Playstation 3 HUD needs a major overhaul

The more I play FFXIV on my PS3, the more I am frustrated with the HUD experience. Shrinking everything down to the smallest size to make it fit on the screen makes most things unreadable. When you make it readable almost nothing fits on the screen properly. Even moving around windows so it doesn't overlap one another when you are looking through your inventory, loot, armory, Markets, etc..., ends up overlapping one of the other things.

I really feel that SE needs to do a complete overhaul on the HUD for the PS3, and especially the upcoming PS4 version. It feels like most of it is just ported over from the PC version and they did not do a good job with the scaling between the two versions.

Thoughts?

Even on PC you get overlap if you have all those elements open at once unless you shrink a bunch of things. It's somewhat unreasonable to expect the HUD to be set up so you can have every dialog window up with NO overlap. The actual HUD itself is fine. If you have Inventory, Armory, Market windows all open then you have no need for the HUD elements like your hotbars or the map that may be behind them as you're obviously doing inventory management and making sales/purchases. The actual HUD elements like hotbars, chatbox, map etc. (Dialog boxes and popup menus are NOT HUD) fit nicely on the screen and are readable in the smaller settings at least on my screen (32 in. HDTV). FYI PS4 is using the full out PC HUD.

I was talking more or less about the overlaps with open windows and they hide part of the information that you are looking at by being overlapped. PS4 full out PC HUD? as in full keyboard and mouse support also?

the PS3 supports mouse and keyboard control schemes for those games that also support it. the mouse accuracy is pretty low. and the bigger your TV the less accurate your pointer will be. i would imagine the PS4 has much smoother mouse movement.

you can play FFXIV with a mouse and keyboard scheme. you can change an option. somewhere is keyboard & mouse mode. and just above it is the default selected option, direct input method.



but i also get where the OP is coming from. a lot of times the tool-tip window will be covering up something i want to look at. there is not much screen space. though i don't think SE will be making any drastic changes. the PS3 has very little RAM. SE is probably pushing RAM usage to the edge as it is. look at Focus Target. two HUD items are removed to display it.

on the PS4 the game will output at a 1080p resolution. allowing for more screen space and more compact UI elements. plus the increased RAM will do wonders for the design team.

A lot of windows could be smaller if they were just organized a bit differently. The crafting log, for instance, takes up most of the screen on a PS3, but simply reorganizing it to use a couple rows of tabs across the top for classes and level ranges could eliminate the need for the entire left-hand column, condensing the overall size quite a bit. If the info in the right-hand column were condensed a bit as well, the window as a whole could probably be about half its current size and still give us all the same information.

And the dialog window when you're talking to an NPC has huge blank margins all the way around, so that it covers far more of the screen than it needs to. That along with the fact that it's not one of the HUD elements we can re-size makes it really hard to keep out of the way. It can sometimes be really hard to find a camera angle that will let you talk to lalafell NPCs without completely hiding them. (Usually you end up just seeing the top of their head and guessing by when their head bobs up and down that they were probably gesturing there.)

Tooltips often end up covering a window you're trying to compare them to.

And although some windows can be moved around, others keep resetting to an awkward default position. (For instance, the other day I wanted to move the retainer's inventory window over to the left a bit so that the tooltips would all show up on the right side. I'd need to be in mouse-mode to do that, and since the L1 button is remapped while the window is open, I had to dismiss my retainer to turn on mouse-mode, then summon her again to move the window over. But then I wanted to get out of mouse mode, so I dismissed her again to turn it off, expecting the window to be where I placed it when I re-summoned her. It wasn't. Once I turned mouse mode off and re-summoned her, the window was back at its really awkward default position that has the tooltips flipping back and forth between right and left.)

I want to be able to have multiple windows open at once. In particular, the PS3 rule that you cannot have any other windows open when summoning your retainer is really annoying. I'm usually picking up crafting ingredients and want to reference the crafting log to see which ones I need, but I'm not allowed to have it open, so I wind up summoning and dismissing my retainer over and over again just so that I can check the crafting log in between to find the next few items to pick up. It's really annoying.

Well, those are some of the window and HUD issues that irritate me. I don't know that they're necessarily the same ones the OP is frustrated by, but I think it's part of the same issue.

Yea the PS3 HUD is pretty bad. Like the materia melding screen at least 10% of the left side is off-screen. Some windows can be resized by clicking R3, but that doesn't always work. They huge default Alliance bars right in the middle of the screen, horrible. Party member list covering up the enemy list. And not really a big deal, but the bottom part of item information windows is cut off below "Sells for X gil"

You can definitely "make it work", though. My biggest complaint about PS3 version is targeting, but that's a whole other discussion.