So, I was going through the blog post about the changes to the building system and I realized a few things that are a bit troubling. I’ll note I’m only thinking about PC use, not Console.
Since all building pieces are no longer items in your inventory, and can’t be placed on the hotbar, two things intrinsically change.
First, you won’t be able to hold as much stuff before becoming encumbered. The weight of buildings materials is typically more than the weight of the building pieces themselves. Take Reinforced Stone Stairs as an example. I checked the wiki, and the stairs weigh 1.50, while the materials to make the stairs weigh 2.86. Unless the entire weight system is being rebalanced too, we will be hindered in building large structures by needing to restock more often.
Second, and this is far more troubling to me, is the lack of hotbar use. When building some large structure / base, I would normally put the set of building pieces in my inventory I would be using for awhile, then put a subset on my hotbar so I could swap quickly and easily between 6 or 7 items.
With the changes, if I understand things correctly, you now only have your currently selected building piece. If you want to swap to anything else, you have to open the building UI, and search through all the categories to find the specific piece you want to switch to. Alternatively, if you already have that 2nd piece you want to swap to placed in the world nearby, you can target it and press the middle mouse button.
Most of the time, I don’t have all those different building pieces just laying around to copy, so I’m going to have to spend a ton of time navigating menus to find the piece I need. This will railroad me into building with only one piece as much as possible before switching to something else. Decorating a base with knickknacks will now be a major pain. I will need to either spend 5 minutes placing all the possible items I might want in the middle of the room for easy copying so I can decorate organically, or I need to only place one kind of thing at a time everywhere before switching to a new item.
Maybe I’m wrong about how much of a pain and a slowdown this will cause, but I fear I’m not. The middle mouse button to change the building ‘brush’ is certainly an improvement that will speed some things up, but I feel like the loss of the hotbar and extra UI navigation will more than makeup the difference and slow me down overall.
One potential partial solution to this issue is to create a Building Hotbar. Let me toggle between the combat hotbar and the building hotbar with a button press. On the Building bar, I can place 8 items for quick and convenient swapping. Additionally, Funcom could add a Favorites list to the Building UI, where you can assign a larger set of pieces you want easier access to. This will require potentially a fair bit more upfront setup time than the current system when you start a building project, but will alleviate much of the burden the current proposed implementation appears to have.
The current changes as I understand them may make me far less likely to ever want to build cool stuff again due to the added time-sink and hassle of having to constantly navigate the building UI to find what I want.
