Let's not get into fuzzy logic with "preferences".
Ok, but why ignore the reality of 2 million players?
Players will have different preferences, but a UI that presents information the
player wants cleanly and allows gameplay with fewer inputs to accomplish the
same tasks is objectively better.
I agreed with that in my previous post.
However there is no such thing as "the player", so what you think is
"objective", isn't.
Both titles obscure/hide game rules, such that even if an experienced player
tries to discern them using only game UI...they can't.
I think that can be a good thing. There are hidden variables and obscure weights
that players get a feel for by playing the game over a long time, and not by
consulting a D&D-like table that tells them exactly how many D6's and D100's to
roll, and precisely what number they need to succeed or fail.
You might prefer strategy games with every rule and random variable defined
explicitly - I don't. I want to feel (or suspend disbelief that I'm deluding
myself) that I discovered something like an easter egg that nobody else has
noticed.
A UI that deliberately misleads is clearly and objectively deficient.
Adopting UI changes that decent UI devs used > a decade ago would turn several
minute tasks in game into 10 second or less tasks...many times throughout each
game.
That didn't parse. Did you mean "minute" as in tiny, or as in 60 seconds?
Nobody, including Ed Beach himself, could make a coherent case that the city
list + build options in civ 6 are as good from a UI perspective as civ 4.
You are comparing Civ 4, a completed toy world, with something far more complex
and not yet realised in full. (Note that I don't mean it's in alpha stage, just
far from having all features implemented.)
I accept, however, that there are dozens of other (reproducible) mistakes in the
game that should be fixed when they feel it's timely.
Hamstrung (to this point) modders had no trouble outperforming Firaxis either
in terms of UI...this patch note + relatively low priority for a broken UI over
a YEAR is Firaxis all but waving the white flag on UI and saying that the
community should fix it because they either can't or aren't willing to invest
the resources to do it.
Haha. All but conspiratorial crapola!
But if you're introducing psipowers & mind-reading, unfounded supposition, and
pretending to have inside insight into motives, let me to throw in some of my
own...
Firstly, the game maintains a huge following, with a big majority seemingly
unconcerned with UI problems that you and a minority see as egregiously awful.
Given that, why would Firaxis stray from what looks like a successful plan so far?
If Firaxis are designing and releasing to some 5-year plan (say), which
includes provision for incremental hardware improvements and income streams,
then they may well be right on target.
Civ 6 devs apparently realized it didn't work, but not enough to delay precious
DLC to make a default feature actually functional.
Maybe their devs and bean-counters got it right by devoting finite resources to
DLC instead of to low-priority items, like a UI that doesn't suit the tail end
of a distribution they know far better than outsiders like us.
I wish they hadn't spent so much on some aspects, like voice actors and artwork,
instead of on my preferences, but I would have bought the game if it had been
released a year earlier with XKCD quality graphics. See, I have standards too.
Even if Firaxis did expect the community to tailor the UI to those who don't
like it, what's the problem?
If your
ideal UI, for your impossibly
ideal player, had been adopted for Civ 6,
would you expect the community to fix it if it didn't suit some players?
Or would you hardwire it, and then tell any disgruntled, ungrateful sob's that
because your "ideal player" loves it, so must they?
The UI is a core part of a game..."
Are you a UI dev? (c.f. "To a cobbler there's nothing like leather." - Tolstoy.)
...and the user's experience, and the UI in this game is soundly dumpstered by
its own predecessors in the series and small dev teams from 20+ years ago.
That user, again. It's not designed for one player in a darkened Platonic cave.
At each stage it should be acceptable to a large majority of the entire player
base. And at the end, it should have been good enough for most players over the
lifetime of the game so that they'd crawl over broken glass for the next version.
Sound familiar? Yes, welcome to CFC.
I see no reason to respect that standard or the market which finds it acceptable.
Same here, Except that I don't "respect" any abstract concepts, like standards or
markets.
I accept that there are thousands of minor improvements that could be made, and
many bugs that should be fixed; many by Firaxis themselves, many that modders
will no doubt pounce on.
But you haven't made anywhere near a convincing case that the UI's deficiencies
and bugs have ruined the enjoyment of the game for a vast majority of the
players, or that the sales of the game are suffering because of the UI.
(The bit where you entered the minds of Firaxis devs and uncovered their hidden
motives was funny though.)
