sizes. I think it was @Sokolov that once said all the maps are the same grid, just with different placement and obstacles that make them feel smaller or larger.
I am not sure on the maps, but I am pretty sure the answer is no because the game's understanding of the map structure would need to be reworked to understand a different size/shape.
+1, been wanting to have that for pox for years You have some players here that can do cool stuff with photoshop, if you made available the "UI" art someone might be able to make a cool looking faction specific one, for some kind of rune prize (like a legendary of the UI faction made), just an idea. It would still be too much work to add it tho
Keep in mind that if there were multiple skins for the UI, you'd need a system to be able to select it, etc.
