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[Die Squirrel Die]

While I appreciate that there are a million and one things that go into game development, one area I think that is probably not given enough attention is making the game more user-friendly.

What do I mean by user-friendly? It's hard to explain because I think it covers a lot of areas. It's things like menus, (un)equipping stuff, etc.

Examples perhaps. Well two games that I found were user-unfriendly that I've been playing recently are Dark Cloud 2 and Drakengard. Dark Cloud 2 first. Several aspects that I would consider user-unfriendly. The menu system, even at its most organised it's a friggin mess. Everything lumped together in one screen. Where's the separation of weapons, healing items, sythenthise items, fishing equipment and bait, miscellaneous, etc? This is exasberated by the way other aspects of the game work. Take for example, exiting the dungeon floor. You have to kill a specific enemy who holds that floors 'key' item. You then take that key item to the exit, press the action button, scroll through a menu of everything that you are carrying to find it, then use it, watch a mini cutscene, then press the action button again and confirm you wish to exit the floor. An unnecessarily convoluted process that could be greatly simplified, by removing the 'key' items, so that when you kill the enemy that would have held the key, that simply automatically opens the exit.

This is just one instance of the game where you are asked to unncessarily fiddle around in a messy menu when there is no reason to do if a little more thought had been put into it. I mean really you've got to give the smarts award to the guy who decided to group the fishing rod separately from the aquarium and bait.

Drakengard then. It's user-unfriendliness can perhaps be best illustrated by a comparison to a similar (or the game it rips off if you will), Dynasty Warriors. Both games suffer from indistinct enviroments, and enemies not appearing on the screen until you are quite close. So you have to rely on maps to determine your position. Where Dynasty Warriors allows the player to easily switch between a overview map and a close-up map without every leaving the gameplay screen, Drakengard only has the close up menu. What this results in is that you end up having to switch into the menu every minute or so in order to get an idea of where you are and where to go next.

As seems to be evident, menus are one area that can often be the undoing of user-friendliness. It would appear that the designer should aim to require players to access the menu as little as possible, and when they do it should be well organised, so the player has to spend as little time as possible there. MGS is one game that I think makes menu access simple and user-friendly. It's quick, there's no pause waiting for it to load, it's fast, you're in then you're out.

I could enumerate many more instances where the approach a game takes seems designed to get in the way of keeping a player in the gameplay, but I won't. I had wanted to try balance it out with more examples of games that had a particularly user-friendly feature, but to be honest I'm having difficulty thinking of examples. But I suppose that's indicative of how little attention this area of game making has received.

 

[Kiriku]

Well, at least you can sort items in Dark Cloud 2, which makes it easier to find the specific group of items you're looking for. If I couldn't find an item, I just kept pressing the select button until the desired group of items appeared at the top.

But I agree that the "find key for dungeon exit" system was a bit cumbersome. I prefer systems like in Resident Evil, where you automatically use the neccessary key.
In Dark Cloud 2, I also wish you would be teleported right to the exit after playing spheda, there's no point in being forced to run all the way to the exit every time.

 

[Redbeard]

This was something that really got on my nerves in Wind Waker. The amount of item-swapping required was obscene, made worse by having to delve into subscreens every time. Would it have killed someone to allow me to cycle through items onscreen?

And on the other end, for all the bashing that Invisible War took, it's revamped GUI and menu system was something I appreciated. It was clean, functional, and unintrusive (as you could set it's transparency to 0).

 

[SpoonyBard]

I'm just playing Dark Cloud 2 and all those things you mentioned are true, and make the game less enjoyable for me. It's just bad design.

 

[Die Squirrel Die]

But I agree that the "find key for dungeon exit" system was a bit cumbersome. I prefer systems like in Resident Evil, where you automatically use the neccessary key.

I can't remember which game it was recently, that I encountered this. There was DC2, but there was another one. But it does happen too often. It's the rather lame idea that figuring out which thing is needed counts as a puzzle.

And WW is another offender in the amount of user-unfriendliness it throws at you. Particularly in regards to the wind direction changing. But that's ground that's been well covered.