New Steam UI

My complaints about Steam achievements and the half-baked integration of a social network into the gaming experience have apparently been heard. Considering how little traffic this blog sees I find this an extraordinary development. But it's true.

As far as achievements go, vague promises have been made:

Achieving Bliss - Whether you think of achievements as merit badges, or candy, or crack, the thing most of us can agree on is that we all want more of 'em. Keeping track of which ones you've got and which ones to get next shouldn't feel like a chore. With this in mind, the new Steam brings the achievements to you — listing recent accomplishments right in your game Library, and on the in-game overlay.

More visible achievements are a step in the right direction. It may make achievements more like what they should be: a game in themselves. Achievements add depth to games because they encourage competitiveness, even for games that have no multiplayer mode whatsoever. Naturally, if a player is made more aware of his or her progress with achievements, it follows that the player will be more likely to want to make more progress. This is a sensible move. But I wonder if the improvements are all going to be superficial.

Complete overhaul of Steam client UI design to improve discoverability of features and to better expose all the information related to games in your library 

Not that superficial improvements aren't needed and won't make the client significantly better. They will. Simple things like DirectWrite implementation, drop shadows, and other styling and layout features will make the client look cooler and work much more smoothly. But the preview page also hints at greater things:

Complete overhaul of in-game overlay UI design to create a richer in-game experience exposing context sensitive information related to the game you are currently playing 

Backup/restore wizard

As you can see, they aren't specific enough for me to tell just yet if this is just a badly-needed face-lift or if the machinery under the hood is getting an upgrade, too.  Beta, here I come...

• New Steam Client Opens for Public Beta (techie-buzz.com)
• Take A Tour Of The New, Improved Steam [PC] (kotaku.com)
• Valve finally unveils an overhauled UI for Steam, and it's awesome (downloadsquad.com)
• Steam UI Update Beta Drops IE Rendering For WebKit (games.slashdot.org)