Eiphel

I really hope we end up with a very modular UI where the people who want to go classic can just turn everything on and set it up in one big block, but others can hide things like borders and collapse any frames they aren't using. Have them on keybind toggles or whatever. Though I do believe it's possible to do a modern, functional UI that still has an IE feel.

I am pretty much in favour of the idea Josh has described, although flavourfully I can't think of a good justification for being able to send things to the stash and that bugs me. (But not as much as a poor mechanical implementation would.)

Crossposted from the update thread: Wanted to come and weigh in on the UI discussion. I've no doubt I'll be echoing comments from the other 17 pages of this topic, but nontheless: I understand the desire for an 'IE style' User Interface. PE is trying to evoke those games, and UI design is part of what they were. But the IE games had pretty bad UIs, and nostalgia shouldn't trump functionality. The PE UI should attempt to capture the aesthetic of the Infinite Engine, but reworked into a much more functional form. This current attempt is, to me, pretty poor. First off, it uses up a huge chunk of real estate on the screen. So much effort has been put into these fantastic landscapes, blotting out an enormous bar of them is pretty saddening. Some form of rectractable/hidable/modular UI could work well here if simply shrinking the space allowed is off the table. (Arcanum even did this a bit.) Secondly, within the UI area itself, it's full of dead space. Large patches of blank wood texture or stone texture or whatever are very ugly and also poor for functionality since they're using up the amount of actually 'operational' screen space. Thirdly, the text window is right aligned. If this is where all of the game's dialogue and writing is going to appear, I very much feel it needs to be centralised. If I'll have 500k words to read across my playing of PE, I don't want to be constantly looking off to the bottom corner when the focus of the scene will be centred. I want to just be able to glance down. Those are my main thoughts, and by far my biggest concern is the amount of wasted real estate in this sample. I don't want to sound too critical, but on the other hand I was really taken aback by how poor and dated this UI looks. By all means you want to evoke the IE spirit, but you need to do so within a functional and up-to-date design paradigm. Evocative shouldn't mean dated, and it shouldn't cost functionality or aesthetics.

Wanted to come and weigh in on the UI discussion. I've no doubt I'll be echoing comments from the other 17 pages of this topic, but nontheless: I understand the desire for an 'IE style' User Interface. PE is trying to evoke those games, and UI design is part of what they were. But the IE games had pretty bad UIs, and nostalgia shouldn't trump functionality. The PE UI should attempt to capture the aesthetic of the Infinite Engine, but reworked into a much more functional form. This current attempt is, to me, pretty poor. First off, it uses up a huge chunk of real estate on the screen. So much effort has been put into these fantastic landscapes, blotting out an enormous bar of them is pretty saddening. Some form of rectractable/hidable/modular UI could work well here if simply shrinking the space allowed is off the table. (Arcanum even did this a bit.) Secondly, within the UI area itself, it's full of dead space. Large patches of blank wood texture or stone texture or whatever are very ugly and also poor for functionality since they're using up the amount of actually 'operational' screen space. Thirdly, the text window is right aligned. If this is where all of the game's dialogue and writing is going to appear, I very much feel it needs to be centralised. If I'll have 500k words to read across my playing of PE, I don't want to be constantly looking off to the bottom corner when the focus of the scene will be centred. I want to just be able to glance down. Those are my main thoughts, and by far my biggest concern is the amount of wasted real estate in this sample. I don't want to sound too critical, but on the other hand I was really taken aback by how poor and dated this UI looks. By all means you want to evoke the IE spirit, but you need to do so within a functional and up-to-date design paradigm. Evocative shouldn't mean dated, and it shouldn't cost functionality or aesthetics.

I felt like one strength of Dragon Age was the way it created inter-party dynamics. No objective morality, but each character had their own individual ethics. Sometimes they'd all agree, sometimes they'd be in sharp conflict. You could never please everyone all of the time, and occaisionally an unexpected reaction would shed light on some minor unique facet of a character. On top of that there were a bunch of randomly occuring dialogues in which members of your party would talk amongst themselves. I believe these existed for every companion pairing. Overhearing these offered new insights in a way that wasn't focussed entirely on interaction with the player for once, and helped demonstrate where each character's philosophy married up or differed.

Everything you are describing here is very exciting to me. And on a sidenote, I'm now going to check out Perdido Street Station.

Personally, I don't really enjoy turn based gameplay in RPGs. I enjoy it in strategy games, but in an RPG I find it flow breaking and less immersive.