Use. Right. Click!
Added 2022-09-30 13:00:12 +0000 UTCTwo years ago, I wrote a Randomly Mine called "A Simple Standard" where I wished more developers would use WASD for navigating menus rather than force the mouse or arrow keys.
Now I'm going to complain about something that's almost identical.
In game menus, you left click to advance, so logically, you'd use the right click to back up, right?
WRONG.
It's the escape key.
The furthest possible key from my mouse is used to go back.
Now this is because the right click is used for other tasks right?
WRONG.
It does nothing.
It literally does nothing.
You have a button, right next to your advance button, and you made it do nothing!?
Just…
Imagine, instead of Web Browsers having this…
They had this…
It's what video-games do!
We've been making user interfaces for 30+ years in video-games across generations of consoles, computers, and handhelds, and yet, when it comes to the vast majority of PC Gaming, even though we never think to do this same thing on controllers, we still don't know what to do with mouse and keyboard!
There's still no effective standard!
Most times it's the escape button. Other times, it's the via icons in the menu with the mouse, by pure accident in 2010s console ports like Syndicate (2012), it's right click!
However, for the large majority of games I've played, it seems impossible for a big game to property design it's menus for efficiency and ease of use, and what's weird, it's not even for the excuse of copying Windows, since as established, Windows doesn't work like this.
I guess I’m just tired, and wished that for games I'm going to end up playing for a couple dozen hours of, I at least had the option of being able to customize the menu to my liking, rather than roll the dice with whichever intern won the arm wrestling contest that day.
