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Gaming Usability 101
Next Generation (now happily fully merged with Edge) is carrying a story entitled Videogame Usability 101, attempting to lay out some standards for interacting with games. Some of them, like '3. Always let players remap controller buttons to suit their preferences' seems fairly straightforward and hard to disagree with. Others may be a bit more controversial: "4. Always let players skip cut scenes no matter how important they are to the story.
What a predicament cut scenes create. As a designer, you want all your hard work to be acknowledged, even the cut scenes. Sadly, interactive entertainment is the name of the game, and it always comes first. That's why gamers play these things. So rather than assume every player wants to watch your story-telling chops, allow them to bypass cut scenes, tutorials, and even speed up the showing of logos when a game boots up. Tell your story through engaging gameplay, and you'll easily be remembered and praised regardless of what you accomplished in a cut scene, tutorial, or start screen branding." Anything on there that you categorically disagree with?
#1 - save games automatically - good point. do it. But don't overwrite their last save. Create a new one.
#2 - always say "press any button" to start game. whatever. I'd say its more important to just work with the common ones. Nothings more annoying than games with non-standard or backwards 'menu navigation'.
#3 - go one further - acknowledge left handed players and design a map, sure it won't match every lefties preference but nothing sucks worse than having to remap a game from SCRATCH because its totally unusable for a lefty especially since at this point we haven't played it yet and don't really know which commands are most important, a lefthanded-template to start from would be nice. (This applies mostly to keyboard / PC games of course)
Also let us save and restore our control maps on the fly for crying out loud. More than one player plays the game, and my brother uses some whacky options. And don't lock it up in some player profile we select when we start the game. When I play NFS carbon for example my friends and frequently just hand off the controller between races in career mode, we don't want to each run our own separate career, and we want to be able to swap control preferences easily.
And for those new 'games for windows' that apparently have to support xbox controllers, if i don't have an xbox controller don't effing show me what my control layout looks like on one. And don't prompt me ingame to push xbox controller buttons. (I'm looking at you Lost Planet!!)
#4 - cutscenese - yeah we need to be able to skip them, especially the long one at the beginning, and doubly so for anything we might see -during- gameplay. ESPECIALY the one right before the boss fight that you'll have to redo a dozen times or so. I've given up on games because I couldn't handle the cutscene between dying and trying again. And seriously, get rid of those cutscenese that are 4 minutes long, then require you to manually walk forward 3 feet, open a door, and then launch into another 4 minute cutscene.... that's just retarded.
#5 - good camera controls - obviously
#6 - good controls - obviously
#7 - accessibility options - meh, this is important, but not top 10.
#8 - cheap enemies is an issue. cheap level design is even worse.
#9 - always present in game tutorials - god i hate these. When the first 5 missions of a cmapaign are really the instruction manual/tutorial. Yes, have tutorials in the game, but give players the option to skip the 'learn how to move my units' missions, or set them aside as the "Tutorial Campaign".
#10 - let players in and out of the game painlessly. obviously a good idea.
Because the office world has taught us that auto-save never, ever ends up writing over data we wanted to keep. Ditch the word "never", let players save when they want to, but also auto-save to a different save file.
2. Always say "press any button" to start a game.
So after years of having to press the Start button, gamers can't seem to remember where that button is located? Weird. What if the main screen has some different options that the player needs to choose? Perhaps the user wants to select a different keymapping (rule #3!)? Wouldn't that necessitate that the press a button other than Start? I always assumed that the wii requires specific button presses to start games so that games don't accidentally start because the wiimote got dropped, etc...