I think you are vastly underestimating how complicated menu systems and UI in games are. I have a friend who works as a professional game developer in a small studio and far as I heard, he's spent most of his time just working on their UI/menus.

Changing these things is neither easy nor fast.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 9 minutes ago (1 children)

If you're spending months on your menu system, you're doing something wrong. Bang it out in a few days and revisit just prior to launch. It's really important because it's the first thing players use, but it can also be overhauled late in development because it doesn't impact much.

I would understand if it was a complex in-game menu system for a grand strategy or 4x game or something, not for a game launch menu. Get your UX team to iterate a bit during development and have devs throw it together once the major features are ready and it's mostly time for bug fixing and polish.

[–] SorteKanin@feddit.dk 1 points 6 minutes ago

revisit just prior to launch

This is simply not feasible - menus include pause menus, talent trees, inventories, all that kind of stuff. All of that is necessary for proper gameplay testing. You can't just "bang that out in a few days".

I'm sorry, but this idea that any of this is easy enough to do in a few days and not crucial enough to iterate on throughout development instead of just doing it at the end, is exactly the kind of naive attitude that the Helldivers and Palworld devs are talking about.

[–] irmoz@lemmy.world 3 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

The ROR2 new game menu has only a few elements:

Character select
loadout select
difficulty select
artifact select
DLC select

That's it.

I know it isn't completely trivial, but as someone with many years of experience making (small) indie games, I know for a fact that a menu like that is onshould only be changing a few global variables. It's a frontend with very little backend to consider.

Something like that is not a year's work. I could agree with a month, and even at that, most of it will be testing, not design.

And tbh - the main problem with it isn't even its design (the design is fine) just its controls. You inexplicably have to use the D-pad for character select, but the analogy stick for everything else, apart from switching to difficult select with R2. Why not navigate the whole menu with either D-pad or left stick? That should only take a week to fix at the absolute maximum, unless they've managed to tie the code in a spaghettified knot that's unnecessarily coupled with actual game mechanics.

[–] digitalnuisance@infosec.pub 2 points 3 hours ago

Correct. Once again, Gamers take developers for granted because something LOOKS like it's simple, but it rarely ever is. It's hella frustrating to deal with this every day as a dev, but I guess that's what you sign up for in this line of work.