Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Gaming usability fail - Borderlands.

- Inconsistent actions available on down/up arrows in menus. Some are clickable, while others are not (i think it's the quest detail screen, as opposed to some stuff in the menus)

- Holding the action button down to swap out your current gun for one on the floor - I don't think I have ever actually wanted to do this, compared to the huge number of times that I did this by accident because holding it is also what you do to pick up ammo/money in the vicinity...

- Useless and utterly pointless "Press start" menu (when are they going to get rid of this? All it does is slow me down before playing your game. why?! WHY!? Rockband 2 has this also. It serves no purpose but to remind me what game I am playing - which you can ALSO tell from the following screen anyway (claptrap = borderlands, rock band 2 menu is pretty distinctive....) The only exception to this was the starting thing for inFamous, which was really cool when you hit start and the city blows up

Gaming usability win - Torchlight

Automatic money pickup when going near it. Best feature in a Diablo-like game, ever.

Automatic inventory/equipped item statistics comparison (unlike borderlands, which relies on clunky button presses to achieve what Torchlight does with a very natural mouseover)

Torchlight also has some really good ideas for diablolikes, like sending your pet to sell stuff (awesome)! And what is more satisfying than leveling up? Obviously, leveling up more (ie the Fame levels)

So yeah they are quite different games...but they are both "lets collect a lot of things and level up and level up and clickingheaps = shooting heaps....so really they are also similar in a lot of ways. Except torchlight has (so far) better usability.

Come on Borderlands, you can patch this stuff for Mad Moxxie or whatever DLC #2 is.

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