If I was working for OOO I would look at this new design (UI) as a beta mock-up UI. It’s a joke, instead of rearranging and adding new features, you could have just polished the original UI to make it a bit more presentable? There are hundreds of problems with the new UI but I am not going to rant on every single of them. I will only address one or two and I consider them just to be a personal preference and how it affects me and possibly other players who shares the same gaming aspect as I do.

The health bars and Vial/Capsule bars. The new placement and look is something that I would expect to see on a beta... Asides from looks, the locations of these features are important in game play. And I took a quick min of my time doodling both old and new UI to compare why placement is crucial and what makes the old UI easier to play and manage with. It’s not because of graphics or not being used to the whole new look. It’s just common sense…

Let us start with the new UI diagram:
New UI
http://img839.imageshack.us/img839/1077/newuih.png

As our character always being center focal point while playing missions, clockworks runs, and lockdown. It is always important to keep an eye on our health bars whenever we get injured so we could quickly learn and adjust our game play. When you look at the diagram I’ve posted you see the lines that are pink showing the two displays (vials and health bars) are no longer parallel and on the same plane field. Let’s say that you are in a low in life bar situations. Looking at your top left to see how much health is left will be a strain to our eyes… However if you look down it only takes a quick half a sec and is so much easier to see and view. Why? Because for one it’s closer to our knights, two it’s all because in the center of the same plane field of your knight, same note for the vials.

Diagram of Old UI:
Original UI
http://img853.imageshack.us/img853/9272/originalui.png

Looks simple enough right? It’s organized and placement is perfect. Parallel and centered.

Now if you notice the arrows coming out of the vial/caps. (Pertaining to players using Mouse) those arrows show you how you would drop your vials and caps if you wish to discard them for whatever reason. Why am I picking on something small like that? It’s just weird… I am pretty sure nobody drags clicks upwards. When we drag click, we always tend pull our mouse downwards… But that again is just preference. I play games like StarCraft where you have to select multiple of units by boxing them.

Long story to short… New UI eliminates better hand eye coordination because of the new unorthodox update.

And I am going to go based of my assumption… Spiral Knights doesn’t need little kiddy UI updates. I am guessing this game is being played by people who are old and mature of age. Considering this is a free to play, but many of us are under the impression that it’s really Pay to Win… And we know not many kids have access to buy energy. The whole free to play gig is to target little kids… But when there is a micro transaction shop involved in a F2P game. The real audiences are the adults lol… As for them being the majority I believe they have seniority and a say what really needs fixing in this wonderful game. Quit going backwards, new GUIs and Features isn’t what this game needs right now… if you want to revolutionize game play, start balancing more important things like lockdown, nerfing/buffing, adding new items, and etc. Or… I could be jumping in to conclusions and be wrong about this?

Edit: Please keep feedback in the release discussion thread. Thanks!