Well, the UI in X3 was a bit naff for newcomers - I think the rest of us who have played it for hundreds of hours have gotten used to it, but I went back to AP deliberately to have a look at the UI with as much objectiveness as I could get... it is pretty bad, not terrible by any means, but for a newbie.. its not good.snwboardn21 wrote:
"we already knew that we had to really change some things, because the game was getting complicated and increasingly more difficult to get into for new players."
What exactly was difficult?
The answer is obviously to revamp the UI somewhat, the commands and options offered by those menus all need to be retained but presented differently. I'd say what was really needed was 2 things - a way to pop a context menu for each and every item (ship, npc merchant, station etc) and another way of getting to those items - a contacts manager of some sort.
What X:R has done has scrapped all those menu commands though and replaced them with something awful. It needs to go, it needs a way to locate all of your assets or things you want to interact with in a really easy way, and then pop menus for them that allow you to interact with them just like we did with X3.
I think sometimes you can just decide to "do something different" and deliberately get so far away from what you started with you throw out all the good bits you should have kept. Ego have obviously done this, its the old 'lets rewrite from scratch' mistake all over again.
![[ external image ]](http://i684.photobucket.com/albums/vv206/gordini1974/missionaccomplished1.jpg){kind=link}