Windows Game menus! Why are they so terrible??

I've just bought myself a load of PC games. Now that I have a computer worthy of playing them I just went nuts when play.com had that sale. The games themselves are pretty polished works of art and fully live up to my expectations. The menus though! What the hell? I'm not sure there is any effort put into them.
The games in question here are Prey, Splinter Cell 4, and FEAR. There are a lot of others, but those are the ones I've just bought.
They honestly look like DVD menus. Especially Preys. Splinter Cell's is just a bottomless pit of links that gives no indication of how deep into it I have actually fallen.

The only games I've ever found that have a well thought out, stylish menu system are all of Valve's games and console games.

Console games need to be idiot proof and usable with a stick or pad. Because of this they are easy, simple and usually quite pretty to look at. PGR on the 360 is a brilliant example. Colin McRae DIRT is another.
PC games can make the menus a little more complicated as we all have mice but that's no reason to try building a damn operating system into the game. There is also no excuse (splinter cell) to force PC users to use the wasd keys to navigate the opsat. Just because our console brethren are limited to their little stubby sticks doesn't mean we have to be.

Its not just laziness, It's a mix of over ambition in tight deadlines and laziness. My advice to a lot of developers is hire someone who does UI's for a living or just copy Valve.

Not that they read this or anything....

Anyhoo! Rant over

 

I know what you mean, but as long as the game's good, I don't care about the menus. I do remember the menu in Riddick being quite fun though.

 

Prey's is awful like a DVD menu, but Valve's totally boring text boxed based menus are infinitely better? What planet are you on? I found Valve's menus to be the most boring out there, and they can be SO LAGGY when you're browsing for servers or something. At least Prey's was interesting enough to look at.

Actually honestly I'm not sure what you're getting at here, what do you want in a menu, simplicity and attractiveness? Then why'd you list Valve as a good example when it's more fun to operate your washing machine than navigate through their menus?

 

Game UIs are usually designed by a single person, and, as you can guess, aren't really a priority, unless the UI is an integral part of the game experience.

So what makes a good UI? For PC games you usually get generic option sets: Controls, Video, Audio etc... Is that good or bad? Should we try to be more diverse and original with menus? Should menus pertain to the game's theme? The DIRT menu system is pretty flashy and would have taken a while to develop. Is that necessarily a good thing? Does it appear to make the game 'better'? What about feature options that rarely get used? Is there much point? Is simple not better?

</market research>

 

UI design is hard, seriously. you can't believe the amount of work that goes into making a workable system.

game developers, as said before, really concentrate on the actual game, so the UI is left as an afterthought.

 

I ussually point to COD series as having the best UI. It looks pretty, fits a theme and has everything nicely laid out for you in a pretty font. It's also very easy to use and the impression of it being a soldiers desktop then carries over into the load screens which give are excellent - offering some diary extracts to read while the level loads. The level loads then top it off, requiring a button push before the level starts. I hate it when levels start automatically.

The same is true of Condemned: Criminal Origins, which I also love.

For a similar sense of style, Half Life 2 is good with its 3d backdrops. Unfortunately these mean the menus take longer to load and it's ruined by simple text and straight-to-game load screens that don't even attempt to fit in. On the plus side, the backdrops give a nice indication of game progress and serve as a helpful reminder of where you were in the game last.

 

IMO, a UI/menu is there to get me where I want to go in the game as quickly as possible, yeah I'd like it to look nice, but it's not a priority. If you take DiRT, it's got a nice flashy menu system, although it looks nice, it takes a long time to navigate (longer than it should), and isn't particularly easy to see where you are going. Same with the 360 blades UI, it's not the best UI out there.

C&C 3 has a nice menu, it doesn't look bland, and when you click on a menu item, it's kind of like the windows start menu, where the next tier of the menu pops up but the rest still stay.

 

Personally, I like Valve's menu's - they're simple and efficient, they tell you what you want and that's it.

I love the one on DiRT, that was a good menu, but I'm not sure the format would work on any other game, it's like an advanced version that was in the Sega Rally series - it'll work well with a wheel, pad or KB+mouse.

I used to like the Medal Of Honour menu's too - moving around the room selecting things. Vietcong had a good one too - it was a whole level where you activated missions/menu's etc by using certain objects/people in the level.

STALKER has an awful menu system, it's such a blatant afterthought it's untrue - half the time on here it doesn't even get the text lined up properly...

acron^: A nice flashy menu (that isn't too flashy) can set the scene for a game wonderfully before you play, and imho it's a vital part of the initial experience.
SC: DA for example was awful, because the menus had no seeming order to them, and then took ages to load. The menu's on things like CoD and MoH were excellent though, because they gave you a feel of the thing before you started.

 

I only used Valve as an example of if you don't want to spend ages on developing a menu system then just make it simple. It might not be all animated and flashy, but it does work.

Mafia is one that comes to mind as being a very effective menu system. It was simple and easy to use.

All I want out of a menu system is a quick loading clean and simple easy to navigate structure and a bit of style thrown in.

It is important though. I was attempting to play splinter cell last night, aside from the fact that it doesn't support my screen's resolution (but that's another rant) the menu's took ages to appear and in that time never said they were loading so I was trying to skip what I thought was some crappy animated intro so when they finally did load, all my key presses caught up with me and i started a new game without having a chance to overview my settings. Its just bad design and it pissed me off enough after having to re-start my game for the umpteenth time while trying to sort my resolution out that I just gave up and played FEAR instead.

 

Valve's menu system is great; you can get to all the bits you need very easily, it's very responsive and robust. Does what it says on the tin.

I hate games (and DVDs for that matter) where they have p*ssed about with the menus such that they are confusing, unresponsive and buggy.

Equally this extends to buying computer components and similar. Who gives one effing jot what shape box my graphics card comes in - does it work?

I'm interested in the content and not the packaging. If you served me sprouts, on a gold platter and handed me a diamond-encrusted fork, they would still taste like sprouts.

One comment on STALKER: I agree the menu is a bit crappy, but imagine if they spent more time on it - the game itself would have suffered, and it would crash every minute rather than every three minutes as it does now.

 

Old topic I know, i only just remembered about it, but I would just like to point out the HL2's menu is NOT a good example of a menu. It's simple, but still takes bloody ages to load because of the 3D backgrounds, so they've gone and shot themselves in the foot. Personally, I think the best ever GUI was Doom's. Simple, arcady, and with cool "pish" sounds as you moved about it.

 

HL2's menu was quick to load for me, but I see your point about it there.

Doom (the original anyway) had an awesome menu, that shotgun sound was used to great effect tbh.

 

wow really ? I always thought the COD menus were the worst menu ever. Especially the server browser that is absolutely horrible. It's slow, you can't copy paste and half the time it doesnt refresh right. It is aweful and is the reason why I keep my favorites in Xfire


UT2004 also has a terrible, aweful and incredibly ugly UI . It does have more functionalities but lags a lot when it comes to server refresh and the buddy list just doesnt work, even 3 years and a half later.


Valve menus, though boring looking, are good and work fine. I also like the UT99 UI and it's win-like look and use. Works great, although the server browser does make the game lag a little (back in my PII 450 days )


The best recent game menu i saw is CNC3'S (as well as LOTRBFMH2 , but the interface in game is aweful)

Anyways now I don't get to use the menus much anymore. I add favorites in Xfire and launch the game from there, no messing around


PS: Honnorable mention to Trackmania United

 

The original Dungeon Siege main menu was great! Too bad we don't see that kind of ingenuity any longer.

 

Chronicles of Riddick, as someone mentioned, has probably the best animated menu, or menu period that is, of any game i've ever played.

 

I find Project Gotham 3 to have the most confusing menu and it takes forever to set things up.