So I’ve been enjoying Darktide and while I appreciated the increase of information available to us players coming from the betas I still think there’s room for improvement. I got the impression that Fatshark’s response to a call for more information was to give all us a bunch of data mashed together while at the same time leaving out others.
I have some experience in UI and UX design so I did some analysis of what we have now and made some restructuring for fun (I actually enjoy this kind of thing) with the goal of cleaning up the clutter while keeping true to the developers artistic vision. Here’s the mockups I ended up with, I’ll try to explain my reasoning as we go along. This is basically a crosspost from Reddit x)
The image above and the one below are the current melee and ranged weapon layouts. It feels a bit cluttered with all the new information, with unordered data of varied importance and instances of duplicate information. My guess is that the list of “Additional Data” is a temporary solution since ranged weapons have the same properties as melee in addition to their own unique ones. Fatshark probably gave us a list of all the weapon data as a failsafe.
There’s also nothing to indicate to the player what can be clicked on, we call this a signifier, so the player is left guessing. This is particularly problematic when there’s an update that adds more things to click on, meaning elements that couldn’t be interacted with all of a sudden can. I experienced this in the middle of me working on this.
My first thought was that the UI could benefit from tooltips that only show up when holding the mouse over the relevant element. I’m not familiar with the game engine but when I started working I found the melee weapons now had mouseover tooltips for the attacks in their attack chains as seen below, although the original tooltip was located above the icon. I think this is a relatively new addition but I might just have missed it earlier.
I moved the tooltip to the middle between the frames, which Fatshark themselves has done in recent updates for other mouseover tooltips but more on this later. I decided to use this tooltip as the base for the rest of the layout and ended up using the color of the attack icons as signifier for what affords tooltips on mouseover.
As a general rule I prefer to have important data that has a tendency to vary collected in one block or area so I rearranged the order of the modifiers, perks and blessings so that the properties that are most likely to vary, damage and modifiers, were adjacent to each other. This is helpful in lightening the player’s cognitive load while browsing several weapons.
Coincidentally (probably not) this resulted in the stat blocks matching the order they have in the regular weapon view which is beneficial to the player experience as a unified location for the same data makes it easier for the player to quickly find the information they’re looking for.
Coming from the betas, the weapon tag description was a welcomed change. However, it’s not really needed to have access to the entire text block at a glance and so it ends up decreasing readability as a whole. In the image above you can see I moved the current tags and description to a mouseover tooltip and used the tags from the other weapon view instead, with the addition of colored text to signify mouseover affordance.
The text explaining Marks and their different stats is also incredibly useful, but as with the tags it’s not necessary to have at a glance all the time and you can see in the image above that I moved the text to a mouseover tooltip, just like I did with the tags. I experimented with colored text as signifier but it ended up too cluttered when put together with the different stats, instead my idea here was an arrow with the signifier color. This was intended to be used by both modifier title and the different stats.
I do think Fatshark dropped an update with some more mouseover tooltips in the middle of me working with this. You can see it in the image below, it’s the orange box around the damage stat, and I quite like it! However, there’s still no signifiers to show players that the stats can now yield a tooltip so I added an alternative to the arrows I mentioned above. This option is based on the green frames used elsewhere in the game UI, although with the signifier color instead.
It’s worth mentioning that the color I chose as signifier is rather problematic in the established color scheme when it comes to different types of color blindness. As a general rule I like to have symbols, rather than just color, for such important things as directions. However, continuing on the orange frame, it could perhaps be used for all cases. That is framing the icons as well as the words that would yield a mouseover tooltip.
Many blessings give buffs or beneficial properties but it’s not always clear what they do. These could be explained with the help of mouseover tooltips and in the image below you can see that I added two such blessings as an example. Here I highlighted the key word with the signifier color, like how I did with the weapon tags. The same principle could be extended to other parts of the game UI such as Scab or Dreg killing contracts, where the player could mouseover the target enemy and get a descriptor.
As for the list of “Additional Data”, I collected them in the main stat block again with one row for normal melee and two for ranged, see ranged below. Together with the stat rearrangement, this allows for easy access to the most important, yet varying, information at a glance.
I also reused the attack chain tooltips for the weapon special and moved its description into it. This, together with the removal of the “Additional Data”, created enough room in the right frame so we could bring back the LORE section again. Yay! I appreciated the increase in information from the beta but the loss of the story element describing the weapon made me a bit sad, but now we can have both data and lore!
Lastly, I think the action breakdown page, you can find it by pressing TAB while inspecting a weapon, can be moved to the main screen and placed in the attack tooltips, as shown below. The breakdown page does allow for clicking the icon and then interacting with the table, but I see no reason why that functionality couldn’t be moved to the main screen, only more possibilities. I’m a sucker for nestled tooltips.
That’s it! If you made it past the wall of text, I don’t think I’ve ever made a post this long but I wanted to explain the reasoning behind the layout. Overall, I think this restructuring allows for the most important data at a glance and in-depth info a mouseover away! While still maintaining the same style as the current layout as it’s mostly just rearranging existing elements, the developers have enough on their plate as it is.
Feel free to come with feedback, I’ve played the earlier Tide titles but I’m not what you’d call a pro so I might put importance on the wrong type of information, although in that case it may still be important for beginners and intermediates.
Also, I apologize for the watermarking but it’s a downer when you put time into something only for someone to present it as their own. Probably not too hard to remove if you really put your heart into it though x)
EDIT: I fixed the image names so you don’t have to look at my poor naming conventions x)