Guild Wars 2

I started Guild Wars 2 recently and as I do I immediately went into the options to find ways to move UI elements and outright disable others. What I found is absolutely no customization for the UI besides 3 options for size.

It seems like a trend and that is new MMOs are moving far away from offering any form off UI customizations. I can not seem to understand the reasoning behind this trend unless its purely financial and they don’t want to pay more money to the UI engineer to create options. UI options are not a forced thing and they do nothing to actual in game balancing.

The issue I usually have as with most games is that I am looking at too much information and would like to disable some of it. Maybe I want to just explore a map without a mini map. I cant do that because I can’t turn off mini maps. Maybe I do not want to see a list of objectives on the screen. Maybe I do not want to see option icons taking up screen space when I use keys for all of them.

Simple options to me such is enable/disable are well were a standard in UIs for games. But like I said now the trend is seemingly the opposite even at times to the point where us lefties cant remap keys for gameplay in some games.

Does anyone know if there are any plans to allow modding of the UI or to create more user friendly options for it?

Will we see some improvements in the UI, in terms of flexibility?

Colin: Right now there’s really not very much at all that we can do with the UI, like resizable elements or anything, so, hopefully, at some point we can tackle that.

I wanted to finish my personal story as soon as I could, just to get rid of that green arrow on the screen. Are there any plans to let us hide UI elements?

Colin: Yeah, I think the UI team has something about it so that we can consolidate that whole right side of the screen, make it easier to manage and use. That’s still a long ways off, cause it would take huge engineering [...] to pull off. We do want to have that daily reminder up there too.

There’s a careful balance in the UI, because some of that stuff is the “I don’t know how to play this game, but there’s something telling me what I should be doing right now”, so we don’t want people to be able to get rid of something like that, because suddenly they would have no idea what they should be doing. There’s that very careful balance - there’s enough for advanced players to be able to do things without noobs getting totally lost.

http://dragonseason.com/Front/tabid/124/EntryId/210/Lunch-with-Colin-Johanson.aspx

So, you can take that as nothing will be done in the near future.