Jesus, the way you people piss and moan you'd think it leapt off the screen and slapped your mother and grandmother. The only complaint that could really be considered valid was Beth's decision to use that eye-searing parchment motif for menus.
Leaping off the screen to slap my mother and grandmother would be about the last thing I accuse it of. More along the lines of just sitting there like a useless lump, and making me do twice the scrolling and tabbing, for half the information, as I would in anything with a REAL menu screen. MW had individual windows for your inventory, stats, spells, and map, all on the screen simultaneously, with the ability to resize or individually call them up or disable them. You could see about 90% of the more "relevant" information at a glance, with NO additional clicking, and get more details about select items by hovering the cursor over them. You could view your inventory by category, and the game would remember the last setting, so you could see ALL weapons or ALL armor, along with your major stats and world map, as soon as you opened the menu. Going from that to a UI where you had to call up each of the menu pages individually, then tediously scroll through about 8 items at a time in that menu, and STILL get less info on each of them, bordered on a crime.
Granted, the ability of an old TV screen with a CRT, using the inherently limited NTSC video standard, gives terrible text, so you've got to use a font size that's better suited for billboards than a book. That doesn't mean that everyone needs to suffer with it, though. Some consoles can deliver much better graphics than others, and those could benefit from their own UI as well. The actual game is 98% of the work; making a menu interface tailored to the platform would be 2% at most, and give us a far better experience than the aggrevation we put up with in OB.
» Sat May 28, 2011 6:18 am 
