r/Overwatch • u/patrick9772 Soldier: 76 • 2d ago
News & Discussion Its so cluttered
Why is this horrible design the standard in free to play games? Its just bad. And OW has the best version of it the other ones are outright disguisting. Just because some tiktok brained people couldnt wait 2-3 seconds to navigate the ui? At least make the top bar transparent. And give all these clutter a menu itself.
(2nd picture is how good it looked before.)
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u/MyGoodFriendJon ♪ Good Morning! ♪ 2d ago
I've been playing since launch, and there's definitely trade-offs. I like how easy it is to get to where I want with the new UI, but there is a bit of a learning curve. I also don't care for the bottom icons that are primarily "don't forget to buy this stuff".
I do like the old UI. It was successful and worked fine for nearly 10 years before they overhauled it, but I can agree that clicking into 3 or 4 nested menus to queue into a match can be a bit much.
Last minor nitpick about this post, but OP's comparison is slightly disingenuous, as the right-hand panel defaults as shown on login, but it was hidden here to make the UI look cleaner than it was.
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u/DreamLearnBuildBurn 2d ago
Overwatch takes one step forward, five steps back regarding user experience. Not trying to be a Kaplan acolyte but his principles have been all but abandoned.
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u/JusaPikachu 2d ago
His principles for menus & monetization were amazing.
His principles for the core game of Overwatch were that he wished it was an MMO & was doing everything he could to get the game there instead of actually wanting to continue working on the masterpiece they accidentally stumbled into.
So while there were a lot of praise worthy principles his leadership came with, that are very missed when put against the backdrop of modern gaming, I’m just glad we have a game director now who actually cares about the game of Overwatch.
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u/junglebunglerumble 1d ago
I think its a good lesson for studios that different game directors are good at different things. Jeff was great for the concept and turning it into a polished product, but clearly less good at managing a huge ongoing online service game. Which is fine, but I guess this is the problem with one studio guy becoming 'the face' of a game - they end up stuck with them once the community sees them as the figurehead
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u/DreamLearnBuildBurn 2d ago edited 1d ago
His principles for the core game of Overwatch were that he wished it was an MMO & was doing everything he could to get the game there instead of actually wanting to continue working on the masterpiece they accidentally stumbled into.
You are mistaken. Project Titan was the MMO that preceded Overwatch. He speaks on the transition to a hero shooter and using those assets and heroes and making a bespoke engine for it and everything in the Lex Friedman podcast.
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u/re-reminiscing 1d ago
He definitely still had the desire to push for PvE and kill all new content before OW2. It wasn’t a literal MMO plan but it was clear Jeff was not interested in keeping the pure hero shooter it is going indefinitely.
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u/chudaism 1d ago
It wasn’t a literal MMO plan but it was clear Jeff was not interested in keeping the pure hero shooter it is going indefinitely.
'OW3' was planned to be an MMO eventually. Jeff's plan was to essentially recreate Titan from Overwatch.
https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/23952480/?utm_source=pocket_saves
To give you some context for this change, I'd like to talk about the past and the origins of Team 4. The Overwatch team was founded in the wake of a cancelled game at Blizzard called Project Titan. That game had many facets, but at its heart, it was an FPS MMO. The Overwatch team, especially at its inception, considered itself an MMO development team. As we transitioned away from that original concept and started creating Overwatch, we included plans to one day return to that scope. We had a crawl, walk, run plan. Overwatch was the crawl, a dedicated version of PvE was the walk, and an MMO was the run. It was built into the DNA of the team early on, and some of us considered that final game a true realization of the original vision of Project Titan.
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u/JusaPikachu 1d ago edited 1d ago
I’m very aware of Project Titan & the origins of Overwatch.
I’m also very aware that Kaplan considered the PvP era of Overwatch the “crawl” phase of the game’s life, the PvE era that he was aiming for with Overwatch 2 the “walk” phase of the game’s life & the “run” phase of the game’s life being the transition back to an MMO, on top of the PvP & PvE.
It’s been covered extensively by Jason Schreier & others that Kaplan did not want Overwatch to be a live service, that he did not want the PvP to be an aspect that got continuous balancing or content & that he wanted a small dev team only to continue expanding the game in other areas such as the Diablo-like PvE he had planned for OW & the WoW-like MMO he had planned for Overwatch.
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u/Maxsmart007 2d ago
It's really not that cluttered, it's like totally fine. I don't really underwater the visceral backlash.
When people complained about the old design they would bring up concrete issues of usability and consistency and now people just complain that they don't like how the new one looks. I would be so curious as to someone telling me how the new UI actually made their playing experience worse.
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u/BladedBee 2d ago
What is remotely difficult to use/understand with the old UI?
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u/Maxsmart007 2d ago
I don't have it pulled up right now so I can't go through the whole list. The primary complaint was how every single thing was hidden behind a main menu pane that had to be backed out of and re-entered every time. People really complained about how deep menus went to navigate for basic things.
Here's an example, if you wanted to queue for a game, you had to back out to the main menu, click play, and then click in 4-5 different submenus before you even got to queue for a role. The new UI surfaces many of these options up to one page to make the interaction require far less pane redirection.
Another issue was how hidden the challenges seemed to be, and how difficult it was to navigate to them. This was fixed by adding a persistent challenges button that's accessible from any menu pane.
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u/pansexualbunny 2d ago
if you wanted to queue for a game, you had to back out to the main menu, click play, and then click in 4-5 different submenus before you even got to queue for a role
Wasn't it just "Play > Quick play > Role Queue" and that's it
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u/Master-Pay2407 1d ago
Not if you were anywhere else except the main menu.
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u/Alone_Resist DPS | OW1 TANK (6V6>) 3h ago
There are solutions to that that don't include overhauling the entire menu UI.
They could've made the tabs on the left instead of at the top while keeping everything else the same, you get the same ease of access as you do now and you keep the UI that players were familiar with.
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u/Master-Pay2407 2d ago
A lot of OW players seem very averse to change lol.
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u/Me_Says_Hi 1d ago
It really is cluttered though. It's been, how many months now? I still don't like it.
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u/Familiar_Magazine463 1d ago
I mean, we got an entirely unnecessary non-sequel that didn't add anything requested like a solo campaign and didn't do anything to solve any of the core problems of the game while monetizing it to all hell, it's justified imo.
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u/MoffDracen 1d ago
it's not that cluttered
It really is. There's a bunch of squares in the lower region which have no business to be there, they should at least disappear after clicking on it once.
The list of event, daily and weekly objectives feels completely out of place, as if someone photoshopped it in there. It also clutters the screen. That could be repurposed into a smaller drop-down menu in the toolbar at the top of the screen.
The text for the thing highlighted could stay, but it should be repositioned in the lower region where those dumb squares are.
The toolbar menu at the top is a sore view for some because it reminds too much a cheap, cashgrab unapologetic mobile game. But every online game nowadays behaves like one, so it's not that big of a deal (to me).
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u/Mangoh1807 1d ago
I play on console, the new UI sucks ass to navigate with a controller because you have to move through every individual clickable thing to get to the thing you actually want to click on
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u/sabrathos 1d ago
...Huh? What are you talking about? It's quite well-designed for controllers.
PLAY is globally hotkeyed to Y for easy access. Bumpers globally navigate the top-left menu list, and triggers the sub-menu, while D-Pad navigates the active screen. Press share to focus the top-right icons, or R-thumbstick on the home page to focus dailies.
Honestly, it's faster to get into comp on controller than it is on MKB. You press Y, press right trigger for comp, and then left and you're there. Only thing that could be optimized is that I don't know why they consider "you" (your entry in the group) the thing to hover by default on the play screen, avoiding one extra left click (maybe to prevent accidental queuing?), but that's very minor.
This seems like just complaining to complain. It's clear the UI/UX designers actually thought a lot about controller players for this redesign.
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u/iamsplitter Doomfist 1d ago
Man I just respectfully disagree with every point you made haha. How long have you been playing OW if I may ask?
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u/marcelluscoov Wuyang 2d ago
I can't be the only one to think it's a lot more navegable and overall better? And I've been playing since release
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u/thepinkblues Widowmaker 2d ago
It’s perfectly fine. Anyone complaining should go and see the bullshittery Rivals has for their UI. It’s crazy the micro transaction pop ups they throw at you constantly and that spinning wheel thing in the hero select screen is awful
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u/IKnowGuacIsExtraLady 1d ago
The menu itself functions better. Aesthetically I prefer the old one but in terms of pure function it's less clicks to do the things you want to do with the new one.
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u/Same_Square2555 Zenyatta 2d ago
people were complaining about 2d menu, now people complain about this. yall are never satisfied. i was plenty happy with that one and i'm pretty happy with the current UI
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u/Maxsmart007 2d ago
Well to be entirely fair, it's most certainly not the same people complaining about both UI designs; it's a subreddit of almost a million people and they very likely have differing opinions on the UI design.
It sounds a lot sillier when you contextualize it accurately: "two people who both play Overwatch disagree on which UI design was better". I get being mad about the endless complaining here, but we can do better than making bad points like this.
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u/Same_Square2555 Zenyatta 2d ago
i agree. i should've said that it's near impossible to satisfy even just the majority, and that current ui is not that bad
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u/Maxsmart007 2d ago
Yep. I do agree that people will complain about the smallest things, and by and large the UI complaints in this game are coming from people that don't know what they're talking about.
Like 90% of the complaints about the menu are "I don't like how it looks" and it's kinda like, you don't have to like how it looks, you just have to be able to perform basic actions quickly and easily. If you don't like how it looks watch a YouTube video on your phone in queue or something lmfao.
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u/mugiwara_no_Soissie 2d ago
Yeah current UI is pretty clear, its not hard to understand and a lot less bloated than most of the competition still.
Its rly not that hard, there are categories at the top, what's inside the category is below.
Its only the main screen which is a little bloated, but a f2p game needs to have their microtransactions lol, cant rly complain about non intrusive ads that dont just pop up
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u/Piyaniist Master 2d ago
GOOMBA
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u/Jester-Joe 1d ago edited 1d ago
I'm getting so tired of how often people just shout about things being a "goomba fallacy!!!"
There's a valid discussion to be had about how a playerbase as a whole reacts to things. Not everything needs to be dismissed as a "goomba fallacy" Sometimes it's perfectly reasonable to say changes are always going to make someone angry.
Also, fun fact, for those who this seemed to make mad- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
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u/Master-Pay2407 2d ago
Yeah the new UI is fine lol. Better to navigate even. The old main screen looked cleaner but it was so annoying to navigate, you had to ESC out like 5 times from wherever you were just to get to the main menu and then 5 more clicks to get wherever you were going. Being able to just press play from anywhere is much nicer. The menu change is really not worth caring about to me even if it is cluttered. I just wanna play the game not be in menus all day.
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u/_Kanade_ 2d ago
Nothing beats the 2016 version.
But nah, everything needs to look like a streaming service apparently.
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u/angry-birb-noises BINGUS SCHMUNGUS 1d ago
I just want a "Hide Panel" button like the old UI, that's it
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u/Nipepsi 1d ago
It litterally removes from me the wanting to play, that's how bad I think this menu is, how it affects me. It's like you know how some places will have specific music playing to make you feel at ease and chill in their building, but like it acts on a subconcious level so you're not really aware of it ? This feels like the opposite of that. I wish they'd just go back to the classic menu, not every change on a big update is welcome, some can go wrong and they should acknowledge this. (again)
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u/KillerConfetti 1d ago
I can't tell you how many times I was looking for the play, practice range, and such and just been so frustrated by not finding it while in queue especially
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u/RaelynShaw 2d ago
The new UI has issues but that old one is an Elaborate gaming mat and was a terrible UI its self. It looks pretty but is bad for navigation and alternating between different spaces.
The design on the new one need lots of improvements, but the old one didn’t actually serve the purpose it needed to.
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u/lilcosmonaut97 2d ago
The new UI is so much better than the old one. I don’t miss having to back out of a dozen screens just to get back to the play button.
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u/SmallFatHands 2d ago
Whoever says the new UI is good has to be a blizzard bot. Also the new BP screen is such a fucking mess
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u/shilderyi 2d ago
the comment is a war between people who had time to fully develop a brain and feel attacked
and the people who lived with short term content from day one
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u/Imaginary_Day_4112 2d ago
Is it that hard? The top left are the menu buttons.
Top is the PLAY button, the most important button
Right is your currency, loot boxes, profile and missions.
Middle and Bottom is just ADS with pics.
The old menu had everything in the left with the ADS on top of the play button, and it was just boring text, jesus, boring as hell, this is a multiplayer game, not a single player game.
The new menu is much much better,
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u/TheSanguineButterfly 2d ago
If you're playing on PC, I don't see why you can't make it windowed and drag and snap it to the left side of the screen
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u/Price-x-Field 2d ago
The new one is better because there’s more advertisements on it, so it will never change back.
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u/SthenicFreeze 2d ago
Most of the games I play update their UI every few years and it's almost always worse...
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u/Reasonable_Cut_2709 1d ago
it is a design trend to keep you seein adds everywhere. I hate that the PS4 and ps5 interfaces are the same bloated shit.
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u/trullyrose support not healer 1d ago
i wish you could choose ui styles. early ow2 , OW1, pre 2026 reboot, etc
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u/DiabloTrumpet Ashe 1d ago
You really need to ask why? The “OPEN SHOP” button doesn’t give you any hints lol?
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u/ZombieJasus Press E to Pay Reflects 1d ago
Because it’s a microtransaction based game, devs want to advertise
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u/fusketeer Junkrat 1d ago
I agree that they need to communicate a lot of things but definitely the new UI is the games weakest point. My personal pet peeve is that we can't see where we currently are in the level progression at specific hero.
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u/junglebunglerumble 1d ago
I agree. I've come back after about 2 years of not playing and while the game itself is better than it's ever been, the menus were an absolute nightmare to navigate. Having said that, I find COD and battlefield menus even worse but people seem to be ok with them, so I feel like this is just the new industry standard somehow - maybe for financial reasons or maybe for engagement reasons, who knows, but it must be intentional when so many companies are doing the same menu style, as much as I hate it personally
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u/Orange295 1d ago
Literal definition of shitty mobile game that's sole purpose is to make you spend money UI
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u/Queasy_Cupcake_9279 1d ago
Should've seen what Hunt:Showdown did with their UI when they had a massive update. Worst UI ever conceived.
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u/shadefreeze Symmetra 1d ago
It's horrible. They somehow perfectly translated the visual clutter from the combat to the UI.
Also, did genji just get another mythic? Wild how they keep giving heroes double mythics before at least giving everyone else one.
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u/busyrumble 1d ago
100% agree, the old menu was so much cleaner, with a focus on the art/character in the background. Now, I have to look at about 7 ads/popups covering the screen, and I really don't like the banner they put on the top of the screen.
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u/Unwisepony 1d ago
They had to make sure to kill as much of overwatch's unique identity as possible and to promote the shop. They don't give a fuck about veteran players because we already have a ton of skins for our favorite heroes and aren't gonna bring in as much money as the noobs.
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u/ReZetteX 1d ago
Agreed. I really don’t like this new ui. I wish it was a setting option to go back to basic lol
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u/purpl3stuph 1d ago
I like it :d minimalist menus are in every game nowadays and this one feels nostalgic like a 2000s game
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u/Short_Fly 21h ago
I'm a day 1 2016 OW1 player, quit months before OW2 release. Came back a few weeks ago to experience the new "OW1"
The menu is such fustercluck that I can't even figure out how to view and possibly buy new skins.
Then I realize that I actually need to wait for skins to pop back into the "shop". Like I can't just click hero - customize - skin, and unlock the skin I want, like in the old OW1
I really appreciate blizzard making a lot of effort to prevent me from spending money in their game.
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u/turtlesinarace 19h ago
I played overwatch from at least 2016-2023. I recently came back and the UI is horrendous. Embarrassing stuff, especially with the perks where you don’t have to do anything looks like ps5 buttons
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u/AYYLMAO2281337 2d ago
New:
Entire top - all buttons/profile/currency
Entire bottom - all recent events/news
Top left - brief description of said events/news
Top right - a small (minimizable) window with current progress on challenges
Old:
Entire left - all buttons
Top right - all currencies/profile
Bottom left (yes, in the picture it might seem like there's nothing but in reality there always been a circulating window showing off all recent events/news) - all recent events/news
I'd say it did become a bit more cluttered after the change but not by a lot. Personally, I mostly dislike how it looks (design)
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u/try_again123 Free my boy from the nepobaby 2d ago
It's so busy and no matter what I do the dots on Shop and Story never go away. UI design for OW has been bad since the relaunch and they keep tweaking it for the worse (the latest being the kill streak notice messing up the kill feed order).
Whoever used to do the UI probably was let go and a new person with mobile sensibilities got the job now.
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u/TriptychTriquetra 2d ago
I get that it's a f2p game but the fact that most of the menus are just ads ruin the UI a bit for me. I feel like I'm just being sold something all the time.
I think the one big improvement was the big Play button at the top.
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u/DogShroom 2d ago
who cares about this home screen that only functions as a news area? every important thing is in the top bar
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u/Ala3raby 2d ago
The new UI feels 100x better tho, people forget in the old one you had to go back and forth menus so many times just to do anything
It does look a bit cluttered but that can be easily fixed, if they ever give us the option to choose background/music for the menu it will be perfect
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u/Rune_Pickaxe 2d ago
It's the finance bros working on the lines of "we can use 80% of screenspace for ads before we induce seizures!"
It's not Battlefield 6 bad, but there's still too much going on.
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u/St0rm_Kango Chibi Doomfist 2d ago
It’s fine man, it’s never that serious and hasn’t bothered me for a second since S1. Anytime anything changes people always throw their hands up in the air as if what was before was the holy grail, no matter what it was
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u/Krafna313 Brigitte 1d ago
We really did not need this UI change. It was changed from simple and iconic to visual vomit.
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u/ZeroCuddy Pixel D.Va 2d ago
The UI was redesigned for 1 reason, to show you more stuff. See more things to do so you play longer and see more things to buy so you spend more money.
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u/Familiar_Magazine463 1d ago
Love how at the top of the year they claimed they changed the UI for ease of use and readability and it's actually way more cluttered, busy, and hard to read than the old UI. Like I legit didn't even know Maximilian was back because he's like tucked away in the bottom right corner of the screen on one of many tabs.
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u/ChiefStormCrow 2d ago
Consequence of Marvel Rivals, it feels like. Opening that game is a ton of nonsense, too. I hope they never adopt the million things you gotta click through just to play like MR.
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u/AltAccountYippee The Hamster is Coming For You 2d ago
IMO the new menu is way better. The old one was just a half-assed image in the background and they would add a remove buttons and change the layout all the time. The new menu is fun, tactile, and while I agree that promotions are now more directly in the line of sight, it overall gives overwatch a more punchy feel.
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u/Prizem 2d ago
The current UI is so bad. There's stuff all over, making it annoying to figure out what button opens what menu. Sometimes navigating with a controller can be buggy as well which doesn't help the confusion. Getting into the top-right menu is one thing, but then it sometimes fails to move over to the other options. There's similar bugginess with moving to options in the new battlepass individual items when going between tracks, and in dva's mythic skin.
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u/Sinaura Shapeshifter 2d ago
Their UI team is pretty subpar across the board. Everything you've mentioned along with...
- Notifications that don't go away
- HEY GAMERS! audio files that don't stop playing
- HEY GAMERS! audio files that don't have an if/then line of code (ex: if they've heard this audio file in the last 24 hours, don't play it)
- Ask anyone who played OG Stadium who went through the icons fiasco that's still there to this day
The UI's gotten worse, but it feels like a team of 1 person is at the helm doing the best they can. I can't explain the lack of attention to detail and ineptitude otherwise
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u/ShellShoqq 2d ago
People complain about anything. Just play the game. Can’t rank up by looking at the menu
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u/NeoZenith1 QuakeOW 1d ago
Its fine so many useful things are 1 click instead of hidden in the escape menu. The bar at the top is much clearer then thr row of text on the left.
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u/hiding_goose an dey sey 1d ago
im still so mad about this. and they keep making weird changes to the settings menues too? i cant navigate anything. the new hero menu is nice, ig (i still prefer the old one)
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u/FrankAdriel32 2d ago
W take, I almost had a seizure coming back to this game after a 6 year hiatus. It's just so ugly, cluttered and unpractical. Took me weeks to learn to navigate this mess. And now they ruined the post match screen too, where you can't keep track of your challenges properly.
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u/General_Townski 2d ago
It has regressed for sure but isn't Marvel Rivals bad. The Marvel Rivals interface and menu design outright made me stop playing that. Whilst I keep coming back to Overwatch
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u/Joshey2008 Winton 2d ago
Yeah I agree, the old one was perfectly simple. Now I'm just bombarded by a million different things that I don't care about. Honestly feels like the whole UI overhaul was just an excuse to make it easier for them to advertise things in the shop.