Wow.
I come back to try out the game again from scratch after having followed newly released content since... well, basically act 1, playing it on and off and waiting for content. I stopped playing after finishing the introduction of act 3 and wanted to wait for a bit of content first as per usual, but since I transferred machines, I was unable to keep my old save and had to start from scratch again. I sure was surprised - but not in a pleasant way.
The most prominent question that immediately came to mind when I started out is: Why this new UI? The previous one worked perfectly fine, and this is worse - needlessly so. Sure, it now looks better and seems like it has more production value to it, but that is the only benefit. This new UI got in my way often enough to warrant me hopping into this thread to even start writing about it.
First up: the entirety of the text being pushed towards the right hand side is an... odd choice, because it means everything on the left hand side of any given scene is going to be out of focus when you're trying to focus on reading the text when this has not been a real issue prior.
There's a very good reason why so many VNs - basically most of them - use the entire bottom of a screen with a simple center alignment for things like dialogue, not just one of the two corner sides.
Second: The dialogue and interaction choices blocked characters either partially (often the face) or entirely on several different occasions during the introductory bit alone and I'm not yet even done playing through the entirety of the first act. I've been on this new save for a whopping 30 minutes and ran into this issue enough times to be annoyed by it, and that tells me one thing: It really shows how these old scenes were not shot with this design in mind, because otherwise this issue would have been avoided in the first place.
This basically forces me to press "H" to hide the interface every other time an interaction or dialogue choice pops up during important events when I barely ever needed this function during any of my playtime in the older versions. Hell, at least turn the opacity down a notch because right now some scenes - like Emmas introduction - look like characters have their identities protected, and I somehow feel this is not in the spirit of how things were meant to be.
Either way, that's at least my two cents, given I've by no means reached the newer content.