I was watching my son play Half Life 2 recently and it occurred to me how much more real or immersive it seemed when the menus and such had this style and they look like actual computer system UI. Dated maybe, but they feel industrial and real.... and easy to use all in one.
Meanwhile many games have hyper stylized menus with flowery wingdings all over them and makes it unrealistic / a horrible experience / chore.
When current UI trends are designed to be flat and hide functionality, destroying discoverability, a key component of UX, I'd argue that "dated" is a feature, not a bug.
Don’t even get me started on modern games’ menu UIs.
I got the latest CoD for PS5 like a year ago and I couldn’t figure out what the fuck was going on in the menu. Incoherent mess impossible to navigate. I felt like I was going insane.
You’re fine, the CoD UI is indeed an inscrutable mess designed to maximize “engagement.” Same for other live service type games. I think they want the same entrancing effect as stepping into a casino.
Glad I’m not the only one. I could barely figure out how to start the campaign.
Aside from the atrocious menu structure, they also throw all this lingo at you with zero explanation like you’re already supposed to know how everything works. Challenges? Plunder? DMZ? Season pass? I don’t even know what a “season” is! Let me play the damn game!
My favorite multiplayer game was Golden Eye 007 on N64. There was a couple of maps (The garden and the village I think) that has an unbeatable position where you just sit there and receive ammunition while having perfect view of everything. But due to being it local, you could ban camping.
The menu system of the MW2 reboot and all CODs after look like they were designed by the netflix UI people while smoking crack.
Similar horizontal scrolling list of tiles shoehorned into an interface where I'm NOT okay with just going with the flow and picking whatever is offered because I exactly know what I'm looking for. Bonus points for the little tabs
Honestly, when I boot into CoD the menu is enough to make me want to alt-F4 instantly.
It is definitely not designed with PC in mind, but even on Xbox it feels horrible to navigate. Takes too long to get into an actual game and there is a constant “upsell” happening for premium things.
If you look up the more later versions of CoD on PC, you'll find that they are actually accessing the webcam and watching the user to drive "engagement", and the users are not made aware of this. I wish I had the link, but I found a YouTube video about it. I believe it started with CoD BlackOps on PC.
I’m also getting old. I tried playing a few of those mobile, micro-transaction driven, pay-to-win games to see what the hype was. I couldn’t even figure out what I needed to buy, and thus could not really play the games. Now I know how my grandparents felt seeing computers!
> many games have hyper stylized menus with flowery wingdings all over them
It can work depending on the style/tone of the game.
The real problem, in my opinion, is all the games nowadays with perfectly flat, generic, colorless UIs with absolutely no style or identity. Nintendo has been doing this a lot, for example.
I'll be honest, I went back to some OLD bootstrap styling for some things and I liked it a lot. The candy looking buttons are nice ...
I'm done with flat and muted all the time.
Also (more to my example) it looks like a realistic UI. A lot of game stylized UI are UI nobody would ever make intentionally for a thing you're supposed to use often.
So yeah like you say just some depth and realistic UI feel goes a long way.
ikr, the old UIs have good affordance: whether or not the UI elements are interactable or not unlike the "modern" UIs which are kind of terrible in this aspect
Meanwhile many games have hyper stylized menus with flowery wingdings all over them and makes it unrealistic / a horrible experience / chore.