I was an avid OW1 player, and set the game aside for quite a while. I’ve come back to OW2, and while I have been enjoying myself, navigating menus is AWFUL. Could we have the dev team put some sane defaults in?
Problematic workflows:
Special events
- I select one of the special events (Anniversary) because I want to play a special mode
- I’m put on the first of the rewards for the event
- To get to ‘play’, I have to scroll over all the rewards, OR go down to ‘challenges’ and then over to try to hit ‘play’.
- I try to hit ‘play’ on Overwatch Classic, but just kidding~! It’s now on Mirrowatch and I have to swap again.
Navigating the menu just to play a game mode is between three swipes (at best) and 7+ (at worst). Imagine this is what you’re doing day-in, day-out, to try to play the game. It sucks!
Second example:
Controller is really crammed for space on character controls. I have some custom mappings on each character, and occasionally (especially on new characters) have wanted to adjust character settings.
Imagine I want to tweak something during a match - I argue this is more common on console due to aim constraints, sometimes I realize the aim is maladjusted.
- I have to go to menu
-
- I scroll down four times to ‘options’, press X.
- I have to R1 twice to get to controls.
- I have to press R3 to navigate to the specific hero I have already selected and am already playing as.
- On the hero menu, I have to scroll through the ENTIRE roster to find the character I am literally currently playing.
- I select them. When I enter the hero, I’m still on ‘change hero’, but it isn’t highlighted, so I just have to KNOW to press ‘left’ to enter the menu.
- Then I have to scroll down four more times to ‘advanced’ for aim, or even further for character bindings.
I have to navigate 18 times to change an average character binding. It could be higher depending on where the hero is on the menu. Imagine that happening in a match! It’s incredibly frustrating. This is a simple usability issue - it’s extremely clear your team doesn’t use controllers in these menus at all. It actively keeps you from playing the game. These should simply default to, on opening ‘all heroes’, pre-selecting the character you are on. It’s so simple.
Example three:
- I go to open a loot box. Maybe I have a few to open. Lands me on ‘open loot box’, great.
- I want to scroll through and see previews of some of the items.
- When I go back from examining an item, I’m back at the top of the menu again, and have to scroll ALL the way back down just to get to where I started!
- Each time it resets it’s harder to even want to go through the items. If you have 5 lootboxes to open, say, you have to scroll through 20 items on the menu, each time you want to look at an item. This is ridiculous. It should simply remember the last place you were in the list.
Most of these would take a dev five minutes to fix. But it steals the time and energy of every single controller player to fix incredibly, stupidly simple things.
Please talk to your accessibility team. Overwatch 1 had literally zero issues with menu navigation.