Fenris Creations wants to rebuild the EVE Online HUD from the ground up, and the community has wasted no time telling them exactly what it thinks. Since the September 11 devblog "HUD, Sweat & Tears" went live, a dedicated feedback thread on the official forums has piled up hundreds of replies and thousands of views in under a week — a mix of cautious optimism, sharp criticism, and more than a few pilots vowing never to leave the old interface behind.
If you've been following the Force Projection Revamped rollout (going live September 22) or the Alliance Tournament XXII coverage, you already know Fenris Creations has been on a roll with major systems changes this month. The HUD overhaul is the quieter, less explosive story running in parallel — but for anyone who spends hours staring at their screen in a fleet fight, it might end up mattering just as much.
What Fenris Creations Is Actually Proposing
"HUD, Sweat & Tears" is the third and final entry in a devblog series exploring how the core flight interface could evolve. The team has been careful to frame everything as early concept work rather than a finished feature list, but a few directions stand out:
Drone integration. Right now, drone control lives in its own separate window. The devs want that folded into the main HUD: "Today, controlling drones is largely done through a separate window. We want to explore how drones could become a more integrated part of the HUD, making their status and commands feel more connected to flying your ship."
Smarter damage indicators. Instead of just watching a shield bar drop, pilots could get direction, damage type, and threat-priority information built into the HUD itself: "Knowing your shields are disappearing is useful, but understanding where damage is coming from, what kind of damage you are taking, and which threats need your attention would give you a much clearer picture of a fight."
Saved, shareable layouts. Multiple HUD configurations for different activities — mining, exploration, fleet combat, travel — that players can switch between or share with corpmates. The devblog specifically floats a corporation handing new recruits a ready-made "recommended setup."
Progressive complexity. The interface would reveal more information and controls as a player gains experience, aiming to keep new pilots from being buried in data on day one while still giving veterans full control.
The plan is to roll this out gradually through EVE's Feature Preview system rather than flipping a switch, which means most of what's live right now is still open for revision based on exactly the kind of feedback flooding in.
The Feedback Thread: A Mixed, Often Blunt Reception
The forum thread, opened by a Fenris Creations developer posting under the handle FC Swift, set a collaborative tone from the start: "We know it's a big topic, and it's not something we're going to just turn on and walk away from." Within days it had grown past 500 replies and nearly 6,000 views — making it one of the more active dev-blog threads on the forums this month.
The praise is there, but it's outnumbered by pointed critique:
What players like:
A new radar-style element drew genuine approval — one player called it "genuinely useful" and asked for multiboxing layout-sync tools to go with it.
The reworked capacitor visual got a nod for its styling.
Several posters called the overall direction "promising."
What's landing badly:
Readability is the biggest sticking point. Multiple pilots said the new capacitor display suffers from excessive visual bloom that makes it harder to read at a glance, and that stacked health bars are a step down from today's separate shield/armor/hull indicators — one player flatly called the new proportional bars "less readable" and "inconsistent."
Screen space and clutter complaints came up repeatedly, especially from ultrawide-monitor users worried about wasted real estate, and from players who felt the whole interface now looks "larger and more cluttered."
Layout choices drew specific fire — speed controls moved to a vertical orientation instead of horizontal, and the booster tray now sits close enough to other modules that accidental clicks are a real concern.
A few long, detailed posts pushed back on the premise entirely, arguing the interface changes are chasing a "mobile game" aesthetic and that new-player retention would be better served by improved tutorials than by rebuilding the HUD veteran players already know.
One of the more memorable lines in the thread, from a long-time pilot: "I will be staying on the OldUI until you prise it from my cold dead hands."
To be fair to the feedback thread, plenty of it isn't just complaining — several players submitted genuinely detailed design suggestions, covering everything from flight-path and transversal indicators to weapon-envelope displays, missile approach counters, capacitor/tank prediction tools, colorblind-accessible palettes, and the ability to export and share HUD configurations. It's the kind of thread where the loudest voices are frustrated, but the most useful ones are constructive.
You can read the full devblog and the entire feedback thread at the links in the sources section below — both are worth a scroll if you want to see the screenshots and mockups Fenris Creations included.
In Other News This Week: GM Week Gets Its Full Schedule
While the HUD debate rages on, Fenris Creations also published the complete GM Week 2026 lineup, confirming the event will run September 28 through October 2. Beyond the previously known dates, the studio has now laid out a day-by-day stream schedule broadcast on the official Twitch channel, including recurring "OnlyCans" segments, a "Whack-a-Pinata" event, a streamer-led GM roam on October 1, and the traditional GM & ISD roam led by community manager Pando. The studio also teased that botter-confiscated assets will be "accidentally" cracked open for players at least twice during the week — a GM Week tradition players have come to expect.
Why This Matters
The HUD overhaul won't reshape null-sec politics the way the Force Projection changes will, but interface changes have a long history of provoking outsized reactions in EVE Online, where muscle memory built over years (sometimes over a decade) is part of how veteran pilots survive a fight. With Fenris Creations explicitly committing to an iterative Feature Preview process rather than a hard cutover, this feedback thread is likely to be the first of several rounds before anything resembling a final HUD reaches the live server. Worth bookmarking if you have opinions about where your capacitor bar lives.
Sources: