Hi Everyone,

 

I found out about Pillars of Eternity just last week so when I saw the conversational UI it was news to me.

To me, it seems a little claustrophobic. 

 

The design seems to have places that the party members could easily go or even icons to click on (such as buying/selling icons).

 

 

In Summary:  I think the conversational UI is a part of the game that the player will become intimately familiar with and so I hope it is a little tighter and cleaner in the final version.

Like Josh mentioned in his GDC talk, it's important that the conversational UI retain the "feel" of the original Infinity Engine games. That being said, now that they have way more pixels to work with, I'm sure they are thinking about ways to streamline it. I like the idea of having party member portraits show up if the situation calls for an interjection from one of them as well as buy/sell icons when dealing with traders.

as the PC will be th one doing most of the conversing, i find it unnecessary to have the other party member's portraits displayed all of the time. if they were to contribute something to the dialogue, their picture could replace the PC's for that line. (in essence - i'd have just two portraits in the dialogue UI: one speaker on the left and the other bloke on the right).

 

the sell and buy UI, i suspect, will be (and should be) a completely seperate UI screen.

 

also, i very much appreciate the more plastic and tactile look they are striving for (although i'd personally rather see some use of ink and parchment, than the chalk and board theme).

My opinions are already slightly here;

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/65150-close-captioning-for-speech-in-poe/

 

But yeah, I do agree with the above poster, that there's no need for more than 1 portrait, and the original looks better to me than the 3rd.

All about taste really.

I rather like it, personally. I don't see a need for having the other party members' portraits there, unless you can choose who is saying each line (and I don't believe that you can), and any sort of buy/sell icons would only show up a small portion of the time, unless you attempt to trade with every person you meet with -- which, while humorous, seems unlikely. Therefore, always having room for them would have the effect of making the window seem more empty most of the time, not less.

 

I also find that I prefer the protrait being positioned as is, in the upper left.