It is very difficult to read the Mana Counter and the Skill Points depending on the background color and / or when there is a buff or damage.
More than that, all numbers are too small to read.
Once you try to play on a mobile device, it gets worse: it is really hard to read them at all.
I don’t have a disability, and it is still difficult for me. More yet for a member of my guild that has one, and it is very hard for them to read those numbers.
Please @Nimhain , @Bramble give a Priority Status to this issue.
Thanks.
It looks shitty even on PC. Small numbers, green numbers on the green mana bg and so on. On mobile it’s probably absolutely awful. IDK how it was tested (if it was tested at all).
I am neurotypical and this card design is awful. It is VERY difficult to discern if traits are unlocked, or if a troop is charged or close. These need to be a lot easier to use. Once again breaking what didn’t need fixing.
The stars indicate unlocked traits, sure, BUT without the specific icons to indicate just WHICH traits those are you can easily end up doing stupid things like attempting to inflict status ailments on an Impervious target, etc.
Separating a Troop’s Mana Level from the Mana icon itself makes it actually EASIER to read when a troop is almost fully charged (recall that previously the total mana cost wasn’t shown, only the current level) so that is a net positive (other issues notwithstanding).
I am nearsighted, but as I get older my eyes are having a difficult time adjusting to things close up too. Almost everything is blurry to me now unless it’s 4 inches from my nose. I relied on the larger text from the old design to read the stats. Now the numbers are too small and they blend in with the colored background making them almost invisible to me during battles. To make matters worse, I play on the Nintendo Switch so everything is tiny and I’m sure those who play on their phones are even worse. Please give us the option to switch back to the old design or give us the option to at least make the text larger.
Joined the forum just to chime in on this, I cannot fathom why these visual changes have been made. The game is unplayable for me now, so I couldn’t in good conscience keep paying money for it.
This game is nothing like it once was when I first started playing it back in December of 2015. I wish I could go back to that version of the game when it was actually enjoyable and didn’t feel like a mindless grind with little to no return.
I think the developers couldn’t figure out the code to fix the bug with disappearing backgrounds/images in combat. Therefore, we decided to completely rewrite everything.
By the way, the rage animation (red circle) is in the old place, where the attack indicator is no longer there.
I agree that the new design is less accessible to people with visual disabilities, and perhaps just harder to read for most people in general.
If the new design is here to stay, I’d like to suggest that the vertical ribbons that contain each troop’s armor and life move from the outside of the screen to the inside, like they were before.
I am blind in one eye. Before the update I could easily monitor the troop’s stats, whilst focussing my sight on the gem board.
Now I have to make the game window much larger in order to read the smaller font. Plus I need to focus on a wider game area, as now the armor and life are on the far edges of the screen. It’s a small thing, but it makes battles slower as it takes me longer to see all the information I need.
If the ribbons can’t swap sides, another option would be to swap the positions of the armor/life and attack values. The attack value generally requires less monitoring, as it doesn’t change as often for most troops. The attack value is currently much easier to read (as it’s not coloured text on a coloured background), and it’s better positioned for readability (than the armor/life values).
I really don’t know who this change was for. I can see things fine but the whole thing looks awful from top to bottom. Who on earth was getting confused by what colour mana you need.
Another fantastic update as usual. Never seen a dev team that’s so out of touch with everything.
Holy cow. I was initially excited about some sort of Slay the Spire type dungeon crawl, but that went very quickly out the window once I got my first look at the new card layouts.
Let’s just go through some of the cardinal sins of design that were made:
Text color identical to color of background. Do I need to explain the cardinal sin here?
Icons on the card that are of no use after 5 seconds, and which are 100% useless in anything involving fully leveled cards. Yes, I’m talking about trait icons. They’re neither timely nor informative. They’re just clutter.
Color banners that are 100% redundant, given that the mana orbs show the mana colors. Instead, they just make it more difficult to read stats.
Class icons that are too small to see properly on a mobile device, so I’m clicking through the card anyway. Not to mention that the icons are not referenced anywhere (or at least nowhere I could find).
The most important texts (the stats) are scattered all over the place. Some on the side of the card, some on the bottom, and some at the top. Given that they all need to be monitored at the same time, it would be handy to have them easily readable in one spot. Or at least only two.
Colors are still often nearly impossible to distinguish. Is that blue or green? Brown or purple? Or maybe even red? I’ve memorized most of the ones I need, since I use only about 2-3 dozen cards total these days, but man - for a newcomer, this must be hell.
Constant flashing across nearly half the card when the mana card is full. Which would be nice if it meant I needed to immediately take action, but often I do not. Often, I actually touch that card only once. Sometimes, it’s just there for the traits, and I don’t touch it all. So I have just eternal flashing on my card.
Card descriptors that actually don’t fit on the card anymore. I really hope we never get a card type that is longer than Elemental, because then any dual type is actually impossible to read. Right now, I’m just glad (again) that I know every type for all my core cards.
Trait icons that are identical, but reference different traits. All in all, a rather minor issue (at least compared to the existing ones), but that is still considered a cardinal sin of design.
Congratulations, you broke nearly every single design rule there is. The prize? A card-based game where the information on the cards themselves range from cluttered to difficult to read to actually hidden by other UI elements.
I’ve been playing since the game first came out, across many iterations. It was fun, even when the only modes that existed were PvP, Exploration, and Treasure Hunt, and the only thing you could do with cards was level them and add traits.
Having to squint at cards to figure out just what information they may be hiding is not fun. It’s just torture. I don’t care about the grind to get stuff because the game is (or at least was) fun, but I do care that the actual gameplay just became actually painful.
I may just take a break from it.
And just as a jab at the owners of the dev shop: congratulations, you found out why UX/UI designer is an actual job with actual job requirements that can’t be handed off to just anybody with access to Photoshop. You may actually kill the game with this mistake.
new interface causes eye fatigue in anything but very short bursts, and physical pain if I try to push past it at a stretch. I never knew “eyesore” could be such a literal word.
just more evidence that this dev team legitimately doesn’t care.
In retrospective, it appears, that Bramble was hired earlier this year, so that all the other staff members can be moved over to the new game or be cut out.
And our new mod is clearly still too fresh to handle this mess in any other way than by staying out of the line of fire.
An additional small bit about this:
If we did get an official statement, it would be something along the lines, how happy the team is about the overwhelmingly positive feedback (I think, somewhere in one of the larger threads, one user mentioned, that they love the new design), and that they won’t let that be overshadowed by the cries of a “vocal minority”.
According to their calculations, the game has 7-8 million users, if I remember that correctly, so even if we got a couple of thousand users here to say, that it’s horrible, they would still dismiss it as a fraction.
And I can’t forget about that time years ago, when a moderator mentioned, what a “funny coincidence” it is, that there are so many new forum accounts just to criticise a new update, suspecting that all of them are sock puppets. That line left a worse taste with me than the update itself (and, if I remember correctly, it was the '17 graphic downgrade, which I hated, so that’s a high bar to clear).
In case, it isn’t a “Sorry, we messed this up completely, we will revert it as soon as possible” (and that surely won’t happen), what would you hope for in an official response, maybe even from the secluded development itself?
Corporate babbling?
Blaming the users?
Doubling down on the trolling by releasing a couple of insulting troops, aimed at the loudest critics?
I just can’t trust them anymore to make something not worse by whatever actions they take.
Totally agree with you as someone whose eyesight isn’t all that good even with glasses. The devs should realize that not everyone who plays GoW is 16 with 20/20 eyesight and no health issues.
Is the design by mistake? I agree with all your design points, but something with this many mistakes couldn’t have been done without a plan. If they don’t want to support the game any more, that’s fine. To deliberately sabotage it, isn’t.