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Which mmorpg has the best UI?
withintempt
Member Posts: 75
I was curious what game you thought has the best user interface. There are a lot of features to take into consideration like hotkey bar, health/mana bars, mini map, text, etc.
This is my ranking from best to worst UI for some of my favorite games:
1. Allods (Known for having a really clean interface. Character portrait in top corner with not too much confusing stuff. The chat box is also nicely sized in bottom corner and can be increased if needed. Some games have UI covered by chat box. Only thing UI doesn't have is mini map although it's been said that a mini map isn't needed since there is a build-in map)
2. Guild Wars (This was close to being my #1 pick as the UI looks pretty smooth. I remember there being a lot of red and blue on colors on the UI so maybe I'm getting confused with the health bars of Diablo 2)
3. Flyff (Simple game with simple interface. I really like Flyff's chat system and private window messaging system. I haven't seen any other MMO's with this function).
4. Perfect World (It's not that they had lots of skills or hotkey bars but it was so small. Most of the UI text that showed up was pretty small and it was hard to read things sometimes. Also felt kind of choppy but maybe it was my computer.)
5. FF11 (I didn't play FF11 too long but I rememer the chat always scrolling and taking up a lot of room. This was one of the first MMOs I've played so I would have to go back and try it again, but I always see random screenshots and seems like too much going on in the UI that it's distracting).
Comments
World of Warcraft has the best UI and main reason I say that is they allow addons and you can do whatever you want to it, same goes for Runes of Magic. Lotro has very nice UI but no addons as far as I know. I found Aion UI ugly and FFXIV the worst of all hands down.
edit: Forget Age of Conan that's another example of bad UI.
My favorite UIs for games I played: WoW
Why Wow: The basic UI is easy to use, easy to find everything, and looks clean. Addons can make it look cleaner. Pretty much any game that allows you to customize it with addons is good. The negative with wow's UI is that the Basic UI can't be moved around, if you know what I mean. If you could move around the basic UI, for people that can't use an Addon for whatever reason, it would be the overall best UI. Recently it became better, because you can make the basic UI buttons and stuff smaller, one of the biggest complaints was that there wasn't much room to see, especially for healers.
My Least favorite: Eve.
Its not horrible, as you can easily find everything you need, but it can get crowded, and looks like a mess, lol. I don't know if there are addons for it. The UI sometimes makes it look like a browser game, if you know what I mean.
-I want a Platformer MMO
unmoded straight default ui i liked the best was Warhammer's It had bugs but its structure and look i really liked.
WoW of course for its modability is great
UI's i like the least would be LotRO it loks cheap and plastic and lacks functionailty and of course FFXIV has a hideously clunky, laggy deep menu poopoo of an UI
WoW is the best.
WoW, and WoW's UI is the most responsive UI I've seen. A lot of games put me off because of the disconnect. They have sluggish UIs and I hardly feel like my toon is being controlled. It's more like I'm making suggestions and he'll get around to it when he has the chance. Secretly, I think he works for the cable company....
Guild Wars
Simple and clean. I absolutely hated the cluttered UI of wow.
Aye, i agree.
And personally i liked EQ2 too, it got everything players need straight out of the box.
WoW tough while modding is fun, in the end the UI killed the game for me with all those mods required for raiding that tell me every step i need to do.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
WoW for allowing it's costumers to use addons to get rid of their horrible UI.
Then probable CoX/GW.
I get that you don't like the look of LotRO's UI, that's your opinion. The "lacks functionality" part is a bit far fetched, though. I think the UI for LotRO is pretty fluid and very functional.
The props, at least for me, for best UI, would have to be WoW. The sheer amount of mods that are available to customize your experience is very nice. It's very responsive and easy to use.
GW for me as well. I tried WoW for a while, but the skill bar is just inappropriately large. Hell, all games that let you fill multiple bars with skills and require compound key short cuts is just bad imo. Another thing I like about the GW UI is that the party/group health bars are in a box with no empty space in between them. When I played WoW targeting team mates didn't exactly work out well for me.
If I were to include unreleased games, I would pick GW2, for the same reasons as GW1 (simple easy to find all the stuff I need on the screen), and Tera. Ill never buy Tera, but from what I can tell, it has a simple UI as well. All targeting is done by a crosshair, and a skill bar in the corner with a good number of skills but not the insame number that WoW type games have.
I used to TL;DR, but then I took a bullet point to the footnote.
the best way to kill a troll is to FLAME ON! ...or with acid...
Probably wow/warhammer or games that let you customize your UI.
The thing is you can make the UI anyway you want. How's that not the best UI.
hehe darkfall
The following statement is false
The previous statement is true
It needs to be minimal, clean, and simple. WoW and Eve would rank as the worst in that catagory.
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Your kidding right? Darkfall is a great game behind terrible UI and controls.
Of course he's kidding! In fact, as soon as I seen the name of this thread I was going to say darkfall (also as a joke) but he beat me to it.
GW UI for me too. Clean, bug free, smart quick-to-read icons, one can draw to the map, smooth and effective target calling, ability to broadcast your state ("I am BLEEDING." or "I have BACKFIRE on me!"), custimizable... Best I've seen, I'd say.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I dont consider Guild Wars 1 really a MMO, but whatever. In any case it had no good interface. You only got 8 abilities and thats it. Very primitive.
I have never played WoW or even seen anyone playing it, but from what I heard, its an awful mess. You can program it completely, so playing results in single button mashing. Yay how challenging.
I really prefered the approach of Vanguard. It was a very configurable UI, but you couldnt macro too much, because one button could only cause one action in the end (you could do a lot of work beforehand, though, like selecting a person or wielding a different weapon etc).
You really should inform yourself better since that is very much not true. You can program the heck out of the UI for information display but actual actions and targeting require player input.
LOTRO has LUA addons with the API in a Beta since it went F2P. Currently there are addons that help with hotbar arrangments and also things like a health/mana HUD style deal and some reactive/buff displays.
Anyway as long as I can rearrange it and apply skins I really don't differentiate that much between games. Very few deafult UI are to my tastes and its mostly taste and tastes that tend to vary alot between people. Of course some UI just suck.
I also prefer GW's default to WoW or LOTRO default as its clean and smooth.
However with the right skin I can make LOTRO look just as clean and its ability to move all its elements around is basically exactly the same as GW.
One huge issue with WoW/LOTRO vs GW is hotbars/skill buttons. GW has 8. period. LOTRO and WoW you have 50 bajillion and you gotta put em somewhere. In order to make LOTRO even close to as clean button wise I gotta jump through a lot of hoops with LUA addons like TonicBars and KragenSlots to get a minimal set and even then its still triple to quadruple what GW would have (unless I am playing my Warden, gambits cut down on clutter by an order of magnitude)
Elegance is not primitive. Quite to opposite. Layer upon layer of kludged on skills is the definition of primitive.
War or City of Heroes. They were easy to customize. City of Heroes really rock in that you could bidn or macro so much in game.
Worst - DF, AoC, and FFXIV.
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