At some point in this millenium, it became ubiquitous in games to ask for a button press before switching to the main menu and it has become a pet peeve off mine.

Why is that there? It’s your main menu so ugly that you have to shield players from it? Why can I not double click the game Icon, go to the kitchen to get coffee and return to the PC/console to find myself in the main menu ready to continue my game? Seriously, cui bono? Sometimes, they even show a different screen before that press, which some artist got paid for creating, so the developer is also losing (a tiny amount of) money here.

I honestly just don’t get the point of these screens.

Bonus negative points for games that only check DLC after that button press instead of any other point of the losing process. Calling a server could easily be threaded while the game assets are loaded since it takes very little hardware load to do so. But no, I get to wait an additional 10 seconds because the game devs want me to for no apparent reason.

On a related note: just allow players to auto skip intros, please. Just put an checkbox in the settings, so that everyone can see it once.

  • Rocketpoweredgorilla@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    It annoys me when you close down a game, and it only has the option to send you to the title menu instead of closing out. It’s not the worst thing ever, but it’s kind of annoying when you need to go, and you have to “quit” the game just to wait for it to go back to the title screen and make you hit “quit” again a second time.

    • delitomatoes@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      It’s for console ports. They have a power button…so on PC you’ll need to go to that button created specifically to quit to desktop

      • XTL@sopuli.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 year ago

        Or, they have a hypervisor, so instead of needing to quit from inside, you just hit the magic button and go back to the console UI. Game is suspended and might resume after power off or switch, or not, depending on the system and user.

        You could just ctrl-alt-del or window switch or whatever to get the same experience on a computer.

        • Phoenix [she/they]@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          0
          ·
          1 year ago

          I honestly will just slap cmd-q on most games. If they don’t handle it properly… well, sucks for me I guess, but most do. (on a mac)

          I wonder how most games treat alt-f4 on windows?

          • N1cknamed@feddit.nl
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            1 year ago

            It differs, on some games it doesn’t work or still takes a long time. For those programs I like to use SuperF4, which kills the process when you press ctrl+alt+f4.

  • Supersonic Stork@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I got curious myself and agreed, so I went looking.

    A lot of sources specified that it was part of a technical requirements checklist, and…

    Yeap. It doesn’t explicitly require a “press any key” screen, but it gives a more pleasant screen to look at while you select a user. People online also say it’s used to detect which controller is in use.

    If you add a feature like this to a game, it becomes harder to maintain if there are discrepancies between builds. So presumably it’s usually just left in rather than removed.

    • Durotar@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      People online also say it’s used to detect which controller is in use.

      I don’t get it. Any modern game can detect when you connect or disconnect a controller on the fly, in the actual game.

      • Oka@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yet they are not built in features to game engines such as Unity and Unreal

          • Thassodar@lemm.ee
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            1 year ago

            Keyword: new. From now on people can do it, but prior to now it wasn’t possible from what they’re saying.

            • Dangdoggo@kbin.social
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              The New Input Package is actually just what Unity users call it because it isn’t the original and requires a package manager install from the stock LTR releases but it’s been out for a few years now. Still, you’re right, although I see no reason not to adopt it, most games that are using it will probably be releasing this year.

    • jivemasta@reddthat.com
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      That’s the thing. I think it is a carry over from that. Back then a lot of games didn’t have a menu or anything, after you hit the button, you were just playing the game.

      Like Mario 1 and 3 have just a simple 1 or 2 player select then you are in the game. Some single player games didn’t have anything, they just would go straight to the game after you hit start.

      Now there isn’t really a need since nearly every game has a menu for loading saves, starting a new game and such. So they could go, but are just a vestigial part of gaming history at this point.