i hate modern game user interfaces

imagine for a second the year is 2009 and you've sat down to play some Modern Warfare 2 as you boot up the game you're treated to a beautiful main menu it's clean empty almost in its Simplicity but is immediately understandable with a single flick of the thumb stick and the Press of a button you're into the multiplayer menu and it's almost everything I could ask for the moment you press play you can find a game create a private match create a class mess with your call sign and kill streaks the barracks immediately give you an

itemized view of your stats and you can change the options without having to exit out of a multi player Lobby there's plenty of space for the level to be shown allowing you to vote to skip whenever you hover over someone's name you get to see their Call Sign and Banner card they picked out I'm not saying that Modern Warfare 2's user interface is perfect there's a lot of little things that'd be nice additions but all of that isn't the point what's important here is that this UI made 13 years ago is really good and easily

understandable so what happened first I need to say this video is sponsored by old school RuneScape but more on that later secondly with the release of Modern Warfare 2 2022 one of the most common complaints I've seen brought up is just how much of a labyrinth this UI is like look at this it looks like I'm logging into Netflix there's so much stuff in clutter on screen that it's difficult to figure out what any of these icons even mean especially if you're new to the franchise there's no descriptors like there were in MW2 so what's

the difference between Invasion and ground war the challenge screen overlaps the pre-match player list pretty consistently there's no way to check your stats check someone's showcase so what even is the point of having three different calling cards hey editor Sho here they actually updated the game and included both of these these things in fact checking someone's showcase is currently broken moving your mouse to the wrong area on the screen will simply boot you back to the main menu against your will no way to vote to skip a map so there's a 10% chance of playing

this Abomination I honestly believe the best way I can convey just how horribly they designed this UI is by showing you the actual process of swapping weapon attachments on screen right now this isn't even mentioning the fact that sometimes the menu straight up just doesn't work this Jo the party how did you crash my Cod swapping a weapons receiver can sometimes boot you back to the main menu and some attachments are just locked with absolutely no way to unlock them $70 by the way this isn't just a Call of Duty issue Halo infinite Battlefield 2042

literally any modern Ubisoft game The Common Thread between all of these games are people complaining about the uis and what's even more frustrating is that with most of these games it's entirely possible to go back and look at an older game in the franchise to see just how much better the UI was so a lot of major game uis have sucked recently cool but what's supposed to make a good UI I believe I've narrowed down three things that make a good UI usability accessibility and theming I'm using Halo 2 as an example a real shocker

I'm sure if you've been on the channel for a bit but I believe it does all three of these things extremely well usability and accessibility are pretty much perfect usable in the sense that there's no issue trying to get somewhere on the UI quickly I'm immediately able to tell where I am in the UI where I need to go to do something and the Simplicity allows me to do something quickly without having a second thought about how the UI is screwing me over it's accessible because imagining I'm someone new to the Halo franchise as long

as I have some form of idea as to what a campaign Xbox Live or settings are I can pretty reasonably navigate this menu navigation isn't confusing is concise and makes sense as for the theming this entire menu is beautiful iconic even it looks like an in Universe 4Runner terminal every single sound being themed around this also for anyone that doesn't know what that means just trust me when I say it makes sense it's themed very well for the game text from multiple different alien languages Scrolls through the background Call Music plays as you make the

decision as to what you're doing on the game it's an overall welcoming experience especially the loading screen that makes it extremely obvious when the game is loading and doesn't just transition between black screens or still pictures that can sometimes be like 40 seconds long making you question whether the game is crashed or not once you're in the game the HUD is a master class in this regard later Halo games take this one step further by leaving a little overlay of where the helmet itself would normally sit in Master Chief's Vision but we're getting off topic

with an idea as to what makes a good UI in my opinion we can go back through older games and see how uis have gotten bloated throughout the years and while we're speaking of older games and older uis the one that I've always enjoyed seeing is the spawn of today's video old school RuneScape for those of you who have already played RuneScape before I really shouldn't have to say much but for anyone just hearing about this game RuneScape is one of the most popular MMOs ever made and released back in 2013 old school RuneScape is

based on the 2007 build of the game that is constantly being updated with features and improvements that players have asked for what's important here is if you're a new player or returning to the game for the next 6 months old school RuneScape has introduced Fresh Start worlds allowing you to exper experience the game on equal footing with everyone else that means a fresh economy and fresh high scores for both new and old players this is your best chance to get on and experience this game as people did years ago you can sign up for free

now and hop into the tutorial world and once you're done with that you can choose to start in a fresh start world and from there spend all of your waking hours exploring the World grinding out the new achievements made exclusively for Fresh Start worlds or just fishing whichever you prefer and don't worry once the Fresh Start worlds event ends you can transfer all of your progress and your character into the main game and continue playing the link is in the description sign up now and go play old school RuneScape while you play old school RuneScape

you can probably notice how the UI isn't exactly a looker but it doesn't have to be it is themed around the fantasy setting of RuneScape but it's entirely function over form there's an extreme amount of menus and options to get through so making sure as much stuff is on screen and accessible at any given time is more important for this game than making it look good this is something that a lot of older games share with each other Unreal Tournament Doom Final Fantasy 7 games like these came with sparse simple menus that got the job

done theming was just a plus sometimes I mean we really don't even have to go back that far take a look at literally any Valve game from the 2000s portal is the perfect example of a 2000s game menu because it is the simplest example of it text over a moving background and some simple boxes courtesy of the source engine portal 2's menu is a perfect update user interface wise because it keeps the sterile aesthetic with these boxes while fixing issues of reading small white text on bright backgrounds and the text actually scaling properly with with

the resolution so it isn't small anymore all while improving the overall look and theming portal 2's menu update is also indicative of how the main menus of games were changing with everything becoming boxy Halo 1 to Halo 2 and now Halo 3 boxes continues into Halo Reach Call of Duty 3 World at War and then Modern Warfare boxes everywhere inescapable every single game was obsessed with boxes and you know what I'll give it to Battlefield because they were on boxes all the way back on Battlefield 2 in 2005 it's this obsession with boxes that really

led us to where we are now though because for some reason whoever is in charge of making UI for games thinks every single thing needs its own separate box MW2 is the worst offender for this because it is so overindulgent with giving everything its own dedicated space and even then some of the decisions for the spaces given are simply baffling it's so loud obnoxious and cluttered that it gives you no room to breathe there's no wasted space all of it is either an option a moving background or an ad which is its own entire issue

from booting up the game you are bombarded with with a constant stream of advertisements message of the day a video showing off a game mode that I didn't ask to download and a battle pass I don't want for my $70 game this battle pass screen is absolutely horrendous by placing the most expensive purchase as the largest option encouraging me to buy it and then shoving the cheaper options off to the side it's so predatory that I'm nearly left stun locked at my chair while they try to walk me through their awful battle pass menu here's

a breath of fresh air compare this once again to the MW2 2009 menu look at all this breathing room and back to hell it makes navigation infinitely worse by deciding that everything needs its own rounded off box usability is failed because of this my test being me trying to change customizable options on my guns in between matches because of how far I need to scroll to look at different options for my sights ammunition laser attachments muzzle attachments I'm left to just use the in-game loadout editor because the match starts before I'm done trying to look

at what gun I need to use to unlock some Red Dot site I'm not even going to use it's even worse if you're trying to change your calling card clan tag or profile picture thing there is zero chance for you to go into this menu and come back out fast enough to beat the match loading up not that it matters anyway because despite the option to customize your character and the weapon they hold in the lobby screen it's a coin flip between seeing an apos blob of characters or everyone holding your gun which means that

your special weapon isn't showing up on anyone else's screen but your own honestly why do we even have these types of Lobby screens just go back to the globe spinning meta that shows all of the people connecting to the game as little dots across the world that was cool access ability fails because even though I've played quite a few Cod games this menu still manages to confuse me on more than one occasion you can get lost so easily and by that I mean you get to a place and exit it then wonder how the [

__ ] you even ended up there a UI for something as simple as a first-person shooter shouldn't be a learning curve there's nuance and an argument to be had for something like an MMO but a firstperson shooter being a mess of menus and options isn't acceptable finally there's no theming to be had here not that Cod was crazy on theming in the first place but the the previous games tried a little bit this is just every previous CoD game released for the past 3 years Halo infinite suffers from the box craze as well which is

so disappointing because they got it right 12 years ago it's nowhere as bad as MW2 across the board but the customization is particularly annoying because of how it's laid out it fails usability because of this and accessibility because of someone who's played these games since I was five this customization screen might as well be hieroglyphics theming because it's just boring it's just boxes it's nothing but both of these games could have just copied Halo Reach while we are on the topic of Halo infinite I can at least appreciate that the open world exploration during the

campaign isn't cluttered with stuff all over the screen the only thing that I could really do without is having a waypoint constantly on screen whenever you place one on the map but that seems more like a personal issue not all open world single player games are immune to this though while God of War 2018 still doesn't clutter your screen with stuff while you're exploring something that actually set the original 2018 release apart from other open world games at the time Ragnarok shows signs of making that worse it's nothing crazy but it's also noticeable in the

changes made since then God of War 2018 user interface took a little bit to sort through and find settings you wanted but ultimately it worked and I think the theming was incredibly well done God of War Ragnarok simplifies all the traveling you had to do in the menu but makes the menu extremely claustrophobic everything is so much larger and closer there's barely any space left for Kratos it's not the biggest deal I know it's super nitpicky but considering I'm going to spend like 15% of my total time playing this game looking at Armor and weapon

stats in the menu I'd like to not thank think about how this menu could just [ __ ] zoom out a bit what Ragnarok also does is introduce characters that don't shut up there's a braer to the left of the chest good bet there's a couple more near here let's find them yeah it's all right for the most part because I enjoy the company of the characters but I like to play with subtitles on just in case a character says something I miss or don't understand and I'd like to explore the world or enter combat

without subtitles being on the screen 75% of the time I don't need a call out when I'm on fire I can very clear c l see I'm on fire the line was somewhat comedic the first time shut up after the third Elden ring takes this idea of letting me explore without distractions a step further and it's why it's the best open world game I've played so far ever I can actually experience the open world and Discover it myself without Waypoint markers all over the map button hints when I'm next to an object a health bar

or item menu always on the screen giant mini map area designation Quest reminders obnoxious Compass subtitles 90% of the time because my character won't stop talking to themselves obviously this is hyperbolic but when you compare the experience of exploration or combat and Elden ring to all the [ __ ] on your screen while you're playing something like Horizon forbidden West Watchdogs Legion or Assassin's Creed Valhalla I'd personally like them to take cues from Elden ring it should be considered that not every game developed might get the chance to take these cues from Elden ring I'm

not really talking about stuff like the open world UI that at least could be doable I'm more talking about the games menus themselves while Elden ring was no stranger to development issues and delays it still got quite a bit more time in the oven than some of the other games I've mentioned in this video now this is just my assumption if anyone has any other ideas or experience to correct me on this I'd love to see a comment about it but when a game is 2 months out from going gold and the developers are juggling

five maps that are missing textures and geometry 13 weapons that need to be properly implemented two separate game modes that are nowhere near complete a campaign that's missing two of its missions and has anyone had time to fix the bug where your game crashes without fail on this Mission if you accidentally alert one of the guards I can see why something like the main menu Isn't a huge priority for as many minutes as I can rant about the user inter faes of modern games the games are still playable for the most part that campaign bug

really was annoying though but on a serious note the actual game itself isn't really affected much by someone saying wow this menu sucks while usability and accessibility are important for a user interface theming mostly fluff these issues pale in comparison to someone being able to become invincible by using a riot shield or the game immediately crashing when you use tuned attachments we are just now breaking out of the cycle of yearly Cod games with this release with the amount of development Time Each studio is given it's honest to God Miracle we got what is probably

the most solid CoD game in a while including like three new game modes and War Zone 2 worth $70 no [ __ ] you Activision but this same sentiment can carry over into a lot of games released within the last 5 to 10 years well yeah you can take a title like Halo infinite and go back in the franchise to look at Halo 2 and see that it was made within 10 months not a good thing by the way I just want to make that very clear and came out with arguably more and better content

and had a better user interface making a game isn't the same as it was in 2005 it's not that games are explicitly harder to develop I don't know if that's the right word I definitely say they're more complicated and timec consuming though Publishers and shareholders get devs in the studio and expect them to complete a game with three times the scale and complexity with the same deadline that games had 15 years ago all of this isn't an excuse it can't be an excuse we deserve quality for our money but it's something that could make sense

hopefully with Cod being the main offender for this video and getting more development time now that there isn't one for 2023 this issue can be fixed will it I doubt it but if we start hearing about changes to deadlines in the game industry and suddenly we see The Return of beautiful impactful main menus I think everyone will be happier until then we remain stuck in the era of awful user interfaces so good luck understanding mww's new battle pass menu it sucks consider subscribing click on the video below to understand why battle passes as a whole

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