“The failure of Gran Turismo 5: the power of menus and UI”
Imagine a restaurant where you wait for your table in a dirty room. The hostess is rude to you, and the process of ordering food or even getting a reservation is confusing. You’re having a bad experience well before you’re eating, and now the chef is going to have to work much harder to satisfy a grumpy customer. Like all metaphors, this is imperfect, but the lesson remains: a great game is a great experience, and the interface is a large part of creating that experience.
I was very impressed by Forza 3’s menu system when it came out, by how streamlined it had become (when the previous game was a bit cumbersome). In fact, Forza 3 is a better game in a lot of ways, and its developers must be suicidal when they compare it to Gran Turismo 5 and realize that what is really holding them back is that there is no remotely decent wheel for the Xbox 360.
And now, instead of a good wheel, they have to support Kinect for their next version. Argh.
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