Jory

I like the feel of the UI, it is a good default UI (left side feels a little cramped, but we're talking about an early iteration here). What isn't shown here is probably the most important attribute of any good UI: the customizability. Allow us to easily change pretty much anything without requiring full scale modding. Make it advanced options that are not necessarily focused on ease of use rather than customizability and put the UI options in a file that is easily shared. Same applies to keybinding options, allow us to keybind anything you can conceivably think of, possibly even modular stuff such as switching between several UIs to accomplish things that you may not have planned for. That way you can have community sites easily sharing UIs and you can just pick a popular one that you like if you don't fancy the default one. Needs of players will always be too different to have a one size fits all approach. As an example of what I would like to do with the UI (just for me): I will memorize the relevant keybinds quickly and I'll probably never use the options pane after 10 minutes of gameplay, so that can go. The chat is of varying importance during different parts of the game. If I'm travelling, I don't want a an empty window blocking space, if I'm in combat or in a conversation and I want to find out what happened I don't want to scroll a tiny window around, so I want to be able to set keybinds that resize/reposition the chat window with just one click, so I can pause and immediately see what's happening. If i know keybinds for all characters I probably won't need a skill bar or only a very small one and I may not even need character portraits if I can save space that way. I also feel that characters don't belong at the bottom, they're a part of the UI that I pay constant attention to and thus are very different from the "on demand" buttons at the bottom, so I may put them at the top or left. The rigidity of the IE game UIs was in my opinion their greatest flaw, I'm all for old school, just not there.

I won't be too specific because I'm no game designer, you guys are better at specifics than I could be. I feel that it is vital that you don't fall into this "everything equal" trap. For example, robes would give you some magical shield bonus, leather would give you some dodge bonus and plate would give you damage reduction and overall it'd be balanced to all offer the same protection, please don't do that, one of the benefits of playing a group of characters is that they can have weaknesses that they cannot overcome by themselves. I can't wait to find out how you want to make every kind of armor viable for classes in a way that different class specs would desire different pieces of armor, but the basic archetype should be clear: Plate offers the best survivability period. A heavy fighter covered in shining plate from head to toe should feel heavy and durable. Leather is all about quickness and stealth; leather is fragile, a thief in leather should not walk in the open and it should feel dangerous to do so. Robes confer power and offer no protection whatsoever. Wizards are above the rabble that needs to wear unwieldy protection to fight. The important part is that this concept does not change depending on the stage of the game, so many games make everyone powerhouses at some point, robe users should always need special protection, a heavy fighter should always feel awkward to fight with without backup, and someone in light armor should always be alarmed if an arrow flies his way. Concerning the stats, I'm actually fine with a somewhat simplistic system, the next tier all things equal should be better than the previous tier and there's nothing wrong with having some generic modifiers (I don't care how that is communicated). I don't know how much depth the system should have, too much depth would probably detract from the experience rather than add to it, to me it is more important how the armor is aquired and how its value is communicated. A +3 item in Baldur's gate, while plain, was more exciting than a shiny yellow rare item in Diablo for instance and that felt good.