Last week, Valve rolled out a refresh for the Steam storefront that made the whole thing look quite a bit nicer than it used to. This week, the Steam Workshop is getting a similar treatment: An update to the UI designed to make browsing Workshop content quicker and easier.
"The Steam Workshop remains a heavily used part of the Steam Community: to date, there are over 3,000 games with Workshop enabled with a combined total of over 50 million items uploaded," Valve wrote, explaining what pushed it to make the changes. "Millions of players regularly subscribe to and vote on items. While we've added features and updated the Workshop over the years, we felt it was time to make some bigger improvements to the overall user experience."
The central issue, apparently, is that while "there are dozens of ways to interact with the user interface" while browsing Workshop content, most of them require a full page reload, which seriously slows things down. To alleviate that, Valve has rewritten the page code to enable quicker updates, and has added a "quick view" option so you can check things out without leaving the browsing page. Like the Steam storefront update last week, the Workshop update also delivers an overall embiggening that makes the front page nicer to look at.
Here's the full rundown of changes:
- Wider page & bigger items - This update makes the browsing page wider, allowing for more items and bigger preview images of each item.
- Faster filtering - We've completely rewritten the page, making it update more quickly when applying filters or changing sort orders.
- Smarter filtering per-section - Filters can now be configured by game developers to apply (and appear) for certain types of items. For Workshops that contain both Maps and Items, developers can define which types each filter should apply to.
- New Quick View - Click the little magnifying glass icon in the corner of each item to enter a quick view mode. Explore some screenshots, click to favorite, subscribe, or vote, all without leaving the browsing experience.
- Mobile and Steam Deck friendly - This new rewrite of the page allows us to better manage the responsiveness of the page for different contexts such as mobile, Steam Deck, and Big Picture mode.
Valve said it expects the Steam Workshop update to remain in beta "for a few weeks or months" as it fixes bugs and addresses feedback. Steam beta updates are usually pretty solid so I wouldn't expect the Workshop overhaul to take too long before going live for everyone, but if you don't want to wait you can access it now by clicking the "enter workshop beta" button on any Steam Workshop browsing page.
