» Sat Feb 19, 2011 3:47 am One of our goals was 'What if Apple made a fantasy game? How would this look?' It's very good at getting through lots of data quickly, which is always a struggle with our stuff.
Now Apple has a stylish interface that looks cool and it certainly is a good approach for browsing through a few dozen music albums on a tiny iPhone/iPod screen quickly. But for a fantasy RPG with a large amount of statistics like skills and hundreds of inventory items on a large screen? Not suited for that imo. There is a reason why those old, oh so boring lists are still in use everywhere and were not replaced by Apple's fancy looking toggle interface.
Just look at the skill screenshot (which is, as far as I know, the only menu mode screenshot available so far). It looks stylish, but almost all of the screen space is wasted and you can't get an overview about all your skills quickly. Instead you have to toggle through them one by one.
According to the GI article you can assume that the inventory will look similar to the skill menu on the screenshot. You choose a category (like weapons) and then you'll see a row of items with one item highlighted in the middle and a few other items left and right of it. Instead of the star constellation on the skill screen you'll see a 3D view of the item. Now you can toggle through the items to the left or to the right. This, in my opinion, svcks.
A list is clean and it shows the largest amount of information on the smallest space possible. For console users it wouldn't make that much of a difference maybe (judging from Oblivion's oversized primary school type default inventory), but on PC with a high resolution and a 21" monitor it is simply a chore to play with an Apple type interface. Again judging from the screenshot you won't be able to see more than 7 items at once on the screen and again almost all of the space available would be wasted for a nice background and a fancy 3D view of the items that I don't care about. Instead of getting a quick overview over all your items (or at least a large amount) with all the stats right next to them you'd have to browse endlessly through a fancy row of 3D items.
To me this sounds like the UI would become even more consolified than Oblivion's, and this time it will probably be much harder to fix it. I don't mean to offend console users by saying this, it's just that a console user usually sits far away from his television and plays at a relatively low resolution so the inventory has to be large and clearly visible even under these circumstances. The Apple type interface might make (at least a bit of) sense in that case, but for PC players it looks and sounds pretty horrible imo.
