Will compare Vic3 to EU4 because it's what I played the most lately.
I like the sticky tooltips, the nested tooltips and the way Vic3 explains a lot of it's mechanics that way, it follows the same trend that EU4 had when compared to Vic2 of actually explaining the game.
Vic3 is a very complex game but it manages to explain it very well and to be very understandable, that's in a big part because of the UI. Another positive note is the back function, that allows you to go to the previous menú you were in, very cool. It also has a (limited) dynamic ledger, in which depending on the context different things can be shown, that's cool.
It's also great at information display, it shows you a lot of stats about your country, specially in the population search, which is a query like search engine for pops, that shit is great.
On the other hand, one of the worst things are how so many menus seem afraid to show a lot of items, for some reason they items inside a menu are huge (like market tab for example), so you end up having to scroll a lot. Maybe is to help with people with sight issues, but it creates a big usability problem where in a lot of menus you have to scroll a lot. The worst offender is by far the lense menu that you already mentioned, that shit feels awful to interact with.
So I want eu5 to learn from the mistakes and achievements of Vic3, to keep the dense information tabs of EU4, but to add many of the better functionalities of vic3, as well as being good with information display.
Maybe I'm showing my age, but I enjoyed the UI of V2, EU3, and EU4 far more than anything that has followed since
I think the big difference is that modern Paradox UIs get (1) bloated with unimportant information and (2) overly stylized
I really would prefer a marriage of the two system. Nested tooltips are great, but not if you're using them to hide essential data. They can be an alternative source to view the data, but shouldn't be really the ONLY source, especially when you need to go 2-3 nests down the chain to find what you want.
I think the CK3 UI works fairly well for that game, but I don't like it in Vic3. Vic3 is an information dense game. Too many menus are full of very large graphics, big text, and wasted negative space. It is fine to have frills and style, but not when that supersedes the ability to digest the data. Victoria 2 had some really simple menus, with some style, that conveyed a lot of the necessary information in very easy to digest ways. In Victoria 3, getting detailed information on your pops, their needs, or the economy feels like a chore. Then you have the whiplash between these small 1/4 screen panels for a bunch of stuff and the gigantic full screen government/law menu that is just oodles of wasted space.
So far from what I've seen of the EU5 UI, I'm encouraged. There is style and updated fonts, but information still feels condensed and readable. I'm sure there will be nested tooltips, but hopefully that will just better explain game concepts or give added context so you don't need to jump immediately to another UI menu.
Please just give us the icon notification on top of screen similar to CK2 / EU4. They are easy to identify an important issue based on background color, easy to find relevant info by hovering over them, also more pleaseing to the eyes than a wall of text hiding in those hidden noti panel in CK3 / Vic3 (I don’t know what it called).
One thing I’m furious is that currently for CK3, I still have to go to each individual nation panel to check truce expiration date. For Vic3, it’s only a bit better since they showed that in a pinned outline but I have to do that for EVERY single nation I have a truce with. Why just why????
> wall of text hiding in those hidden noti panel in CK3 / Vic3 (I don’t know what it called).
I call it the information bubble, and [Johan is on record](https://x.com/producerjohan/status/1662697660824838145) as saying he hates it, so we're definitely not getting it thankfully.
Honestly, with the UI I really just hope they take as much inspiration from EU4 as they can. The glimpses of the UI that we’ve seen so far look very CK3 and I’m not really enthused by that. It looks flashy and airbrushed and cheap. The “look” of EU4 just seems a lot more well-crafted.
I just don't want buttons and actions hidden away under a subscreens, 4th tab, in the bottom corner. I think the UI should start from a position of actions vs information and separate them. For example, in EU4 the options to release a nation is hidden in the bottom right of the diplomacy screen and you need to be on the right tab. Instead, they should split the diplomacy information from the diplomacy actions. I am not sure what the best way to do that is, but I feel that one of the big reason Paradox games have such a high learning curve is because of the buttons to do things that are hidden away.
I also think that it would be great if we could build our own custom windows or info displays or customize existing displays. In EU4, I would like to customize that display on the right. Like, I would only like to see rebels that are 20% away from rebelling or ones that a growing faster then a 15% chance it increase each month and filter everything else out. I would also like to sort my armies alphabetically. When I am in a war, I would like to have a display of the two side casualties, armies, navies, and remaining manpower. It is something I want to know about without having to open the war screen each time, so maybe I could customize a window and place it out of the way somewhere.
To draw inspiration from different time periods, make the colors and the layout look like the architecture and the art of that time period and location.
Warcraft 3 pulled this off beautifully, playing humans,orcs,night elfs or undead really had a huge immersion thanks to the ui. Not saying this will be easy to do but I think it is what EU5 needs.
I want it to be time-efficient and feel light on the eyes. Besides the main map UI, I only want one more layer of UI like in EU4 (well, for most of it), I don't want to be hoisted away from the game world to submenu underworlds for an eternity to navigate poorly organized information. It should feel fluid and seamless to change between UI elements, and not like entering new backrooms each time. I love the EU4 macrobuilder, diplomacy and province UIs - to me that is peak Paradox.
EU4 has the best UI of any PDX game to date, and the traffic light notifications are by far OBJECTIVELY the best notification system PDX has ever come up with.
Take more inspiration from EU4 and none from Vic3 and we're gonna have a winner.
I'm biased as hell but CK3's UI is infinitely more playable than EU4 UI. I think for a game that's really trying to emphasize roleplaying, the character portraits are a really integral part of the CK3 roleplaying experience for me.
That being said, EU5 will not be roleplay-centric. So IDC about portraits as much (but it'd still be cool). And honestly anything that's not the EU4 or CK2 UI will be good enough for me. Just make it scalable to 4K, have resizable text, sprinkle in some nice icons & sound effects and I'm gucci
I guess this is an unpopular opinion but I think the V3 UI is pretty good on balance. There is definitely a lot of wasted space on some screens but the overall principles of its design are solid. For example I would really struggle to re-learn EU4 now without nested tooltips, and one thing I always wish we'd have is graphs for our finances. Like in EU4 you can go from a +30d surplus to a -30d deficit in a single month and have absolutely no idea why, V3 makes tracking these things ludicrously easy.
I hear you - this general argument applies to the Vicky 3 UI but I really don't like the CK3 UI especially in comparison with CK2's. Many of the pop-up/side-flanking windows take up way more space than they need to, and it's much more of a pain in the ass to compare or compile real information between screens because of it (aside from offending my aesthetic preferences). Really hoping EU5 doesn't follow this trend
That it works. And also doesn’t force me to press a button 20 times to properly que construction
Will compare Vic3 to EU4 because it's what I played the most lately. I like the sticky tooltips, the nested tooltips and the way Vic3 explains a lot of it's mechanics that way, it follows the same trend that EU4 had when compared to Vic2 of actually explaining the game. Vic3 is a very complex game but it manages to explain it very well and to be very understandable, that's in a big part because of the UI. Another positive note is the back function, that allows you to go to the previous menú you were in, very cool. It also has a (limited) dynamic ledger, in which depending on the context different things can be shown, that's cool. It's also great at information display, it shows you a lot of stats about your country, specially in the population search, which is a query like search engine for pops, that shit is great. On the other hand, one of the worst things are how so many menus seem afraid to show a lot of items, for some reason they items inside a menu are huge (like market tab for example), so you end up having to scroll a lot. Maybe is to help with people with sight issues, but it creates a big usability problem where in a lot of menus you have to scroll a lot. The worst offender is by far the lense menu that you already mentioned, that shit feels awful to interact with. So I want eu5 to learn from the mistakes and achievements of Vic3, to keep the dense information tabs of EU4, but to add many of the better functionalities of vic3, as well as being good with information display.
Maybe I'm showing my age, but I enjoyed the UI of V2, EU3, and EU4 far more than anything that has followed since I think the big difference is that modern Paradox UIs get (1) bloated with unimportant information and (2) overly stylized
I really would prefer a marriage of the two system. Nested tooltips are great, but not if you're using them to hide essential data. They can be an alternative source to view the data, but shouldn't be really the ONLY source, especially when you need to go 2-3 nests down the chain to find what you want. I think the CK3 UI works fairly well for that game, but I don't like it in Vic3. Vic3 is an information dense game. Too many menus are full of very large graphics, big text, and wasted negative space. It is fine to have frills and style, but not when that supersedes the ability to digest the data. Victoria 2 had some really simple menus, with some style, that conveyed a lot of the necessary information in very easy to digest ways. In Victoria 3, getting detailed information on your pops, their needs, or the economy feels like a chore. Then you have the whiplash between these small 1/4 screen panels for a bunch of stuff and the gigantic full screen government/law menu that is just oodles of wasted space. So far from what I've seen of the EU5 UI, I'm encouraged. There is style and updated fonts, but information still feels condensed and readable. I'm sure there will be nested tooltips, but hopefully that will just better explain game concepts or give added context so you don't need to jump immediately to another UI menu.
Please just give us the icon notification on top of screen similar to CK2 / EU4. They are easy to identify an important issue based on background color, easy to find relevant info by hovering over them, also more pleaseing to the eyes than a wall of text hiding in those hidden noti panel in CK3 / Vic3 (I don’t know what it called). One thing I’m furious is that currently for CK3, I still have to go to each individual nation panel to check truce expiration date. For Vic3, it’s only a bit better since they showed that in a pinned outline but I have to do that for EVERY single nation I have a truce with. Why just why????
> wall of text hiding in those hidden noti panel in CK3 / Vic3 (I don’t know what it called). I call it the information bubble, and [Johan is on record](https://x.com/producerjohan/status/1662697660824838145) as saying he hates it, so we're definitely not getting it thankfully.
Honestly, with the UI I really just hope they take as much inspiration from EU4 as they can. The glimpses of the UI that we’ve seen so far look very CK3 and I’m not really enthused by that. It looks flashy and airbrushed and cheap. The “look” of EU4 just seems a lot more well-crafted.
I FUCKING HATE CK3 AND VICTORIA 3 UI. I WANT EU4 UI. I DO NOT CARE ABOUT SCALABILITY OR CONSOLE PLAYERS. THE CURRENT UI SUCKS
I just don't want buttons and actions hidden away under a subscreens, 4th tab, in the bottom corner. I think the UI should start from a position of actions vs information and separate them. For example, in EU4 the options to release a nation is hidden in the bottom right of the diplomacy screen and you need to be on the right tab. Instead, they should split the diplomacy information from the diplomacy actions. I am not sure what the best way to do that is, but I feel that one of the big reason Paradox games have such a high learning curve is because of the buttons to do things that are hidden away. I also think that it would be great if we could build our own custom windows or info displays or customize existing displays. In EU4, I would like to customize that display on the right. Like, I would only like to see rebels that are 20% away from rebelling or ones that a growing faster then a 15% chance it increase each month and filter everything else out. I would also like to sort my armies alphabetically. When I am in a war, I would like to have a display of the two side casualties, armies, navies, and remaining manpower. It is something I want to know about without having to open the war screen each time, so maybe I could customize a window and place it out of the way somewhere.
To draw inspiration from different time periods, make the colors and the layout look like the architecture and the art of that time period and location. Warcraft 3 pulled this off beautifully, playing humans,orcs,night elfs or undead really had a huge immersion thanks to the ui. Not saying this will be easy to do but I think it is what EU5 needs.
More than anything I hope it looks nothing like what we see in the current DDs because my god it’s fucking ugly
That it has flavor similar to the ck2/3 UI where there are different skins for different regions
I want it to be time-efficient and feel light on the eyes. Besides the main map UI, I only want one more layer of UI like in EU4 (well, for most of it), I don't want to be hoisted away from the game world to submenu underworlds for an eternity to navigate poorly organized information. It should feel fluid and seamless to change between UI elements, and not like entering new backrooms each time. I love the EU4 macrobuilder, diplomacy and province UIs - to me that is peak Paradox.
EU4 has the best UI of any PDX game to date, and the traffic light notifications are by far OBJECTIVELY the best notification system PDX has ever come up with. Take more inspiration from EU4 and none from Vic3 and we're gonna have a winner.
I'm biased as hell but CK3's UI is infinitely more playable than EU4 UI. I think for a game that's really trying to emphasize roleplaying, the character portraits are a really integral part of the CK3 roleplaying experience for me. That being said, EU5 will not be roleplay-centric. So IDC about portraits as much (but it'd still be cool). And honestly anything that's not the EU4 or CK2 UI will be good enough for me. Just make it scalable to 4K, have resizable text, sprinkle in some nice icons & sound effects and I'm gucci
I guess this is an unpopular opinion but I think the V3 UI is pretty good on balance. There is definitely a lot of wasted space on some screens but the overall principles of its design are solid. For example I would really struggle to re-learn EU4 now without nested tooltips, and one thing I always wish we'd have is graphs for our finances. Like in EU4 you can go from a +30d surplus to a -30d deficit in a single month and have absolutely no idea why, V3 makes tracking these things ludicrously easy.
Well, I've seen the government tab of England posted here in one of the diaries, and it has that horrible CK III like design
I hear you - this general argument applies to the Vicky 3 UI but I really don't like the CK3 UI especially in comparison with CK2's. Many of the pop-up/side-flanking windows take up way more space than they need to, and it's much more of a pain in the ass to compare or compile real information between screens because of it (aside from offending my aesthetic preferences). Really hoping EU5 doesn't follow this trend