Guild Wars 2

Crazy to see how a single persona managed to change the UI to be so much better than the original, which was made by a team at an established company. Fantastic job, especially on the dyes.

Something in between would be nice. I definitely like the hero panel redesign. I like the interactivity of LFG, noting that solo rewards have been claimed, etc. I do think the website needs to come back more towards what we currently have. It’s a little too busy. Overall, a good suite of ideas.

Oh my god, the lore page! It would be absolutely amazing to have a little book of all the characters, items, locations, and lore bits you unlock as you play.

Like, if you find a book, it should unlock for you in the lore page, or unlock a character page during Personal Story. kitten , it’s so essential especially when the lore in Guild Wars is so deep.

I like the idea of the lore panel the most. I’d especially love to read up on more lore on gw2 in game, rather than relying only on fan information or even just speculation for the most part. It would be cool if ANet gave us official lore around legendary weapons in particular, because right now all they are, are shiny weapons with no real story behind them.

It would also be cool if they included GW1 lore as well, so that players who never played GW1 could get a better idea of the overall history of the world they are playing in.

Hi Gradinar! I’ve made a deeper look on your design’s points, goals and flaws.
The very first thing that I’ve seen clearly is the compactivity of the panels, which are great changes for experienced players, but not for the casual “coming by” kind of players this game, Guild Wars 2 aims at.

The point you may misunderstood from the current UI is the clarity, which intended to minimalise the confusions and supposed to speed up any process made whitin these window panels. When a not-so-expert user wants to reach a specific option, it works out better if there is a clear logic hierarchy to go through instead of trying to find a specific icon/area not memorised deep enough. Another problems are the lack of features needs UI complexivity and the smoothness of gameplay doesn’t require as frequent edits/views in these panels as your design is for.

The Lore UI & Living World website concept is just Amazing. I’ve seen these designs elswhere some years ago as a concept of Next Gen designs, and you’ve implemented it very well.
Apart from some UI elements I would minimalise, like drop-boxes, your work should be used in the creation of an upgraded UI that is selectable to use.
To be honest, I would use it.

-
“Royal Predator”
Game Designer

I can’t really say I like to toooo much.
Some elements are nice, but overall, 3 things annoy me:

• Everything is dark, dark, dark. Including the website stuff. I don’t much like dark, an optional dark mode for a website makes sense but we’re not trying to be Age of Conan here, GW2 has red and white as significant colors (see box art).
• Too much stuff cramped into too little space. This is the problem of the current UI, but I feel you made it worse, especially on the hero screen. It’s ok to have entirely separate screens for things. If needed, make a text-only detailed-statistics screen to sum up gear and stats and everything for someone who really wants to know the details.
• Too many tabs and dropdowns. A problem the current UI also has, and it adds to the visual overload. Rather have more windows and frankly, just have some elements flat out removed. It’s a fallacy to believe that everything should always be available readily. I’d rather work around the issue with game design than completely overload my GUI.

Windu The Forbidden One.6045:

It’s a shame this suggestion just slowly fell into oblivion.

hey mount threads don’t spam themselves.

Prototypemind.4026:

Something in between would be nice. I definitely like the hero panel redesign. I like the interactivity of LFG, noting that solo rewards have been claimed, etc. I do think the website needs to come back more towards what we currently have. It’s a little too busy. Overall, a good suite of ideas.

Yeah, some good ideas and some ideas that aren’t so good. But still ANet could take a look and see what they like and don’t like.

Avascar.9237:

Oh my god, the lore page! It would be absolutely amazing to have a little book of all the characters, items, locations, and lore bits you unlock as you play.

Been going on about that for two years now… please ANet

Awesome job. The dungeon part is too visually for me, but generally I like everything you’ve done. I hope ANet is at least getting ideas from you.

The UI designs are very well done, and much needed over the current.

PookieDaWombat.6209:

amax.8034:

Hi guys,

I’m a Senior UX UI designer and I’ve been playing GW2 since the betas, with long breaks in-between and since I’ve spent quite a lot of hours with this game, I’ve noticed some flaws in the games UX (user experience) and thus I decided to tackle it in order to diversify my portfolio. This lead me to redesigning some of the in-game UI’s & the official website.

Basically, let’s say that Anet was working on something similar to what you’ve presented to them here, they might have to shelve it now or risk having to compensate you in some way, even if they’d been working on it first since you could argue your work gave them these ideas even if that wasn’t the case.

Well if they were working on something like this then I don’t have a problem them using the concept, as this would benefit both parties, but they need to reach out if they are interested in using it and a compensation isn’t required as this was done more for fun as I love what I do and thought to give something back to the community.

Also thank you to all who continued to share the opinion in the last 24 hours since I posted the new information. I really appreciate it guys.

Some clarifications

Technical I’m not familiar with the technical limitations of the current system they have in place thus I didn’t take it into consideration, if this would have been a real project then I would have collaborated with other departments to come up with a solution, but since I’m not familiar with their tech I just assumed it could get implemented without affecting fps, since I do agree that fps is more important then a UI.

Hero Panel this thread is over 5 pages now and I noticed some people like the new redesign and some don’t. I also noticed the most common reason why people didn’t like the Hero Panel was the fact that it was considered to be too cluttered and some of you mentioned it would intimidate new users. I totally agree with this and in fact that’s why in my original presentation I proposed a concept that in a nut-shell hid some of the slots/features for new players and gradually unlocked them as they level up, thus slowly getting accustomed to the ui. Based on this project I learned that the best approach would be to have two options a more clean and a more advanced version in order to meet both user groups and actually build a more user-centric product.

Refinement just a heads up, the UI would definitely need more improvements and testing, however since I don’t have the resources or data gathering tech as ANet has that’s all I can do for now, since without actual data I won’t be able to clearly refine it as there always be certain things that some of the +1 million players would dislike or really like.

Hire this guy Thank you to all who suggested hiring me, unfortunately I’m based in Europe and for me to relocate to the US, although would be a dream, it would involve a lot of costs on their part that I’m aware of. This project also generated some awareness in the gaming community and was approached by some recruiters from big companies, so hopefully it will go well.

Thank you once again to all who contributed to the discussion, it’s really overwhelming to think that a design I made in my free time got so much exposure, for this I thank you guys.

PookieDaWombat.6209:

Basically, let’s say that Anet was working on something similar to what you’ve presented to them here, they might have to shelve it now or risk having to compensate you in some way, even if they’d been working on it first since you could argue your work gave them these ideas even if that wasn’t the case.

Frankly, that’s Anets fault for not communicating at all with the community. If the community was aware of what was being worked on, and if they released teasers (similar to how CCP does with Eve Online), this would do well to prevent users from striking out on their own like this to solve problems that, as far as we know, are not being worked on at all.

@ Neural.1824:
They may not communicate as we expect, but they do listen.
Look up my redesigns and compare it to the game changes – there are a nice amount of ideas released in their own taste.

Amazing job!!!!

I like everything but the Hero page. Your hero page although it does put everything at your fingertips is just too much info and too jarring. This may be a placement issue or an artistic one. Probably both.

I like everything else though. Re-the-too boxy comments for the lore page you could do a circle-like map similar to the skill tree from Path of Exile/classic brainstorming map.

I need this! it looks amazing :O

clap clap clap clap

Very Impressed! Great Job! Amax

Very impressive work, I like pretty much all of it.

How did I not see this before? Very good work

How is this not in game yet?

give this man a job at Anet HQ quicly !

Good lord this thing is amazing. I’d love to see it in action. °-°

Bruhhh those are some killer skills, I hope Anet will commission you cause that ui is beyond perfect and very much needed!