April 23 2008

You will lose all unsaved progress!

I love good user interfaces, and I love games. Unfortunately they don’t often overlap. Games seem to have a lower standard of UI polish than the desktop, maybe because of deadlines. This is no excuse, because a frustrating UI sucks the fun out of any game.

I love Rock Band1. That said, it suffers from a common game UI flaw: an irrational fear of unsaved progress. This is particularly impressive for a gave that autosaves by default.

For a demo, go into Quick Play. Play a song a couple times, get frustrated, and choose quit from the pause menu. “Egad! If I do this, I will lose all unsaved progress!” Wait. What unsaved progress? My score up to this point in the song?2 If anybody is upset that they can’t resume a song from mid-song, they can go suck a rock.

EA’s NHL games, the poster child of bad game UI, have this problem all over the place. Once a game is over, and you want to leave the game (which you want to do approximately 100% of the time) it asks, “Are you sure?” This isn’t you trying to leave Word without saving, this is you leaving a game that’s finished, people.

Now you game designers go out there and spend more time on UI development.

  1. Except for the fact that the PS3 version is only 3-player for now because Activision sucks and won’t let the Guitar Hero guitars work with Rock Band. [↩]
  2. As a side note, this is also a good example of the “Yes and No are always bad menu options” rule. [↩]

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5 Comments

  1. Curtis Lassam
    Apr 23 2008
    11:29 am

    Yes and No are always bad menu options? You can’t dangle a load of interesting like that out there and not provide a link!

  2. Yang
    Apr 23 2008
    10:06 pm

    It makes sense as something to prevent people from accidentally existing a song. It is too verbose, though.

    Still, it’s far less annoying than GHIII’s quick play menus, where you select the difficulty before being shown the song list. The extra button click required before you start playing is trivial compared to having to back out to a different level in the interface everytime you or a friend want to change the difficulty level.

  3. Allen
    Apr 23 2008
    10:22 pm

    To accidentally exit a song, you’d have to accidentally press start, press down 4 times, and press start again. It’s not like it’s a one-button quit or anything.

  4. Dan
    Apr 24 2008
    9:27 am

    Game designers and artist often mistake “good interface design” with “that interface looks good”.

  5. Pingback Antipode | Archive | Cancelling “Yes or No”
    Apr 24 2008
    12:01 pm

    [...] inquired in a comment on my last post about “Yes” and “No” being poor menu options. There are many UI design [...]

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