It just feels lazy to me, like the developer couldn’t be bothered adjusting the UI for consoles so they copied the PC interface and bound the mouse cursor to a stick. Some games do both at the same time, having menues navigable both with buttons and a cursor, but usually that makes all menus unreliable and unprecise as hell.
Wait? Console players feel like devs just copy the PC interface? Us PC players always feel like they copy the console interface and just slap a cursor on it. Buttons are huge, excessive amount of tabs, very few things visible at any time, etc. Oh and those “wheels” ugh.
Both things happen. It depends on what the game was originally designed for.
I don’t think Hogwarts Legacy was designed for PC primarily and it’s full of cursor control on console.
But it also limits me to 4 spells at any given time even on PC, instead of giving me a bigger hotbar. So I guess devs just make middle-of-the-road interfaces that don’t please anyone these days.
The only game I can think of is Minecraft.
No Man’s Sky’s UI is almost entirely through cursors, drag and drop etc.
Even choosing between a couple dialog options used to require moving a pointer over buttons but they finally fixed that at some point. Now with a controller you can just select the answers right away.
GUIs are a science of their own. Think The Last of Us, how unintrusive, but at the same time intuitive is the UI in this game? Somebody spend months designing that and fine tuning it to the gameplay. A simple selection cross mapped to the D-Pad. Crafting accessible by shoulder buttons or quickcrafting directly from cross selection. Thats the majority of your gameplay needs met.
Now think Zelda: Breath of the Wild, how dogshit is the UI? Pressing the Switches tiny + and - buttons a million times, scrolling through pages of clutter to get where you want, quests being on a completely separate menu than the map, etc. I could literally go on for hours on how bad that UI is, but thats not the point I’m trying to make.
The point is, that both examples are topshelf game devs. Being an experienced dev doesn’t protect you from bad decisions. Prioritizing, investing effort and understanding the connection between gameplay and UI is what makes it good. And some devs just skip that part and make due with something on of their designer came up with on a lazy Tuesday.
Also, not everything is always arranged in a neat grid, and one thing more infuriating than a cursor on console, is the selection never jumping to where you want it to.
As a former developer in the game industry, I would say it’s just cost saving. Actual devs know it’s not optimal, but that’s the requirements from the guys paying them.
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