Splintert said:
It doesn't matter whether they allegedly created the bad UI on purpose to try to have some realism or immersion, you're still claiming they did it on purpose.
But it does matter, because it's the purpose that's different. They didn't make it that way to make it bad, they made it that way to make it realistic (or something, I don't even care). The badness is just a necessary consequence of it. By your logic there's no difference between murder and manslaughter. Yes, the result is the same, but the intention is different.
IMO, the buttons were likely disabled due to some unforeseen bug or crash related to the way it was programmed. That's why edit mode is edit mode and not normal mode.
Except that I have never had those buttons cause a crash or a bug, and neither have I ever heard of anyone's game crashing or bugging out because of them. At this point I invoke Occam's Razor and claim my explanation as preferable on its basis.
MadocComadrin said:
Now, if they had made so say, you had to walk around in camp, grab the armor you wanted to put on your companion, have him/her hold up his/her arms while you play a minigame to help him/her with the straps, that would be screwing things up on purpose.
Oddly enough, I find that idea almost appealing. Have you heard of Receiver? It's a first person shooter made as part of some kind of 7-day challenge or something by the guys making
Overgrowth. The point is, it's a first person shooter that has only one gun in it, and it takes eight buttons to operate. It works like an actual gun, you can control every part of it. You don't just press R and watch a reload animation, you have to eject the magazine, holster the gun, put bullets in the magazine one by one, pull the gun out, put the magazine back in, and release the slide. And you know what? Doing that is amazingly fun. I also liked Trespasser, where you didn't pick up things simply by walking over them, you had to actually extend your noodle-arm into the game world to grab guns and other objects. I kinda wish more games were like that.
Here's somebody's blog post that explains the whole idea in more detail: http://gamedesignreviews.com/reviews/street-rod-game-design-and-usability/
link above said:
You see you car in a garage, just like in Need for Speed. You click on the newspaper to see the page with second hand newspaper adverts. Basicly, it is a menu like in Need for Speed but it looks like a newspaper. Also, just like in a real newspaper, not all parts are always avalible and some parts are in a bad condition. You can only buy what is there. Also, the parts are actual engine parts and you have to understand which one fits to your car and if it makes it faster or not. The game doesn’t help you with that. You click on an advert to buy the part, but it is not installed yet.
The fun begins now. When you click on the hood of you car, you can see the engine. The mouse cursor turns into a wrench. You can then proceed to disassemble the engine by clicking a few times on the screws that hold the engine parts in place. After you unscrewed and removed the old part, you can put in the new part and screw it back on.
The screws are red so it is easier to find them. I guess you can call that usability.
My point is that from a standpoint of usability, this is a catastrophe. The whole process just takes time and doesn’t really do anything. You have to even needlessly click on each screw a few times while it would be much faster if you could click just once or at least hold the mouse button. The Need for Speed way is much more user friendly since it simplifies the process to just selecting parts from a menu.
Or is it? You see, usability is not the point here. A game doesn’t do anything specific. You don’t really have a task you can optimize the interface for. So instead of optimising the process of changing parts, Street Rod makes it very prominent part of the game. It adresses the senses and the emotions of the user. It tries at least to capture a bit of the how it is to be a mechanic and tune up a car.
I think that's kinda what TW were going for when they decided that you had to talk to each NPC in order to access their inventory or stats screen. The problem is that Street Rod (which is the game discussed in the blog) and Receiver require the player to exert some effort to do a task that also requires effort in the real world. Not so in M&B. In reality you don't need to enter a special pocket dimension disconnected from normal spacetime in order to check someone's inventory. You don't stop your mercenary army and go "show me your things". You don't even stop, you just turn to the guy riding alongside you, you see what he's wearing, and you go "oh by the way, Borcha, throw that old shield away and take the new one we found after the last battle". Yes, you do the same thing you would in real life, you talk to them to tell them to change gear, but it's much more of a hassle than in reality. M&B requires effort to do something that should be effortless.
