Most MMO gamers rank the user interface, commonly called the UI, as a pretty important MMO feature. In fact, I’d go as far to say that a good UI is almost crucial to a successful MMO in today’s gaming universe. The UI determines how you see the game world, and how you control it. If the UI’s too blocky and huge, it’s hard to see what’s going on around your character. If it’s lacking any information, you risk running around blind.
So what makes a perfect UI? That’s a hard question to answer. Most players are rather particular when it comes to what exactly they want their UI to do. Some players enjoy a very minimal UI with a large viewing area, and others enjoy as much information on their screen as possible. Most players will tailor their UI to their class, role, and what type of gameplay they enjoy. A raider’s UI may look entirely different from a PvPer’s UI, for example, or it may look exactly the same. The galaxy’s the limit when it comes to what players imagine as their ideal UI setup.
When it comes to UIs, usually the first example provided is World of Warcraft’s UI, and for good reason. The default classic WoW UI was pretty clunky, so players began to customize the hell out of it using addons. One of the best features of WoW is possibly its extensive UI customization. RIFT also did a fantastic job with their customizable in-game UI, and now have enabled addons as well.
It’s not uncommon for WoW players to spend hours tweaking every little UI feature, to get it just so. The system grants everyone a little creativity in their gameplay, and creative options are always good when it comes to MMOs. The addon system in itself is largely debated, but that’s another topic for another time.
Now, where does that leave Star Wars: The Old Republic? Not in a perfect position. Player addons are not in currently, which would be fine if the basic UI was fully customizable, but that’s the problem. It’s not. We’ve seen the UI in multiple gameplay videos by now, so we have an idea of what it looks like, but it isn’t nearly customizable enough.
All players benefit from a customizable UI, but for the purposes of this two-part article I want to divide the roles up and discuss different portions of SWTOR’s UI that benefit the different roles. For this week, let’s focus on tank and DPS UIs.
Here’s an example of the UI in its current implementation, in a raid setting. The dialogue box auto-hides when there’s no chat going on, which is a nice feature about the default TOR UI. Its location is the top left-hand corner, which I am not a fan of. It can be adjusted and moved somewhat, but it’s difficult to find a different place for it, since everything else on the screen, besides the raid frames, do not move.
The bottom left-hand corner is reserved for your companion unit frame. In the raid screenshots, these don’t exist. The center unit frames and action bars are not adjustable, except to add a second action bar. Optional action bars can go on the left and right edges of the screen. The map is in the bottom right-hand corner along with the somewhat-large tooltip window. Both are stuck in place. Luckily their location is pretty good. The top center bar doesn’t move, although its location is pretty easy to get used to.
There are a couple good things about the UI setup, some of which I mentioned already. Besides the auto-hide on the chat box, I really like the fact that there’s a lot of free space on the screen. I also like the fact that the character and target unit frames are where they’re at, and that the cast time bar is directly above them. I never understood why MMOs like to start off with these frames on the upper right and left-hand corners. These frames are generally the main focal points during combat, besides your character. Having them directly below the character is the easiest way to keep an eye on them.
I also like the fact that we’re given fairly large buff/debuff icons. The timers on all of the icons is also awesome, although I would prefer the timers to be actual numbers instead of approximated bars. The buff/debuff icons look like they only display your own buffs and debuffs, which is both good and bad. As a tank, I sometimes actually like seeing other players’ debuffs on my target.
TOR’s raid frames, shown in the above screenshot on the top right, seem decent for the purposes of tanking and DPSing. They’re movable and re-sizable, which is good. I like the size of the health and energy bars– not too large, but there. I always like to keep an eye on the energy levels of my healers. The font the entire UI utilizes is honestly a little hard for me to read at times. It would be nice to have the option to increase the size of some of the text.
Here’s my big gripe. As a player who generally tanks, I have fallen in love with the target-of-target frame. And SWTOR doesn’t have one.
This is an old WoW screenshot of mine where you can see it pretty well. It’s the smaller pink unit frame between my character/target frames. You can see from it that my goofy Paladin has aggro on good ‘ol Drek’thar. In most MMOs, target-of-target is an optional part of the UI, but I found that once I tried it, I was unable to go back to playing without it.
If you’re DPSing, it lets you know when tanks change targets, or when a mob’s coming your way. It’s also good for assisting. If you’re tanking, it lets you know when the other tank takes aggro if you’re doing aggro switches, and it lets you know instantly if you lose threat on a target. Generally, if you’re quick on the draw, you can taunt the mob back before it even reaches the player who has its attention.
Target-of-target is also fantastic for healing and PvP. So why the heck isn’t it in SWTOR? I assume it will be post launch, and hopefully it will be. I see no reason why they can’t put one in.
Speaking of post launch, there’s one more feature I need to touch on, and that’s the combat log. At this last Fansite Summit, Georg Zoeller address the combat log, stating that it isn’t in SWTOR currently, but that it’s very high priority, and there’s a chance that it may make it in for launch. I hope so. A combat log is extremely useful for players. It helps players design specs, report bugs and feedback, and make the most of their characters in general.
Zoeller also stated that BioWare loves it when players crunch numbers, which is nice to hear, but it’s kind of hard to do so without a combat log. It’s a shame we have to wait until post launch for some of these features. At least BioWare seems to hear our pleas. In time, the path will be illuminated.
Stay tuned next week for Part 2, where I go into some healer UI specifics.
LET'S GET SOCIAL