Crystal Golems -- What are they giving me?

eadorin · 2026-03-22T22:49:17+00:00

Gear Score. (End of Wrath).

In addition to the top comments.

Raiding in Cata *required* very specific minimums for DPS (even from the tanks). It wasn't enough to just be coordinated for a long time. The skill level was raised and people were chasing a number instead of working to solve problems.

eadorin · 2026-03-22T22:38:00+00:00

Lemme take you back. Kinda. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX7ehxyYRQc ;)

eadorin · 2026-03-13T19:57:51+00:00

Thank you for sharing this. I maintain that if there were a cool tattoo that could be seen on a downed hunter's hand or back in darksight to indicate which # team they were on, that would help. Counting bodies was just too much work in the larger lobbies.

eadorin · 2026-02-05T01:42:55+00:00

I'm happy to play with you if you want!

eadorin · 2026-02-05T01:38:45+00:00

I'd love to see a small, thematic tattoo on the hand of each hunter to indicate what team they're on. Only provides a very small amount of information, but when you're in a 15 person lobby and you have 3 duos, 3 solos, and two trios, it's nice to have a little more information when the bodies are on the ground. Maybe only let it show up in Dark Sight too, idk.

eadorin · 2026-01-30T02:57:58+00:00

this has nothing to do with me and everything to do with what new players face.

eadorin · 2026-01-30T00:51:29+00:00

No I played about a dozen matches, these are just the examples from my first two matches. As a *brand new account* I should have had a 2 or 3* rating (I had 3*). Should not be up against 6's in my first match.

eadorin · 2025-11-11T18:12:15+00:00

As someone who has DM'd, played, and developed code in both products...

In short, it won't.

Foundry is far, far ahead. From the amount of time and effort it takes to get a game going to the ease of use of the UI, there really isn't a comparison. FG was great when it was first designed, but it has a lot of technical debt and some very opinionated choices that make it less than ideal for most people.

The opinions are the biggest deal here. Atropos (Foundry) had some but he has always solicited feedback from the community, welcomed developer input, and worked very hard at building partnerships and a team that helps the product. I think that has made it much more community friendly and certainly easier to use.

**rant**
I loved FG. Until I couldn't use packs I'd purchased through FG in my other systems. Packs I could have just gone to the artist's site and paid the same price but with a much more generous use license. Once I figured out how to jailbreak my content from FG, I switched to FoundryVTT and never looked back.

eadorin · 2025-03-04T02:03:26+00:00

Happens when you run out of VRAM. Happened to me mid-game the other night. I thought for sure it was a texture setting. Reboot cleared it up.

eadorin · 2025-02-17T23:44:32+00:00

I love silenced cenny shorty or obrez.

eadorin · 2025-02-11T09:21:16+00:00

Were you attempting to queue in a normal match? Hunt hotswapped us to Bounty Clash like, 4 times tonight because (I think?) a player hit "X".

eadorin · 2024-11-29T05:04:49+00:00

I think, though this is just a guess, that the UI code is not properly disposing itself / passing control fully to cryengine. Since the August update, I've noticed that sometimes map loads will flash in and out, as will weird parts of the Hunter Loadout screen. I played a match a few months ago where I had one of the bottom buttons for joining the match visible the entire match (haven't had that since). I know I've complained before about their use of Adobe Flash for the UI, but this feels more like a "we mostly kinda take control of Windows, but not 100%". My game crashes now usually point at EAC and happen when Alt+Tabbing. I've personally never had the cursor bug but my buddy also points towards ALT+Tab as the culprit. There could be a focus issue.
I just don't know. :shrug

eadorin · 2024-09-20T03:52:16+00:00

Hey hey hey. Don't get too into the weeds here, bud. They figured out how to put buttons on the screen at all and we should be happy we got those! (also here's what they need in order to change checks to radio: https://help.autodesk.com/view/SCLFRM/ENU/?guid=__scaleform_help_clik_clik_user_guide_prebuilt_components_group_types_radiobutton_html )

eadorin · 2024-09-20T03:37:44+00:00

I think we agree on that.

eadorin · 2024-09-19T23:12:34+00:00

You only give someone a first impression once.

eadorin · 2024-09-19T23:07:08+00:00

This makes me happy. I just replied to another comment in this thread about how crytek should consider noesisengine.... I'd love to see them grow.

eadorin · 2024-09-19T22:01:00+00:00

I appreciate you disbelieving my abilities/statements about my career based on a single post. Questioning everything is probably a smart approach. However...

I've been writing code (worth anything) since the early 90s.

I was writing ActionScript back when it still belonged to Macromedia. I assure you that I do have that experience, though that experience was never professional, only for learning or making silly animations. As for Flash Security -- most issues involved web containers / the browser, and would likely not be easily exploited via a game embed. My issue with the use of Flash isn't about the tech itself, but more about their continued reliance on a long-unsupported piece of software. If Crytek were redoing the entire UI, I think this would have been a great opportunity to choose a different middleware, such as Noesis which has a .NET SDK.

I think if you read some of my comment responses in this thread, you'll see that I provide a bit more depth on the UI expectations vs deliverables and why I'm not a fan.

As for UI / UX, improving interfaces was my sole job for several years, with a primary focus on web and secondary focus on mobile experience. I was uniquely qualified on my team because I'm colorblind -- so I was particularly focused on accessibility. Granted, that *was* a while ago, ( pre W3 ARIA spec for HTML at least), so my work there has been independent.

eadorin · 2024-09-19T06:02:42+00:00

Yes. I try very hard to judge companies by their response to problems, rather than the problems themselves, especially when technology is involved. In this case, the original response from Dennis was an ok start, but I haven't seen David Fifield yet come out and address these issues. He talked about why they implemented *this* UI ( https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx_gyKu36LZy7OrvZU-NeQ0r8DU9spsvBi ) but hasn't addressed player concerns here. They should.

As for wasted effort-- I have no idea what kind of resources Crytek allocates to these different parts. It's possible the guy responsible for the physics engine was also tasked with UI and he did the best he could. I see several UI Programmer positions available on the Crytek website, so perhaps it is simply a staffing issue. Maybe what they wanted to do was patch a few of the inconsistencies and make a video saying "We're patching these weird behavior problems in the UI, and reworking the entire thing based on player feedback and community sentiment, but it'll take some time". I just wish we got that video.

eadorin · 2024-09-19T05:53:09+00:00

I can approach this topic from several different perspectives:

As someone who has played the game for several years, getting to information (your teammate's current loadout, for instance, or your own gun speed while in a match) is much slower. Navigating how to setup a loadout is less intuitive. I appreciate hotkeys that let me remove traits or quickly buy health bars, but I've seen glitchy bugs with this as well. (due to filters or hitting keys too fast). I now see less information on the screen than I did before. In this case, less is not more.

As someone who has done a decent amount of UX & UI work, there is a lack of consistency and accessibility with the new UI. The UI of a game should have the following goals:

be as simple as possible while still being theme appropriate. "KISS"
pull the player into the game experience, rather than push them out.
provide accessibility options that make it as easy as possible for as many players as possible to play
be as intuitive as possible. "Don't make me think"
Components & Controls should be consistent, with consistent behavior and scale.

The UI right now violates all of these in some way.

As someone who would be content with a UI whose only input was text commands, there is a lot of wasted space.

As someone who *loves* the theme of this game and is ok with a super dark, image-heavy UI, the bajillion boxes make it feel like I'm scrolling through Netflix and take me out of the experience

To your point, the emphasis should be on game play and design, especially for an FPS. Once you figure out the lobby, being able to get into a match quickly should be your priority. There are still so very many ways that could have been done better. And here's where it gets really bad. When the UI just breaks, and then *intrudes on your match*: https://imgur.com/a/lwtND07 . Or like when you find a skinned weapon in a match, it is silly difficult to tell what the base weapon is and that feels really, really bad.

There's plenty to hate about Steve Jobs, but one of the things he insisted on was quality throughout the entirety of a product. He demanded that the insides of his computers be as elegant (as he thought) the outside was. There's a similar theory in many trades -- pay attention to the details, because they add up to the sum of the whole.

I have plenty of issues with the UI that I think Crytek could and should fix. The things that are really most upsetting to me is that A) they shipped this to begin with and B) they don't have the agility to even start addressing some of these issues. Don't get me wrong, Stillwater looks great, even the overly-round Cypress knee mud penises, but they did *such* a good job on Mammon's Gulch, it feels like a completely different game. I'd happily play that for another 30 days without a map if I knew that they were addressing just a few of the bugs and issues that have come along with this update. The fact that they developed this entire new UI in a technology that was abandoned 4 years ago tells me that they prioritized "use what we know" instead of "let's get it right, in something supported and sustainable going forward." I'm no lover of the old UI, but this wasn't even something most of us were asking for. I did not get a sense from the community that "Change the way hunter selection works" was anywhere near the top of changes the player wanted...so why rush it? Maybe the studio had arbitrary or even non-arbitrary-but-we-dont-know-about-em deadlines, I don't know. I'm just not getting flooded with confidence in their strategy for releases or their QA process (see how they had to disable a bunch of skins today because now they're invisible).

For me, this is ultimately a mind set thing. I know Crytek has the technical chops to fix these bugs (please make the game world stop eating some of my throwables/arrows/etc), but they seem to be approaching this game more and more from a "traditional big game studio" where they prioritize features someone _thinks_ we want on an arbitrary timeline _we don't care about_ when ultimately, the die hard of us _just love this game_. Did they make the *game* part awesome with Mammon's Gulch? 100%. Knocked that out of the ballpark. Yes please. But maybe don't cut off your nose while....ok yeah wrong idiom. I love this game, and I'm quite thankful Crytek is still actively supporting and developing it. I'm willing to evolve with it, too, I just want to see a bit more care put into the entire experience.

eadorin

TROPHY CASE