Early, early, early this morning Touch Arcade’s Eli Hodapp (who apparently doesn’t sleep) posted the above video for the release of Anrufen Online, a cross platform MMO, now available on the App Store [Link for the Bold.]

I guess subscribers to Anrufen Online might find this exciting, but the video did little to peek my interest in the MMO. Still, I summoned my courage and I downloaded it. I’ll be honest, I spent very little time with this game. Maybe ten to twenty minutes, what I found really put me off.

Inglorious appears in the world of Anrufen.

The UI and control scheme is, well, at it’s best it’s awful. I found the UI to be clunky, confusing, crowded and ugly. Icons are a muddy mess, surrounded by these stylization elements that server little purpose. When screen real-estate is at a premium, you don’t waste precious space by over styling your UI. A large majority of the screen is covered up by the players thumb when moving about. Onscreen text is a mess, and I am not sure whats going on in that mini map in the upper right hand corner.

So, this might have viruses in it? Wait a second!

While technically impressive to port your MMO to the IPhone, all it does it strengthens the idea that while it’s possible, is this really necessary? If you’re looking to get your MMORPG fix on the go, I’d look somewhere else, or hope and pray that Anrufen’s developer WiSTONE‘s takes a solid pass at correcting the issues after this first release.

The hot bar dominates MMOs when it comes to management of abilities and skills. Increasing popularity of these games along side massive successes like World of Warcraft have started a trickle down effect. Similar UI/UX is managing to spill into other genres as well. It doesn’t matter if you are playing a wizard in an MMO or a space marine in a RTS, sooner or later everyone will be subjected to the hotbar.

In most games there is little problem with this system in the beginning. A low level or starting character usually knows and owns little within the game world. Until a player reaches higher levels they won’t really see the inherit problems with the system. After a certain point, the hot bar ceases to be functional and becomes a nuisance. Tens if not hundreds of icons swim before your eyes each displaying status, recharge times, amounts and many other functions.

A hardcore gamer would chock this up to skill, claiming that the rote memorization required to play each class is part of the learning curve. I would disagree with this on principle. Requiring memorization starts to seep the fun out of a game for a casual player. A leisure activity becomes work, and a large portion of the audience, won’t want to memorize icons for their entertainment.

Don Norman once said, “Complexity is not bad. Complicated is bad.” He’s right, as long as a complicated system is organized in a clear and concise way a new player won’t be put off from interacting with the environment.

How do we allow users to take this one step further and make this complicated system easy to use? How do we move beyond the messy hotbar and streamline the system into something simple and more functional?

I have a few ideas and I am sure the community does as well. I intend “Solving the Hotbar” to be an ongoing series for discussion among the community. Is the hot bar truly broken? What would you as a user or a designer like or dislike? Send in your thoughts to: kmalexander at inglorio.us or drop a comment.

The Secret World or John Constantine? You make the call.

Today FunCom and Ragnar Tørnquist have finally started releasing details of their new MMO titled The Secret World. The premise looks great, monsters and magic in the modern world, little Lovecraftian lore, what’s not to love? I followed this a while back, when it was announced with an incredibly complex ARG. We’re talking April/May 2007 before FunCom had released Age of Conan, a game which sadly disappointed me as a gamer, and unimpressed me as a UI/UX designer. (I’ll riff on this later, AoC recently started inviting people back and I intend on checking it out again and reporting what I find.)

Ragnar Tørnquist impresses me as a game designer, his previous entries The Longest Journey and it’s sequel Dreamfall were good games with great stories, and quite fun despite some control and interface issues. Massively had an interview with Tørnquist and when asked about the makeup of the development team he stated:

No, it’s been it’s own team. This team formed after Dreamfall was done, and most of the team is made of people from Dreamfall, especially artists and designers. We’ve also done hiring and gotten new people onto the team, and as Conan has wrapped up we also got a few people from them and Anarchy Online as well.

While I enjoyed Tørnquist’s previous games I will admit I wasn’t pleased with the awkwardness of the UI or control scheme. In Dreamfall’s case the experience was slightly better on console, but on PC it was clunky and confusing. This partnered with the team from Age of Conan and Anarchy Online (another FunCom MMO with it’s own UI issues) doesn’t bode well with it comes to a simple and intuitive user interface.

I still hold out hope that The Secret World will be everything that I could want, but based on past experience I do so with trepidation. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.

Read the full interview with Ragnar Tørnquist here.

Old new seemed to be resurfacing as Curt Shilling announced his retirement. Seems that things are shaping up over at Shilling’s 38 Studios. The company’s mysterious MMO code-named Copernicus has some big names directing its creation, and they have been quietly building a solid development team.

Back in November the studio has also brought in two big industry heavy hitters, Director of Audio Aubrey Hodges (of Kings Quest fame) and most interesting to this blog Senior UI Designer Irena Pereira. Pereira comes from Blizzard, where she worked on the UI design and development for The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. The two add-ons for Blizzards mega hit World of Warcraft.

There were some significant UI improvement between the original WoW and the changes that came with The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. Here’s hoping that Copernicus goes beyond the jumbled and confusing icon fest that plagues most MMOs these days and brings us back into the light of intuitive UI design.

Via Joystiq Forever Ago

Lord of the Rings Online is going strong. Massive content patches, solid game play, excellent customer service and a enthusiastic user base it’s no wonder Turbine has had so much success with the game. Their first major content release post Mines of Moria recently hit the servers and with it a whole slew of changes.

Something recently caught my eye was their attention towards fixing the new player experience, tweaking the game play in an attempt to draw in new players and focus on giving them a fun experience. MMOs can be overly complicated, and their strategy seems to be to ease a player into the game and not  overwhelm them with details.

One particular thing that excites me is seeing a developer focusing on the reduction of load screens by removing the need for zoning. As I said in a previous post, the need for zoning can be a major hindrance to game immersion. It pulls a player out of the game. Seeing a developer like Turbine embrace this strategy is a positive development. For the full discussion: Read the full Dev Diary here.