I kind of get a feeling that there wasn’t a lot of thought put in to the designing of the user interface for Brink as I currently think its inefficient, can be prone to errors and I don’t get any satisfaction from having to repeat the same tasks again and again!
Character Selection Menu
My first gripes are on the character selection menu. Soon as you load in to the game the “Steam Community” box covers the option that you’re most likely going to be wanting to use, which is the “select” character function. You’d think that’s it in selecting your character and going to the “main menu” but no you have to press another button to select the character or from what it says on my screen “Seleot Charaoter”.
So that’s two clicks with trying to press the select button in the dark. Not very efficient and satisfying to me and the amount of times I’ve made the error in pressing “create new character” button.
After writing the above, I’ve noticed that you can click on the character that is currently in view to bring up the character selection options, thus avoiding the “steam community” box error, but your still having to select it twice.
But that does bring me to my next point that using two different styles of interaction in my mind is a bad way to go. As a user I’m stupid and lazy. I see buttons; I want to use buttons there for I don’t bother clicking the character to see if it brings up a menu, same with switching a character, I looked for a button first to switch character then decided to click the dude to see if that works because there wasn’t a button.
What I’d like to see implemented and what I think is a better process is that the character that is currently selected is your default character so when you load up the game you go straight to the main menu with that character and not the character selection screen.
Chances are you’ll be working on a particular character for a period of time anyway.I also think the user interaction on that page with the buttons wouldn’t be that noticeable if it wasn’t the first page you go to when you load up the application.
Freeplay / Filters
My next gripe is when filtering servers to play on. Every time I have to set my filters! This is really annoying as they are always the same every time I play! I was really disappointed that the same filtering system wasn’t implemented like seen in ETQW. The old saying don’t fix what isn’t broken comes to mind.
I guess what I’d prefer is a Filter option on the Freeplay menu that remembers your selection for the next game before you actually press the Search button.
Anyway these the two main things I find frustrating using Brink (other than being spawn raped on Container City and lack of stats in game). I just wondered if anyone else had the same views on this as me.