EPTWhile its impact to players may seem subtle, the out-of-game experience in StarCraft II can be just as important as the in-game experience. Our Battle.net statistics show that players spend about a third of their time in StarCraft II using the menus outside of a game. They might be browsing the latest Arcade games, checking out someone’s profile, reviewing the score screen of past games in their match history, or just chatting with some friends. It’s important to us to make this experience as streamlined and usable as possible.
The 1.5 patch we released a couple months ago was a major update that included several changes to the menus and the addition of the new Arcade experience. What you might not know is that many of the changes in 1.5 were actually slated to be a part of the Heart of the Swarm expansion. We felt that several features, including Arcade, would be of immediate benefit to players, and decided to release them earlier in the 1.5 patch. Since we weren’t done with the rest of Heart of the Swarm yet, we had to compromise in some areas of the menus to support these features. We weren’t really happy with how this added additional complexity to the menus.
Since then, we’ve continued to work on Heart of the Swarm, and we’ve made some big changes to improve the overall user experience. With the release of the next major Heart of the Swarm beta patch, we'd like to give you an advance look at those changes. These updates will become available to both Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm players once the expansion is live.
The 1.5 patch we released a couple months ago was a major update that included several changes to the menus and the addition of the new Arcade experience. What you might not know is that many of the changes in 1.5 were actually slated to be a part of the Heart of the Swarm expansion. We felt that several features, including Arcade, would be of immediate benefit to players, and decided to release them earlier in the 1.5 patch. Since we weren’t done with the rest of Heart of the Swarm yet, we had to compromise in some areas of the menus to support these features. We weren’t really happy with how this added additional complexity to the menus.
Since then, we’ve continued to work on Heart of the Swarm, and we’ve made some big changes to improve the overall user experience. With the release of the next major Heart of the Swarm beta patch, we'd like to give you an advance look at those changes. These updates will become available to both Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm players once the expansion is live.
Full post and screenshots here.
Pretty great timing, though it's obvious this has been in the works for a while. Must say, it's infinitely better than what we have now. I love the reductionist look.
Note - these are coming to Wings of Liberty too, so I think it belongs here. Didn't see there was already a thread in the HotS beta forum.
