I'm guessing rolling Sprites, enemies and Ui into one big roll.

I can foresee under the Shield Gauge, there will be a BS ability cool down / charge bar. So the move of the health bar and shield gauge to upper left makes sense.

The heat gauge should probably have an option to display in numerical value (just in case the new HUD lag).

I like the revised player health bars, although this appears to be a solo run so I can't comment on how it looks with other party members. I always found the player health panels pretty strange, because it was very difficult to determine how much health you or your teammates actually had.

However, I don't like the boss/enemy health bars. I enjoy not knowing each enemy's health, because it forces me to guess and prioritize on my own. Displaying enemy health bars removes this element of surprise from the gameplay, where you are hoping the next sword swing will finally finish the boss/enemy off. I also think they clutter the interface, so I would prefer to have an option to turn them off.

EDIT: Also, it would be cool to have an option that makes the UI slightly transparent or shrinks the icons or something. The more we can see of the environment, the better, IMO.

@Eltia the arrow might indicate the objective - kill the royal jelly and collect recon module. Just like current UI?

Oh yea.. so where do the party member's information go?

Actually what they could do is this: on the left hand side of the screen, display these:

Your health bar
Your party leader's health bar
Party member health bar
Party member health bar

Then you can save the space by removing the health bar at the top, and use the space to concentrate on shield health, heat gauge and BS ability charge bar.

I also think the enemy's health / status window isn't too helping and could clutter the interface. Having health bar displays at the top of enemies are enough to me. If you insist on keeping the enemy's status window, move it to the bottom centre and move the utility shortcut bar back to where it is (centre top). This is all assuming we get rid of that health bar at the upper left corner.

now i start to believe they take the easy suggestions to have an "Excuse" that they are working on something...

looks nice and all. but not something that the game really needs.

enemies are easy to tell when they are about to die since everyone deals the same damage depending on what they are wearing. not like others MMorpg where the damage are based on the character stats and equipment (and the equipment have different stats there, so.. not like here).

But honestly.. im tired about reworks and recolors... I know you are working on battle sprites... and the new "mass like" enemies... but a whole year for them.. its kinda dissapointing compared what you done on 2011.. when we going to have a new T3 boss that isnt a event, expansion or danger mission?.
or how about more natured based levels? like snarbolax or craddle surface... how about more from the swarm??'..

i really would wait enought if you guys already keep working on them.. instead on reworks or minor things like battle sprites.. that can wait..

Oh well.. nice work anyway Nick. nothing exciting like a new boss would be...

Will it blend? I don't know, put it in a blender?

I like that one.

I really only want the minimap change.

You do not touch the colour scheme.

You do not mess up with the gears.

Or else. (O_O)

Where's the Current Weapon icon? You know, the one that shows whether we're wielding our Shivermist Buster which will stop the Devilites or our Blitz Needle which will stop us in place for a second while said Devilites chuck chairs at us? Trust me, we don't want to lose the Current Weapon icon.

Please let this be a test...

An april fools...

Something other than the final release!

My complaints is colour scheme, and the knight Icon. What is the point of the knight icon?

This seems also, not to be rude, sub-par...... Just saying, some of the letters come from some dudes one man flash game.

Also, this seems cluttered, as several things such as player rank, shield, ect are all on the HUD, when there is no need before hand, as it's displayed o the knight.

Health bar, I really don't care for, but I don't like the presentation. There is really no need to show weakness, dmg, ect, when you learn it quite easily.

Items, as said, I disliked....

The minimap is an asked and suggested idea, nice one.

So, is this going to be shown in Test server>

It looks to me they removed two things: party health bar (that would be replaced by in-game health bar, when your mouse cursor hover over your teammates) and current weapon icon (well you can see what you are holding, right?).

Both are providing less information than what we currently have. So it would probably take some time to get used to.

The coloring looks like something done in Gimp. It completely clashes with the games art-style; the flat coloring in the UI looked so much neater, different, fun, and enjoyable. This is just... ugly and is seriously going to make the game look bad if you implement it. It's WAY overdone and looks like some 10 year old trying to learn to shade using Gimp... @n@;;
Otherwise I think the tools on the UI and how they're set up is neat, it'll definitely be nice to know when a monster is close to death.

Please don't force this onto us though, at least give the ones who don't like it an option to just use the previous UI.

Armchair artists all around. It's amusing. :>

Can we at least be able to switch between the new UI and old?

I can probably tell you that if you notice to the right corner below the map, you can see an arrow. It may be possible that by clicking the arrow, your crowns appear. I do not know about anything else you mentioned in your post otherwise.

Nick and co.Believe me when i say that im open to change. The picture of the new UI doesn't look better, just different. I dont know the pros and cons since i havent seen it in action yet. From what i can see however i do think some of the things dont look better and could be worse.

Designwise it looks a lot less stylized and fitting. Almost seems not very thought out. For example i find it strange how the health bar at the top gets in the way of your view ahead. The vitapod slot next to the vials should look distinct from the vial slots.

So far i dont see the "improvement". Don't let it be a change for the sake of changing. I'm all up for improvements but dont ruin things that werent broken or were actually working excellently.

Another gripe i have is that you guys are removing the mystery by showing weaknesses and adding healthbars to the enemies. Personally i always thought the way things were unknown was part of the charm, in a good way.

Learning and finding out all the ins and outs was imo part of the fun. Calculating how many hits kill certain enemies. Finding out yourself what enemies are weak against. Please dont nerf that experience by shoehorning everything to the player

For me its really simple. Im not gonna make an issue of anything. I spontaniously became part of this great game/community. If i feel that the experience is less fun with all these changes, ill simply move on just how i simply got hooked in the first place.

in advance ill say that at least it was very fun

IIRC, royal mini is really weak to shadow and also elemental damage (another glitch?).

There is a graphical glitch where sometimes when the damage number get too huge, the color of the number turns from yellow to the ones that indicate neutral damage but in actual fact the critical damage really still do apply.

In response to the points Djawed pointed out, I do agree that there should be a distinct slot for the vitapod as it looks very much the same and could be easily confused for being a fifth vial slot with the layout shown in the preview picture.

The style looks a lot more fresh in my opinion, but this is a very subjective topic so I won't say more than that I like how it looks over how it used to.

The monster information and health bars is, again, something I'll have to experience before I comment on it.

The thing about the new player tabs cluttering the screen, I'm not really so sure. For one, you always had two health bars on screen - one at the bottom displaying your full health bar and the one in the top right displaying up to 20 HP at once. This was redundant. With the new health bar being exclusively in the top right it frees up space in the bottom center which used to be a weak spot for detecting incoming enemies and attacks from below as the health bar would get in the way. The item holster is transparent when inactive and doesn't have a hard background which again makes it easier to detect enemies on the bottom half of the screen.
I don't know how cluttered the top right might become with more party members but for now it looks fine and is all the way up in the corner so it doesn't strike me with concern of cluttering things up on its own.

---

Oh, and someone said something about the vitapod being an indicator for time of release? Instead of April 13th I'm thinking April 10th, as it happens to be 13 days after the time it was posted and word has it that Three Rings launch updates on Wednesdays; so, on April 10th we might get to see the UI implemented to the game?

I know I could have just edited my post above, but I'm tired of doing that. >.>

I think the HUD went up top in order to balance out the view. You know, the angle is up there more. With this, it will be much more so that the actual view is more equal. (Yay! BN won't be so much of "Snipe 'em from below" anymore!)

It just means that it won't show more than 30 bars similiar to what happen to party health currently.

The monster weaknesses have always been public info. Just open up the help menu and it'll tell you.

As Nick stated on the first page, if your health exceeds the limit it will instead show additional health by overlapping with silver and gold health bars, or "armour" to use his words.

@Sir-Wuddle

"This sort of stuff" is just a small upgrade to what we have, and has no relation to the death of the Arcade. That was the Missions being introduced, and the conveniences of skipping levels for bosses.
Really, just because one update caused something unfortunate to happen doesn't mean that every update henceforth is a bad update that negatively impacts the game because...the other one did. I request that common sense and logic is used when reviewing updates, especially ones that have yet to be implemented into the game.

Hmmm...They probably have to rework the UI to make Battle Sprites work with it.

I also...want to say....I hope you can take off bits of the UI, like the HP bars and such to keep it less filled. It also would be nice for us "Hardcore" players.

I remember one guy who posted a hack that removed the HUD. I wonder if that'll reappear...

I can't remember what game it is. But there was this game (JRPG?) I played that won't reveal any enemy's tactical information (HP / weakness / attack) until you have at least fought it once (and killed it by exploiting its weakness). Is this something going to be implemented in SK also? This seems like a bipartite solution to the Vet. and noob. The noob would still have to learn the rope by at least fighting it. The Vet. is indifferent because we all know what the weakness of each mob is (because we have not only killed them once, by the N-th time already).