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.

  • XTL
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    11 months 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
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      11 months 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
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        11 months 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.