THat new UI.

[Fensfield]

Well then...

Am I the only one loving it?

No, I like it a lot. That said, I'd miss being able to hide away the secondary commands in a pull-out menu, and I hope the option will remain to have the action bar only appear when I have an engaged target. Also, it isn't the most controller-friendly-looking thing in the world; as a gamepad user I'm still very much waiting for similar detail on the gamepad-specific UI that the developers also promised. Hopefully it'll build on the good points of what we currently have; it's already pretty comfy so far as I'm concerned.

we all love it but i'm sure we're all wondering... why wasn't it done before, say at launch?

Because, I assume, the rush out the door meant that they only had time to build up one UI and systems behind it, and so attempted to hybridise one seems to have been intended for use primarily by a controller.

It wasnt done before because Tanaka wanted to rush the game out to start making money, this backfired and Yoshi-P is being careful not to make the same mistakes as Tanaka.

Yoichi Wada and the other Square-Enix executives are the ones with final say on release dates. Whether Hiromichi Tanaka said he could achieve a viable game despite the problems they were having is still in question, but the execs are the ones who had veto on when Final Fantasy XIV came out, and they chose not to block the launch in favour of further development.

Only question here is whether or not they forced it out against Tanaka's team's recommendation of if he and his team were with them on the decision. Which I find highly unlikely. No development team pushes for less time to work on a project, especially not one they know is in trouble - and Yoshida has in the past stated that the company did indeed know they were in difficulty a fair while before release.

So.. yeah. Yay new UI! Now, do please hurry up and show us similar prototypes for the gamepad one and OH LOOK TANAKA BASHING.