First impressions thread

[Chieron]

I get that y'all are using floats, but rounded numbers at 0 showing as positive and negative in the UI is everywhere:

View attachment 1393870

Showing the absolute value with 4 digits and the difference with 2 digits is also a weird idea. Why is this not unified?

 

[Lamisatr]

I agreed with you on this but you should know there is actually a big divide in the community about this idea of "instant feedback". There's a very vocal faction of "hardcore" simulationists who believe the player should be able to only carefully nudge their country in the desired direction and engage in "society gardening". This was actually a big sticking point when Imperator: Rome was released. Johan designed a game with instant actions: spend mana and move pops from one location to another, spend mana and instantly convert culture. This design was blamed for poor reception of I:R and then they had to redesign it where you had to carefully massage migration rates and assimilation modifers to achieve the same thing after years passed in game. So now Johan went in completely opposite direction and basically created (another) Victoria game where you engage in gardening your tag. I expect many players will bounce off hard after experiencing this game design.

The UI is going to make people bounce off as much as anything.

 

[mrflagio]

For those I would think that the delta value will always be small so it would make more sense to see the 'current value' as the numbers and have a green up or red down arrow if it is changing. This would remove the need for the bar allowing for more space for the icon and value.

I've had the game paused for 2 hours now while I try to figure out stuff and just now realized that the estate satisfaction icons don't even show their current satisfaction level as a number, but instead as the tiny colored bar underneath. Is this a joke?

Honestly, at a glance, which of these is 50%? Which is 60%? Which is greater? Who knows.

 

[Palna Thoke]

The UI is going to make people bounce off as much as anything.

Well that shouldn't be surprising for them considering how many people complained about UI problems throughout development. It just seems they never took the complaints serious enough.

 

[exalter]

Because it was essentially an admission that EU5 is to complicated for a human mind to manage.

Speak for yourself because I'm built different

 

[AChangeInTempo]

Personally I love the UI, it’s a lot of fun to click through, the sound effects are fun and it’s pretty informative. I don’t know how anyone could think the music is Meh I absolutely love it and I have it on repeat at all times, can’t wait to keep playing

 

[Agostinos]

The UI is the worst I have ever seen. There is no excuse. Can't even look at the map, it is all flooded with map activities from other nations. Truely disgusting to look at and play with.

 

[Merrivale]

I agree that in my extremely limited play so far--the UI is a big obstacle. Going back to buildings (no screenshots, sorry).

Take the task flow of I want to see what buildings I have in a particular province, so I click on it. (We've seen this screenshot up thread). OK now I want to build some more buildings, so I see the building icon in the middle of the screen, that when I hover over it, tells me how many buildings there are in this location. Great--let's click on it. Except you can't, it does nothing.

That's a small example from limited gameplay but I'll say this to the entire Tinto team: you are going to get extremely detailed and useful suggestions on how to improve the UI from this forum in the coming weeks. I'd highly suggest listening to them and implementing them fast. Because I also agree some folks are just going to bounce off this game and not come back (their loss I think). I've been playing Paradox games for essentially 25 years and I can tell you that it is going to take me hours just to figure out how to do basic things in the game (like build a building in a specific province).

 

[Muntril]

Loving the music, but I think the main tracks are too loud and/or the ambient tracks are too quiet. I really love the soloist instrumental pieces, but then after turning up the volume I get blasted by intense orchestra!

 

[Álvaro Núñez de Lara]

Im absolutely LOVING IT!

Playing as Castille thinking it would be even easier than eu4. BIG MISTAKE. Had to white peace against aragon and Portugal. No reason to go continue the war when i was gonna get like 200 antagonism for taking the throne of Aragon.

Then I conquer all of granda ans two provinces morth of Africa. Coalition eeclared on my. Mid black death. Levies getting decimated, I cannot win the war, I need to protect my coast until white peace

The Black death is decimating my economy.

I havent had this much fun playing eu Castile since Eu4 came out.

People giving a bad review need to go touch grass.

 

[Strompator]

I kid you not.
My 10 year old daugther just came into my study to say goodnight. She sees my screens and comments: "Oh, you're playing an old game? Is that an old version of that map game that you're usually playing?"
I have to agree. It looks old and most importantly, it feels old, static, and clunky.

Nevertheless, I try not to be negative. I felt overwhelmed when I first played EUIV too, and now it's second nature. Of course it doesn't help that the game crashed before I unpaused. But alas, I'm in for the long ride.

Out of the mouth of babes.......

OOF......that's rough

 

[Metropolitan]

My first impression is the map is absolutely beautiful.

I spent my first 2 hours not even playing, just looking at everything on it.

 

[todes22]

I questioned a lot of design choices before launch and now that I played it, I question them still.

- It's a boring slog. You press buttons and then things will eventually happen. Problems will occur and you won't have any idea how to fix them.

- It's opaque. There were commands I could use, the UI seemed to tell me I could do them. But the "okay" button was greyed out. When I hovered over to understand why? No information.

- too many provinces. When you have 200 of something, each individual piece becomes indistinct. It's like stellaris' ships: can you remember any of your ships in Stellaris? Probably not.

- why does the game need to simulate hours? It's not HOI4. It bogs down the game and what does it achieve? Well, like most things in the game, it might be important, but I don't know.

- Automation is a flaw, not a success. If you are saying your game is too complex to play, then that's a mistake. It's an amateurish mistake, because simple design is masterful. Complex design is someone who didn't understand how to make it simple. Beyond that, it's another button you can press and not understand if it does anything.

Paradox, you need to hear this because you've been making this mistake pretty consistently in your titles since Stellaris: PLAYERS NEED CLEAR, AND INSTANT FEEDBACK ON THEIR ACTIONS. If the result of their actions is only going to be apparent 30 minutes after they've taken the action, the players *will not* remember what they did to cause that. If you expect the player to make an informed decision, they need reliable information feedback. And you do want that, that's why you got into developing strategy games for a living.

I played this game for 2 hours, as a person who has spent decades playing Paradox game and other highly involved strategy games and I was just bored. Is this game going to be good in like 2-3 years? Hopefully. Because it's not good yet.

You can’t remember things you’ve done 30 minutes ago?

 

[Verenti]

You can’t remember things you’ve done 30 minutes ago?

Yes, if I have done hundreds of things in the past 30 minutes, I can't accurately catalogue them all as to be able to interrogate which ones might have had the effect I am currently trying to understand.

 

[juanfegonzalezce]

Nothing was changed in most of South America from the first Tinto Maps to the game, unfortunately

 

[doken]

View attachment 1394069

This image is amazing. The tiny and blurry unclear icons, all the misaligned and uncentered tabs and icons, the ugly brown everywhere, everything is all over the place...

Paradox, do you want to hire someone with basic UI design knowledge? I'm offering myself as an employee

There are misaligned text, columns, icons, font sizes, etc. all over the UI, giving it a very amateur and messy look.

I don't care that much because they are easy fixes, but they are annoying, specially because we've been telling them for months and that feedback has been largely ignored.

 

[Purg]

Me: "Tutorial? I don't need a tutorial."
Me five minutes later: "All right now where was that tutorial?"

As for music it's pretty much a blend of absolute bangers with 'background music', but overall I like it. The main theme is the bomb.

The odd thing I found with the 'tutorial' is that it's turned off by default. I had to quit my game, enable missions and start a new one?

 

[Aquila SPQR]

I watched quite a lot of videos, but... I had no idea how to build buildings I spent few minutes trying to find out how to build something new in one of my rural locations.

But overall it's a blast.

And I had to change my rule. Speed 1 is way too slow, for peace speed 3 is new speed 1.

 

[lo24681]

I was having a tough time figuring out military as England, so I switched over to Castile to figure it out.

 

[uberjedi]

I played Sweden. Not understanding anything and not having gone through any tutorial, I declared war on Wolgast, like the idiot I am. I eventually raised an army, and only later figured out how to assign a leader, and won a couple of battles. Then the game crashed.

Did I learn anything? Not likely.