Thank you to the OOTP Dev team, you've really nailed it this year and I appreciate that not every year is going to have the same number of headline-grabbing features; there's always behind-the-scenes/sim work to do that often goes underappreciated.
I just wanted to share a thought about the UI and general design changes I've seen from the screenshots, I'll use this one.
1. I think that finally dropping the "chevron" design that the top bar used in previous iterations is a great move. They added visual noise and broke up the display. Having the top bar now fully fill is perfect and I love this decision
2. I love the subtle 'dot' gradient you introduced last year and continue with. It gives the gradients more character and texture and I'd like to see it become a mainstay.
3. What I don't think is so great is the abundance of visual noise on the right - the dynamic stripe at the end is very abrupt and I would prefer the gradient just to continue to the edge. It really breaks up the UI to me and just adds to the confusion from an interactibility point of view
4. Likewise the background image with all the dynamic vectors, it's just too much. It's a ton of visual noise that complicates an already busy UI - but on this point, maybe there's a setting to have a simpler background, so it might not be a problem?
My final point is just - I feel like you guys have been experimenting with the UIs "design language" in the past couple of years and while I do think there have been mostly steps in the right direction, it feels like you're "fiddling" with it too much as if you need to provide a "fresh look" each year, since players are often drawn in by new visuals.
This is definitely the best UI yet - but all the dynamic stuff on the right feels like it was put in there to make things more "exciting". All it does to me is create visual noise.
I honestly think you've nailed the UI despite this and I hope that the current design, sans all the stripes, forms the basis of your look for the next few years. You don't need to fiddle so much! Keep it simple!
Let the gradients and simple textural elements (like the dots) do the hard work, the Feynman diagrams are way too much
Thanks for taking the time to read this, the game is of course a day one!