I've heard people whining that The Witcher 2 has a terrible interface because it was made for consoles. I present three screenshots, two from a console game and one from PC.

http://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s100/SfonDN/Tooltip.png
http://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s100/SfonDN/Window.png
Final Fantasy 9 for the Playstation. Efficient use of space, fast and clean interface, tooltips and windows providing item descriptions.

http://i150.photobucket.com/albums/s100/SfonDN/Hollywood.png
Item's Arcade Hits for PC. High resolution, barely shows you anything, slow and clunky. Because there are not many items it works, barely.

Irem's Arcade Hits has a total of 18 items and navigating them is cumbersome. Final Fantasy 9 shows you more items than that at once; as well as being faster, easier on the eyes, and providing more information about each item in a 320x240 total screen resolution.

Of course an interface designed to work comfortably on consoles is not going to be as magnificent for PC users as Morrowind's. In some ways The Witcher 2's inventory beats Final Fantasy 9s, though I feel overall FF9's wins easily. My point is that bad design has little to do with consoles. Slowly scrolling descriptions and 7 items visible at once was a separate stylistic choice. As was a confusing minimap and menu items that change size when highlighted.

Anyone use Windows 7? Tried using the calculator? Noticed how the buttons slowly become unhighlighted when you move the curser to another button? Noticed how that makes it more difficult to use, ruins the whole point of highlighting, and makes you want to yell at whoever made it because seriously what the heck? That is the problem. It shows up in programs and platforms of all kinds, not just games or consoles.

Everyone has too stop crying about this, THEY ARE A COMPANY THAT NEEDS TO MAKE A PROFIT!!!!

Its the sane thing to do , besides more people will be able to play this great game, so pull your heads out of your own asses and move on with your lives.

No complaints from me here. Unlike a lot of folks I live in a little place I like to call reality. These guys have bills to pay and mouths to feed like you and me. makes sense that they not actively lock themselves out of a market just to satisfy a vocal minority of whiny spoiled brats.

You used the comparison between one of the best interface for a console game versus one of the weakest interface design I have ever seen in a PC game as a basis for your argument?

You don't even have to compare this far to understand why some people are annoyed. Just compare the current interface to its predecessor. You can't deny it's drastically different in terms of navigation, placement, use, etc. Now, the TW1 EE interface was more "old school", with grids and relied heavily on dragging stuff around, quick hover of the tooltip window on mouse over, etc.

The interface in TW2 relies a lot more on scrolling, dragging is not possible and tooltips are scrollable instead of showing all info at the same time.

It's so different that the polarization of opinions is inevitable. Those who preferred the TW1 interface are likely to dislike TW2's interface, and vice versa. Depending of how important to you personally interface design is, it might affect you more than others in terms of enjoyment.

Tastes are tastes. Can't change that!

yet they can still do that if they made our version's UI better ans then made the console versions better. everyone is happy and no one goes hungry

Implying that doing so is easy and/or financially viable in the current gaming environment. When it has been proven time and time again that it's not always that simple.

people can't handle innovation. it's not a question of preference, but the inability to adapt to new systems.

are you sating that it is hard?

they did a whole UI change for free. FREE. as in 0 dollars from the gamers pockets.

and yes, with the millions they made on this game its very much viable they could have made a new UI for the Console versions

Is the circle jerk over yet? Cause I'm here to say they could just as easily give parity to both platforms. They didn't. They need to fix the UI, and no amount of brown nosing by other users here will convince me otherwise.

I don't own any consoles, but I expected CDPR to start developing for the consoles eventually. All businesses want to make money and grow.

I just hope they learn from TW2 feedback and make TW3 great for PCs AND consoles. Then everyone can be happy. It's too early to go for the life rafts.

they should not expect everyone to be happy, they should tho expect to bring the maximum enjoyment they could.

Ok up front, I've followed the other threads so don't expect a whole lot of back and forth from me on this. We are not going to agree on this pure and simple.

With that out of the way...yes they could have made a separate UI for both platforms. The question is why? I've seen bad UIs. This is not one. it's not perfect but it's Not Mass Effect 1 either. THAT was crap. None of us were involved in the making of the game but we do know a few salient facts.

One, CDPRED is not a big dev house like Bioware or Bethsoft. They simply don't have the same manpower as those big boys.

Two, making separate Uis involves more time QA testing money manpower whatever. What we have is perfectly functional. Frankly after looking at UIs for PC only and cross platform UIs I really couldn't care less which I get as long as it is working and doesn't make me spend 15 minutes turning gear into omni gel.

three which kinda ties into 2, one UI interface makes it easier to fix any bugs that do crop up, by definition from a dev standpoint that's way better. I'd rather they spend time making really cool environments and maps than set up a 1990s style character doll in the inventory screen so that I can play dress up with Geralt.


All of this can be summed up by my saying this is about as far from the end of the world from a quality standpoint as it gets but it has set these boards on fire. it wasn't too bad until the announcement came out about the port. So is it the UI that has you all riled or the port. Both are non issues as far as I am concerned.

Again I am not expecting agreement, you have it your way and I'll have it mine but there you have it.

There are some cases where pc games have been tainted by developing them for consoles...for example, the differences between Deus Ex and Invisible War are glaring. Even the developers admit they were not happy with the results of developing Invisible War for the XBox first. I understand why a lot of gamers are concerned with the obvious console UI and QTE similarities in TW2.

That said, I don't see the problem in making the game available for consoles. It will only help CDPR to develop more games. I like the overall product of TW2. It's not without its faults, but it's a good game. As long as CDPR continues to make good games without making them completely brainless, I don't see any problem at all in making their games available for all platforms. There are plenty of console ports to PC that I enjoy. I don't see the harm in console gamers getting some PC ports.

You just lost all chance of being taken seriously bub.

Yup! I hope you are not trying to suggest that because the console example was good and the PC one wasn't, my argument that console UIs can be good is invalid. Because that would be very, very silly.

Final Fantasy 9 didn't even get all the UI stuff right some previous JRPGs did. Irem's Greatest Hits isn't the first program I've seen with that interface. The other one was the old GameTap launcher, and yes people complained regularly. --Edit-- Thinking about it, I'm not confidant in saying just how much people complained about it. It was a while ago.

Console doesn't mean it must be bad, even if it does mean it won't be as nice on PC as it could have been. Furthermore terrible stuff is done for PC all the time. A major point of the free program Media Player Classic is that it is clean and usable instead of what is normally done on PC anymore. Usability just isn't a priority.

CDPR made numerous mistakes that have nothing to do with consoles. There is even an interface mod out now which does nothing which would have worked worse on a console.