A week before release, I decided to finally do something about a few things that bugged me, one of which was influenced by a discussion here on Steam.
Legend
The legend is the information element on the right side of the screen that can be opened and closed and that ideally shows information related to nodes. When you hover over a node, it has a little label that shows the type (or name) of the node, and rewards you could get there. Some nodes also have a little banner above them with a number. The legend was there to explain the meaning of the various icons you could see on these node labels. The issue was that it didn’t really explain them well, it just told you what the icons are. A lot of the more important information was sorely missing.
The legend was also already filled to the brim with text and didn't have enough room to add more information or reorganize it without impacting the screen and keeping it clean (as in empty until you need it).
So I attempted to improve the situation with a dedicated node tooltip which would show you the information relevant to a specific node you're hovering over. The new node tooltip (which is smaller than the legend) shows the name of the node and a general explanation of what the node contains, along with information about the threat you can expect there, the rewards you could find there and what the little banner above it means.
Hints
The other thing that was increasingly frustrating to me while doing a lot of testing was the codex opening up and forcing a context switch from the thing I was doing. In the editor, every time we start a world or level, a new session and profile are created, which means none of the hints are marked as "seen". Thus, the hints would update and spam opening the codex, forcing us to close it just to have it open again a short time after. It also kind-of promotes a tutorial heavy approach to playing the game instead of figuring it out for yourself.
So I decided to change the hint situation. All hints except two are now shown as a side notification, similar to the “levelup available” and “essence available” notifications. Clicking these will open the codex onto that hint, so it’s a non-intrusive element. Any player who wants to read those is informed that these exist and are ready to be looked at, but is not forcing you to do so.
These side notifications don’t persist across loading screens, so if you get into a combat map, the previous unclicked notifications are gone, but the codex will still show these hints as unread.
This change should go live with the patch today, so please let me know what you think about these and whether additional changes could be made to the text on the node tooltip, in cases where it’s not clear what the benefits of a specific node are. Once you try it, leave a comment here or post on our Discord server!
Thanks!
MarkoP
