Sure, nicer graphics and aiming with a mouse and keyboard is all well and good. But there’s one thing about Destiny that always bugged me, something I won’t have to worry about with the sequel.
It’s the bloody interface.
It seems silly, finding joy in something as plain and uninspiring as the ability to move more swiftly around your weapon inventory. The relief of using a scroll wheel instead of having to move a cursor to an arrow and click.
It’s incredibly silly, really. But as longtime Destiny players know, you end up spending a lot more time juggling your inventory, switching abilities and ditching junk than you’d like.
Being able to easily glide over items makes a world of difference from using the left analog stick. So shaving any time off what is essentially busy work, busy work that the player will undoubtedly endure repeatedly thanks to the litany of crappy loot from the Cryptarch, is a huge plus indeed.
As a friend once said, the UI in games is like the plumbing in your house. When it works well, you don’t notice it at all – but when it’s buggered, or even when something is slightly off, by God do you notice it.
The PC beta for Destiny 2 kicks off on August 28 for anyone who pre-ordered, with the open beta kicking off the day after. I’ll be spending some time failing miserably at jumping puzzles, so let me know what your names are in-game so we can catch up over a game of Destiny soccer.
The author travelled to Gamescom as a guest of NVIDIA.
Comments
12 responses to “The Best Reason For Destiny 2 On PC”
It’s not going to worry me too much as I’m using a (slower) controller (have been for 20 years) as my console reliant hands can’t get used to WASD etc.
I don’t ‘Destiny’, but man do I agree with the point you’re making. How many games have terrible, terrible UI/Inventory screens that just grate? Seems to be a dearth of decent UX/UI designers in the game industry! Surprising how often modders come along and can improve them quite quickly with little changed too?
Looking at the consoles though, I guess if the makers themselves can’t build a decent UI for the whole system is it a big surprise that they struggle with it in games?
Also irritating in a similar vein – games where you need to use the map, but opening the thing is several menu’s deep or it has a delay/lag on opening so it just becomes a chore
Ugh Skyrim’s UI is the worst one ive ever seen. its so bad that not having SKSE and SKY UI is preventing me from playing the Special edition. Well that and the fact that after playing the likes of Dragons Dogma, Witcher 3, Dying light and the Shadow Warrior series just makes even combat stand out as extremely piss poor
Man, Dragons Dogma – what an awesome game that was. Why on earth didn’t they ditch that F2P fiasco and build a proper sequel? Or someone else crib the best ideas (the combat/beasts/magic and the pawns) and make a game in the same mould? The thing was awesome even there were plenty of rough edges/flaws, if they included everything that made the original great and fixed those… Geezus, i don’t think i’d ever stop playing!
And yep, as much as I played the heck out of Skyrim back in the day, I can’t play it now because it just feels dated in so many ways, with or without the mods. I’ll let it sit happily in that nostalgic part of my brain that remembers Biker Mice From Mars on the SNES being as good as Mario Kart 😉
yeah though, I have to give it to DA:I. it is the only game I have actually quite over a bad UI. Like, almost everything else about it I liked, and could been having so much fun but as soon as I opened the menu, all that interest immediately left me.
No idea whose idea was it to display all the endless pages of lore in game in white capitals on a black background. No human could possible think reading a page of capitals is fun.
(er quit, no idea why I cant edit)
The Destiny UI is by no means perfect, but the amount of work they put into it seems way more extensive than most developers would. There’s some really subtle things going on there that make even navigating the menu more satisfying than the gameplay of most other games.
A lot of the problems that Destiny’s menu has isn’t because of the game itself, but more the limitations of the controller. It’s something other games struggle with even more.
There’s a major problem with it that I sincerely hope is fixed for Destiny 2 though: load times. You often have to pull up your menu in the heat of battle in Destiny 1 (using ammo boxes, mainly), but the extremely noticeable delay between pushing options and the actual menu appearing in an interactive way is way too long.
Anyway check out this video if you want to see more on their UI design:
my lord I hate UI’s designed for use with a mouse on console. much like Destiny, No Man’s Sky suffers with the same problem.
I guess I’m in the minority because I always found Destiny’s UI one of the better console UIs I’d ever used. I found its similarity to a PC UI made it easy to use and found myself wishing more games used the analogue stick like a mouse cursor. That said I never use the scroll button when navigating game menues on PC and always point and click, so apparantly I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time.
It came with my video card, dilemma never happened here.
I’m a console guy but ever since Destiny Item Manager existed I’ve been using my computer and mouse for inventory management .
i wonder if theyll support the actual trackpad of the control to take care of this stuff instead of just to pull out the ghost