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Black and White 2 - How To Construct A Giant
Gamasutra has another GDCE postmortem, this time for the sequel to the god-in-a-box sim Black and White. From the article: "The design philosophy that Lionhead Studios adopted for the sequel to Black and White was to enhance the player's feeling of being a god in the game world by immersing them as fully as possible in that world. What this meant in practice was to largely reject the standard model of game menus and data-panels for an interface that forms part of the game world itself. This presented the design team with all kinds of challenges which were made even harder by the decision to expand the scope of B&W 2 beyond its god game heritage to include elements such as real-time strategy, simulation, city building and a physics engine. "
"I think the human mind is pretty adept at figuring out the status of things without menus showing everything... we've been doing pretty good without them up untill the last what... 25 years?"
I wish my last girlfriend had a better status meter above her head or a control panel of some sort. Making gestures at her just seemed to make her mad. Unfortunately, I couldn't tell exactly how mad until she flung some poop at me and left.
If she only had a nice indicator panel to show me just how mad she was... My mind is rather worthless at figuring out the status of things, especially the mood of things without a number or gauge showing everything.
That's something I missed in the first B&W.
When I slapped around my pet, I wanted to see exactly what that meant to him immediately. I don't recall seeing detailed feedback, other than he might have eaten some of my villagers later. This might have been a random act or a response to my beating... which made me wonder how to properly dicipline the beast.
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I mostly agree with this, and am not exactly arguing but maybe just adding something.
All the examples you've given include a lot of menus, but they are built-in to the GUI and HUD of the game itself. You don't have to pause the game to access them, or leave the game world to access them.
Menus are bad when they take you away from the game. If Lionhead feels like thats what menus were doing to their game, I say take them bitches away!
RE4, a nearly perfect game, had some flawed menus that were its only problems. Changing weapons involved no less than 2 diff. pause screens, WAY out of place in such an otherwise engrossing game. Throwing switches involved asking the player a question, totally unnecessary in 99% of the cases.
The real problem isn't menus themselves, but an interface that hurts the immersion of the title. Menus are simply the most common way people happen to screw up their interfaces.