I’m a new Overwatch player on an Xbox Series X and I ran into what felt like some glaring UI design flaws on the platform when I got started just these last few weeks.
In order to leave matchmaking (and I have to either perform this action or turn my whole xbox off each and every time I enter matchmaking), the xbox game requires you to hold X in order to leave the queue. However, the x button is ALSO mapped to several other menus in various places. In the main menu, hitting X also brings up an Xbox system prompt to change which Xbox Live account I’m signed in with (Overwatch says X to “Switch accounts”). In the main parent menu for matchmaking (the “Play” menu), the X button opens the “Find a group” menu. So in many of the menus I might find myself in, Overwatch has overlapping controller button assignments where the controls to STOP queuing for a match are also the controls that open up other menus, and these menus open up when I stop the queue.
This is kind of an incredible lack of polish for a game that has been out for 6 years and has a massive playerbase. Like its totally fine that this was a bug, but this should have been caught and fixed at the alpha stage and it’s really weird to encounter in what seemed like a really mature product…
Its clear that the long queue times are understood to exist by everyone, which is fine and I do think the system to deal with this by Blizzard is well-calibrated and a thoughtful, creative and overall very commendable approach, to my eyes a new player. However I will often look through the Hero Gallery menu while waiting for a match. Unfortunately the 3D model of the Hero and the match queue menu overlay are placed directly over each other. Its a perfect time to browse through the many skins that are available (which amounts to much of the game’s ‘content’), only I can’t do this because the matchmaking queue overlay has been placed directly on top of most hero’s head. There is quite a lot of open real estate on the screen in each individual Hero view to house both a full and interrupted view of the Hero 3D model and the matchmaking queue overlay together at once, but the overlapping decisions about where to put these (much like the overlapping controls) create a situation right now I can’t actually peruse the hero gallery skins while waiting for a match given the way they are stacked over each other.
This is kind of weird because you went to the entire effort of creating these distinct “skirmish” “deathmatch” “training” activities for us to do while we wait for a match, which absolutely required a very non-trivial amount of developer and design hours to to implement and was a very commendable and again creative thing to do, and yet you left the Hero Gallery in a state where we can’t properly look at skins when all that would have taken to fix this is adjusting a UI element? I’m pretty sure you would rather want this too, since seeing a skin I want and then buying it in a microtransaction is part of your revenue model and this is blocking me from beginning that sort of chain of events that leads to a transaction.
Sorry if this comes off rude, it is just a little surprising to run into and I thought writing a bug post about it would be the best way to help. Like I would just go in and fix it myself so its not a problem, but I’m not a Blizzard employee and you don’t get to tinker with games on xbox like you might be able to elsewhere. I hope it can help smooth out the Xbox experience and help this game present itself as the mature, polished product it should be right now.