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.
I got curious myself and agreed, so I went looking.
A lot of sources specified that it was part of a technical requirements checklist, and…
Yeap. It doesn’t explicitly require a “press any key” screen, but it gives a more pleasant screen to look at while you select a user. People online also say it’s used to detect which controller is in use.
If you add a feature like this to a game, it becomes harder to maintain if there are discrepancies between builds. So presumably it’s usually just left in rather than removed.
I don’t get it. Any modern game can detect when you connect or disconnect a controller on the fly, in the actual game.
Some games use it to determine who is player one vs player two. i.e. whoever presses the button first is treated as player 1.
Yet they are not built in features to game engines such as Unity and Unreal
Unity’s new input package does exactly this.