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I don't want to "Press any key to continue" to the main menu (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 119 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (19 children)

Why is that there?

It's there due to the technical certification requirements of XBox. All games are required to become interactive after a set number of seconds. When you have a complex game with long loading times, that might be difficult. The load start screen works around that, it's simple enough to load quickly and it is interactive, i.e. "Press any key to continue". It's not useful, but it fulfills the certification requirements, all loading time that follows or might happen in the background while that screen is shown, doesn't count.

It the same reason why you see so many games have the same "You'll lose all your unsaved progress if you exit the game" screen, even in games that save so often to be a non-issue. It's a certification requirement too. There is a whole bunch of stuff like this in games (and movies) that is not there because anybody wants it, but because some contract somewhere says it has to be there or you aren't allowed to publish your game (see also the way names in movie posters never line up with the people on that poster).

PS: This has been around since at least the Xbox360s, don't know what Sony requires or how Microsoft might have updated their requirements since then.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

IMO it's a good feature and it's a good thing it's required. I remember the days when I would boot up a game and never be sure if my system crashed or not.

This requires the game to start giving you feedback before you start wondering if you should do a power cycle.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, better loading feedback would be better than an arbitrary "interactive within 1 second" blanket rule, leading to this whole "press button to continue" workaround.

That's like a generator needing an earth rod, and the engineer putting an earth rod into a plant pot. Sure, the earth rod is there, and sunk to regulated depth in dirt... but it's a plant pot.
Just make an accurate loading screen with accurate feedback.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Imo that's still not enough. Plenty of crashes or failures happen in a way where loading screen animations still keep playing. Having a cursor you can move around to validate that the process is still responsive is important feedback.

I also remember lots of games that did exactly what you are saying and there was no way to tell if it had hung during loading or not because you couldn't check if it was accepting feedback.

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