The User Interface - Mouse and Keyboard Users

[AtlasNR]

As many people know one of the major problems with Final Fantasy XIV in its current state is the user interface. It seems that the game was designed with only the gamepad players in mind. (I remember reading it in one of YoshiP's letter.)

For a game as ambitious as Final Fantasy XIV (They wanted to be a serious contender in the MMO market.) you would assume they would be cater to all parties, ESPECIALLY the majority of MMO players which tend to use mouse and keyboards as controls. This unfortunately doesn't appear to be the case.

The fact remains that almost all MMO players use the mouse & keyboard for gameplay. Usually the gamepad players are the ones who have moved from Final Fantasy XI. If the intention was to draw players from other MMOs or new players in general the players using mouse and keyboard should have been at the very least acknowledged.

Top hindrances in the UI

1. No drag and drop functionality.

This is one of the strangest omissions I have ever seen in a PC game. The lack of the ability to drag and drop abilities on to the action bar. (Plus many other instances.) Makes the necessary amount of working with the keyboard absurd. This brings me to my next point.

2. The main menu system.

Nothing has stopped me from playing this game more than the clunky menu system. I understand the purpose of it for gamepad players; however, quite frankly, for a mouse and keyboard player it is an absolute nightmare. There is absolutely NO reason I should not be able to bind hotkeys to access the specific parts of the menu. Having to trek through the large menu is tedious and cumbersome.

Coming later: On field interactivity.


I apologize for cutting this short but due to the fact I am at my workplace I will have to complete the compilation of my list later on. Feel free to comment on the current part.

[Soda]

Totally agree. It blows my mind that people are talking about stupid idiotic stuff like class-renaming, jumping, swimming, and other nonsense when I still can't even hotkey 99% of anything in the game. Why do I have to use third-party programs like AHK to remap my keys because the game STILL won't let me do it? And why do we only have ONE action bar at a time? It's like, hey, I WANT to use all the pretty skills in the game, but I can't even assign keys to the hotbars in the first place. It's like I'm always unequiping skills because I don't have enough room on my bar.

And don't stand up for SE by saying "FFXIV is meant to be played with both hands on the keyboard to access the 1-9 keys and arrows to swap through your bars in combat." Are you kidding me? Seriously? No. This game needs to be brought up to the standards of modern MMOs. I'm hoping that the new battle system improvements address these issues.

- Allow us to hotkey anything. Full customization. If you don't, players are just going to use AHK type programs to do it anyway.
- Give us more than one action bar for skills at a time.
- And allow us to toggle it to not disappear every time we're not in combat. I want to be able to see the cooldowns on my skills between fights and such.

Basically, and I know you guys hate it, but we need WoW's set up of allowing us to have a few hotbars that are always visible, with skills being able to be dragged directly to where we want, with the option to bind ANY of those buttons to ANY key combination we wish. Yeah, you may not like it, but if this game is going to succeed that is where it needs to go.

Combat needs to be easily accessible, and skills need to be easy to use. Right now, that is not the case.

[Benjaman]

Totally agree. It blows my mind that people are talking about stupid idiotic stuff like class-renaming, jumping, swimming, and other nonsense when I still can't even hotkey 99% of anything in the game. Why do I have to use third-party programs like AHK to remap my keys because the game STILL won't let me do it? And why do we only have ONE action bar at a time? It's like, hey, I WANT to use all the pretty skills in the game, but I can't even assign keys to the hotbars in the first place. It's like I'm always unequiping skills because I don't have enough room on my bar.

And don't stand up for SE by saying "FFXIV is meant to be played with both hands on the keyboard to access the 1-9 keys and arrows to swap through your bars in combat." Are you kidding me? Seriously? No. This game needs to be brought up to the standards of modern MMOs. I'm hoping that the new battle system improvements address these issues.

- Allow us to hotkey anything. Full customization. If you don't, players are just going to use AHK type programs to do it anyway.
- Give us more than one action bar for skills at a time.
- And allow us to toggle it to not disappear every time we're not in combat. I want to be able to see the cooldowns on my skills between fights and such.

Basically, and I know you guys hate it, but we need WoW's set up of allowing us to have a few hotbars that are always visible, with skills being able to be dragged directly to where we want, with the option to bind ANY of those buttons to ANY key combination we wish. Yeah, you may not like it, but if this game is going to succeed that is where it needs to go.

Combat needs to be easily accessible, and skills need to be easy to use. Right now, that is not the case.

I disagree with a lot of what you say. My biggest concern is that the UI takes up way too much space on the screen at the moment. FFXIV's (only) strong point is it's graphics which I find hard to appreciate when the UI in all up in my face. I liked FFXI's UI because it was simple and didn't take up much space. List's of your WS/JA/MA were brought up with shortcut commands and didn't take up much space at all. The controls and the UI were flawlessly integrated with each other. FFXIV's UI has so much shit all over the place (especially during leves) that I can hardly see what is around my character. Between my action bar, health,mp,tp bar, stamina bar, party member bars, chat log, minimap, rank/physical level bars, target health bar, debuff/buff status window, and levequest objectives window, I can hardly see anything without reducing all of these bars as much as I possibly can and shoving them into the corners of my screen. It's a huge cluster-f*** right now and what we DONT need is more f****** action bars in the way.

[Seikninkuru]

I disagree with a lot of what you say. My biggest concern is that the UI takes up way too much space on the screen at the moment. FFXIV's (only) strong point is it's graphics which I find hard to appreciate when the UI in all up in my face. I liked FFXI's UI because it was simple and didn't take up much space. List's of your WS/JA/MA were brought up with shortcut commands and didn't take up much space at all. The controls and the UI were flawlessly integrated with each other. FFXIV's UI has so much shit all over the place (especially during leves) that I can hardly see what is around my character. Between my action bar, health,mp,tp bar, stamina bar, party member bars, chat log, minimap, rank/physical level bars, target health bar, debuff/buff status window, and levequest objectives window, I can hardly see anything without reducing all of these bars as much as I possibly can and shoving them into the corners of my screen. It's a huge cluster-f*** right now and what we DONT need is more f****** action bars in the way.

What the fuck do you play in 800x600 it's an extremely minimal design as is. That minimalistic design is what is hampering it's functionality. The last thing we need is less usability of the interface. I don't need a clusterfuck of macros and menus to do what what simple hotkey press that I map to the key of my choosing should accomplish.

PS GTFO

[ShinChuck]

I agree. I would love to see an overhaul on the UI, and that alone could take care of a lot of XIV's basic issues. I've tried it with the mouse and keyboard, I've tried it with a PS3-cloned gamepad, and it really doesn't seem ideal for either. It seems to me like they attempted to do something that would work for both camps, and ended up not entirely managing to make it work smoothly for either.

For the reasons OP said, it's rough using a mouse and keyboard. But it's also rough using a gamepad, especially in battle trying to press left or right repeatedly to get to desired actions, and with the game as menu-heavy as it is, it's slow navigating with both a pad and a keyboard regardless.

[Cairdeas]

Can someone explain how Drag and Drop could possibly be implemented in XIV?

[Molly_Millions]

Can someone explain how Drag and Drop could possibly be implemented in XIV?

Dragging skills from the list of skills to the action bar, but I fail to see how this is that much faster than the current implementation where we click on the space that we want the action in, then click the action. Either way, total time spent setting an individual action would be around 3 seconds.

Sure, this request would be nice to have, but is the current implementation game breaking? Absolutely not.

[Seikninkuru]

Dragging skills from the list of skills to the action bar, but I fail to see how this is that much faster than the current implementation where we click on the space that we want the action in, then click the action. Either way, total time spent setting an individual action would be around 3 seconds.

Sure, this request would be nice to have, but is the current implementation game breaking? Absolutely not.

Yeah that isn't that big of a concern to me either. I do, however, despise the fact I had to write macros to use any of the hotbar abilities other than the first hotkey bank. The alternative is CLICKING arrows up and down? How un-user frielndly.

Here's a simple solution to the QQers whining about screen real estate. Give me the option to turn on multiple hotbars at once, as well as have them stay up all the time. Furthermore allow me the option to map my keys however I want. You don't have to use any of this and it can stay the same for you if you wish, just let me have some usability of the UI without having to fight that along with the monster. Thanks!

[Nivana]

Second both the OP and 2nd post

I would like to have the option to use the "FFXI Full Keyboard" setup as well. I am quite used to that after what, 7 years of playing and i keep getting spam from accidentally hitting Right Arrow Key + Enter Key or some other random Arrow Key.

Even if they only add WoW's setup I'd still be happy though, the current setup is far too buggy.

i know it kinda sucks but you can F9+Enter Key to see your action bar. F9=target yourself

[Marious]

I dont know about all of them, but I would like to be able to have the bars up at all times, and yes it would be nice to have or be able to use hotkeys in game instead of going to a 3rd party SW which is against the TOS if I am not mistaken.