7 ms·

I agree that slow menus are horrible but there are a lot of good or at least very popular games that have slow or even allaround terrible menus. It's a problem

I agree that slow menus are horrible but there are a lot of good or at least very popular games that have slow or even allaround terrible menus. It's a problem I wish more people would write about in reviews and designers would think of but I wouldn't go as far as saying the speed of a menu is an indicator of the overall quality of a game.

setr 8y ago
Its a hueristic so its expected to fail, but obviously I’d argue most good games do have ignorable if not good menu transitions. But regardless, I think I would’ve better described it as targetting how much power the aesthetics designer had versus the gameplay designer (this is an inherit conflict: aesthetics wants control and a limited set of interactions, so that they can each be designed to fit the aesthetic best, while gameplay calls for an expansive/free set of interactions, so the player can explore the world and mechanics). Menus seem to be one of the first to go, as soon as aesthetics become important. As an example, monster hunter world has substantially slower menus than its predecessors. Its also clearly very excited about its new graphics (as it has every right to be, this is the first in the series in over a decade to have a real hardware upgrade; it started from the ps1 to ps2, and from there it was all handhelds and one on the wii), with fancy cutscenes, scripted monster interactions, and big fancy finisher moves. In most fashions, the gameplay survived fine, but there are clear regressions, like the game does the map exploration for you, because of the difficulty of parsing the environment (a result of making it lush, thanks to having an actual graphics card), an annoyingly large and maze-y town using an auto-travel bandaid (because it looks better than the previous smaller towns). The game is still good but notably along with all the regressions in favor of graphics was the menu transition speed. The graphics designer clearly had a bigger say in this game than in the previous titles.

setr 8y ago

Its a hueristic so its expected to fail, but obviously I’d argue most good games do have ignorable if not good menu transitions. But regardless, I think I would’ve better described it as targetting how much power the aesthetics designer had versus the gameplay designer (this is an inherit conflict: aesthetics wants control and a limited set of interactions, so that they can each be designed to fit the aesthetic best, while gameplay calls for an expansive/free set of interactions, so the player can explore the world and mechanics). Menus seem to be one of the first to go, as soon as aesthetics become important. As an example, monster hunter world has substantially slower menus than its predecessors. Its also clearly very excited about its new graphics (as it has every right to be, this is the first in the series in over a decade to have a real hardware upgrade; it started from the ps1 to ps2, and from there it was all handhelds and one on the wii), with fancy cutscenes, scripted monster interactions, and big fancy finisher moves. In most fashions, the gameplay survived fine, but there are clear regressions, like the game does the map exploration for you, because of the difficulty of parsing the environment (a result of making it lush, thanks to having an actual graphics card), an annoyingly large and maze-y town using an auto-travel bandaid (because it looks better than the previous smaller towns). The game is still good but notably along with all the regressions in favor of graphics was the menu transition speed. The graphics designer clearly had a bigger say in this game than in the previous titles.