At some point in this millenium, it became ubiquitous in games to ask for a button press before switching to the main menu and it has become a pet peeve off mine.
Why is that there? It’s your main menu so ugly that you have to shield players from it? Why can I not double click the game Icon, go to the kitchen to get coffee and return to the PC/console to find myself in the main menu ready to continue my game? Seriously, cui bono? Sometimes, they even show a different screen before that press, which some artist got paid for creating, so the developer is also losing (a tiny amount of) money here.
I honestly just don’t get the point of these screens.
Bonus negative points for games that only check DLC after that button press instead of any other point of the losing process. Calling a server could easily be threaded while the game assets are loaded since it takes very little hardware load to do so. But no, I get to wait an additional 10 seconds because the game devs want me to for no apparent reason.
On a related note: just allow players to auto skip intros, please. Just put an checkbox in the settings, so that everyone can see it once.
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God I wish they wouldn’t try to adhere to these awful requirements in PC games.
If you have a particularly slow PC, this screen would be good feedback that it hasn’t crashed while booting the game. It also keeps the game consistent across platforms.
Yeah, they’re not gonna do all that stuff for cert and then go “now let’s remake our whole intro sequence to be more convenient!”, I don’t think devs typically have that much free time
It wouldn’t be that hard. Devs already have to make all sorts of adjustments for different platforms
Getting rid of that screen would be a negligible improvement and also might mean getting rid of any unique art that some may indeed want to see.
And they are better off using their time to do those improvements rather than something inconsequential like removing the press to start screen.
The save warning is helpful for kids who don’t get how game saves work yet.
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Seems pretty common in games with auto saves that they will show a little icon whenever they are doing it.
It’s usually a really subtle and easy to miss icon though, especially in a game that otherwise demands all your attention.
IMO it’s a good feature and it’s a good thing it’s required. I remember the days when I would boot up a game and never be sure if my system crashed or not.
This requires the game to start giving you feedback before you start wondering if you should do a power cycle.
I mean, better loading feedback would be better than an arbitrary “interactive within 1 second” blanket rule, leading to this whole “press button to continue” workaround.
That’s like a generator needing an earth rod, and the engineer putting an earth rod into a plant pot. Sure, the earth rod is there, and sunk to regulated depth in dirt… but it’s a plant pot.
Just make an accurate loading screen with accurate feedback.
Imo that’s still not enough. Plenty of crashes or failures happen in a way where loading screen animations still keep playing. Having a cursor you can move around to validate that the process is still responsive is important feedback.
I also remember lots of games that did exactly what you are saying and there was no way to tell if it had hung during loading or not because you couldn’t check if it was accepting feedback.
Well that was educational. Thank you good sir or madam.
TIL
Neither of these things can be true, because they’ve been around since long before Microsoft got into the console game. I’m pretty sure Atari 2600 games had that prompt. I know NES games did.
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Wouldn’t just going straight to the main menu qualify as an “interactive state that accepts player input within 20 seconds”?
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