OW2 team if you happen to glance at this, i’d like to pitch a few things that should be re-considered re-tweaked, or otherwise re-implemented to provide better hud clarity and overall stylistic consistency, and to spice what is a fairly stale user interface when you had a really nice form and function with the prior game, look to it for inspiration.
First off, the “On fire” mechanic is a subtle but an old part of the Overwatch gameplay loop. While it was reintroduced early on, it has almost no presence whatsoever when it was clearly intended to be by design. In Overwatch 1, the on fire mechanic was clearly shown by a meter that filled right underneath the player health bar, as well as everything that raises the meter showing exactly how many points you got for it, such as getting a kill. Reintroduce this, it would make doing things feel alot more satisfying on a micro and macro scale, change the current fire effect around the portrait of your character and give it more of an OOMPH, and to make it more noticeable for players without having to look at the scoreboard for a tiny symbol, add something perhaps around the name above the enemy players, even just that small fire symbol. It would bring some nice pizazz to the gameplay without really doing much work.
Speaking of portraits, reintroduce or otherwise bring back the old mechanics of showing your rank, and level around the portraits, If you intend to stick with the battlepass system, why not do something creative with the progression level system. It serves a similar purpose to the old leveling portrait system, it’s only metric is to make your potrait look fancy and to showcase how much you have played the game and what rank you are before the round even starts. Making the progression level, and your competitive rank intertwined with your portrait, much like how the old system worked would otherwise help communicate team member experience and it would also make the UI overall less stale. having 530 progression level means nothing to me nor anyone else, but if it’s baked into the UI, people at least will look at it and immediately get helpful information and some nice visual stylishness.
The last big thing is about the scoreboard, it’d be preferable to get rid of it as it promotes dogging on the guy with the lowest numbers on the board, if you would rather not, I think it needs a visual redesign to put less emphasis on the numbers and a higher emphasis on your teams individual ult charge and less emphasis on the numbers the other teams are pumping out, OVERWATCH 2 IS NOT PLAYED ON A SPREADSHEET, NUMBERS ARE NOT EVERYTHING. That would still have it be a decent scoreboard but it could be actually more useful to draw the focus towards the things that would matter more in moment to moment gameplay based on teamwork.
After this are a bunch of minor pitches which i believe are worth considering, for starters bring more visual consistency to some of the fonts. The health and ammo fonts should be the same as the slanted one used on the main menu and used in the days of old OW1, the color accessibility used to change the UI colors should individually be controllable and customizable with a color picker instead of predetermined colors and the colors effecting EVERY element. It could add alot of nice creativity, add an opacity slider too. The hero select screen before a match starts should use the 2D artworks used on the scoreboard for visual consistency and stylistic appeal, and possibly consider reintroducing some slantness to the health bars and abilities since that was never an issue with the old UI, maybe even improve upon it at your own discretion.
and while this isn’t UI related, on a final Christmas wish for your consideration, bring back the OW1 “heroic” highlight intros so that people may toggle between the 2 animations on the hero select screen/actual highlight intro, allow a toggle between the old and new play of the game music, and PLEASE allow an option to toggle different menu OST tracks and backgrounds other than this months promotional item set to a dull dry music track that you can’t change, you already have an outlet to advertise in the bottom right corner of the screen and in the shop.
None of these changes should take precedent over the more severe ones that effect actual gameplay and user experience but if anyone on the development team is reading this i hope you take any one of these things into consideration and have a good day