Major changes are on the way for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4’s Blackout battle royale mode, one of which will be a new user interface for stashes.
Treyarch’s Studio Design Lead, David Vonderhaar, tweeted out the first look at the new stash UI that the development team is working on while also giving some insight as to how it will all work.
In Blackout, stash is referred to any group of items placed together in a single container, such as crates or loot dropped by eliminated players. The current system requires looting players to scroll through the stash items individually, which many console players feel is a cumbersome process.
However, that will all change once the new UI is implemented that will display each stash’s contents in groups rather than individually, allowing players to pick and choose what they want to loot much more efficiently.
“New Stash UX is in dev builds, being playtested, actually tested by QA, and we are bug fixing,” Vonderhaar tweeted. “Current design debate is two rows of five or three rows of five. Three rows means less tabbing in a death stash, but that uses more screen.”
The image above shows the 2×5 UI, which would display 10 stash items all at once. However, often times stashes contain much more than just 10 items, which means that tabbing between groups of items would still be necessary.
As Vonderhaar describes above, there is a 3×5 system that would show 15 items at once, however that could lead to a different inconvenience as the UI would take up a larger chunk of the screen.
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In his tweets, he also explained why these changes are being made and the benefits that would stem from this new UI once it’s added to the game.
The main change from the [paper] design is that this now anchors are the bottom of your screen the same way Quick Equip does. I like this change a lot. You can still look around and understand how to look at blocked areas of your screen as a result. Even when it's 3 rows.
— Lord Vonderhaar (@DavidVonderhaar) January 5, 2019
Of course this change would benefit console players much more than those on PC as the latter already have a easier management system for looting stashes thanks to the versatility of the mouse and keyboard.
However, for those using a controller, individually tabbing through items in a stash is not only tedious, it also can take a long time and lead to untimely death because of it.
As for when this new UI will be implemented, Vonderhaar did not comment on a potential timetable, although this change has been hinted at since the early days of Black Ops 4’s release.