The Downfall of Gaming UIs and Menus 

World at War, Halo 2, Dead Space, Gears of War - all menus that immediately invoke a very strong, specific set of emotions. What would you consider THE BEST video game menu of all time? *Watch my newest video about the game that saved my love of gaming here! -> **ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Vr7mkU83MaY.html*

The sanitization of UIs and menus is really just another indication of how video games these days are no longer viewed as works of art or immersive experiences, but products merely to just be mass produced with the bare minimum viable product for a quick cash grab.

Black Ops 1 had the most unique menu I’ve seen and is perhaps still my favorite in a video game. Instead of being a simple UI screen you’re actually Alex Mason in that chair still being interrogated. The television you see in your television screen is the freaking menu. You can even break out of the chair and find a small computer in the room to put in cheat codes. And when you switch to Zombies the whole tone changes in the room, the interrogator becomes a zombie banging on the window and the iconic Damned track plays in the background. I’ve always loved the menu in that game and it made me more immersed into the campaign or when playing Zombies. Not many games do cool and creative stuff for something as simple as a menu screen anymore.

As someone who works in the industry, I know a few causes for UI getting worse: - UI development cost minimization mandated by execs - Engineer-driven design, instead of artist-driven, meaning menus are made up of simple tinted rectangles and most animations are done programmatically (i.e. translation, scale, rotation transforms) - Heavy templatization that doesn't permit crazy custom animations - Yearly franchised game releases. That said, I really enjoy the Persona 5 games' UIs. They exude so much personality. The developers have said in interviews that it took a long time to make them.

Star Wars Battlefront (original 2004) had the coolest menu! Blue hologram/wireframe/schematic aesthetic! Sweeping camera movements over the battlefield, and seeing an army of soldiers advancing on an AT-AT. It all made you feel like you were strategizing your plan of attack. And when you loaded into a game, you start from orbit looking down on the planet. Like a satellite, you zoom in grid by grid until you reach the battlefront map on the planet below. It never gets old, literal perfection!

10 years ago I remember imagining how amazing games were going to be in the next decade. Never in my life would I have expected so little progress. A lot of things have become worse actually. What a shame.

One thing that 343 need to add to MCC is the option to use the original loading screens and main menu UIs for each game. The Halo: CE loading screen, with the ominous building monks chant and the shaft of light revealing more of the Halo mural in the background as the level loaded made the game feel alive, like it was some ancient Forerunner mechanism or something. It's not just about nostalgia, things like that are an essential part of experiencing a game, especially one as atmospheric as Halo: CE.

Its not just UI - its everything, and I mean everything. "Hollow corporate shell" like you said answers it perfectly. Look at a McDonalds building from 20 years ago. Look at one from today. Stripped of personality and color, a greyscale square built to look effectively depressing. We as a society have totally lost sight of personality because corporate takeover has bled into every medium we consume and is quite literally killing every uniqueness it can. Its dystopian really. We are already in a corporate dystopia.

I feel like smaller AA productions and Indies still keep the tradition alive. Pentiment starts by opening a book in a escritoire, and it ends making an really clever callback to that very scene. Tunic also has an "old-school" styled menu that is actually _crucial_ to the end game (if you know, you know). Metal Hellsinger also had Unknown opening her eyes when you first press start and the torches in the back flicker along with the background music. Fighting games also rely heavily on personality, SF6 went with a techno-punk aesthetic which ties the entire game together, Guilty Gear also always uses a genre of metal to stylize pretty much anything in the game, and while Strive does have a few faults in functionality, the UI is still one of a kind.

A main menu is important for a game. The first thing the devs likely think when they make it is BUILD UP THIS LAND!

I remember sitting in the menu of the original halos just listening to the music and watching the background slowly move about. What a truly mesmerizing experience they were.

The sad thing is that I bet a lot of developers want to make more creative menus and loading screens but with their tight deadlines, it makes it more difficult to do so.

Perfect Dark has one of the best menus ever. The whole audio + visual aesthetic floods me with emotion. It’s immediately immersive af in the game’s world, being a projected hologram from a laptop, which you can also close to instead explore your HQ.

What do most incredible UI’s have in common? Vertically. Blows me away that modern design teams can’t see this or chose to ignore it lol. Amazing video mate I loved it, so much nostalgia!

What a sad realization that Gaming UIs and menus are now so oriented towards being slow and clunky to use because of their addiction to putting an emphasis on monetization over anything else. For as much as Halo 4 gets hate from people due to its decision to make the gameplay be tailored towards Call of Duty fans, one thing it definitely did right was have the best main menu and UI design that 343 had ever done for a new Halo game, it's way better than the UIs that were done for Halo 5 and especially Halo Infinite.

A relatively recent game whose UI I absolutely loved is Kingdom Come: Deliverance. The game takes place in Bohemia (today's Czechia) during the late middle ages and (aside from the main the main menu) EVERYTHING in the game UI is designed to look like it came from a medieval manuscript! The health/stamina bar, the inventory, the quest log, etc...

Call of Duty 2 had really cool loading screens. It was your character’s kit laid out on a table. A map of the area they’re fighting in, ammo, a pistol, personal items, and their diary that’s flipped open to their current entry, which both tells you the mission while bringing a bit of their personality (“I don’t like the odds but we’re surrounded, what choice do I have” or the Soviet soldier mentioning how cold it is) which I always remember as one of my favorite style of loading screens. It just had so much personality packed into it.

Instant goosebumps with that use of the World at War theme. It's a shame that the menu music for a lot of games doesn't feel as thoughtful as it once was.

Gotta show some appreciation for Spec Ops: The Line - A simple and easy to use UI - A main menu that tells a story set in the world of the game - Loading screens that go from helpfull hints to actively taunting and mocking the player Truly a masterclass in the design of all three elements

You just gave me inspiration for the game menu that I’m working on! Videos like this are awesome to get inspired and see what made some UIs so magical. How I miss the days where creativity was priority n1

One of the most underrated game ui's I have ever seen was the UI from The Darkness (2009). The menu and pause screens use the tentacles of the Darkness as the background. Their writhing is audible when those menus are up. And The Darkness had my favorite loading screens ever. Whenever you hit a loading screen, you see Jackie monologue on his thoughts on what's happening in the story, the location you're loading into, a random short story, or sometimes it's just a cinematic with no spoken words. The same is true for the second game as well. One of the most memorable loading screens from the series for me was in the second game when Jackie described a time as a child when he woke up to see his father standing over his bed with a gun. He said he wasn't sure if his father was thinking about killing him, himself, or both. That was a harrowing loading screen and it really shows the lengths some people go after the Darkness has a hold of them. I absolutely love the game, and I can say for sure it and the second game have my favorite loading screens of all time.

This video deserves a ton of views to make people realize what we lost. I did my part liking to hope that it blows up.

Star Wars Battlefront 2 2005 had my favorite menu. It starts with the iconic imperial march and shows you a side of good and evil, something that Star Wars was always about. The sound design was also very iconic and really created an impact on how memorable it would be.

Even a menu as simple as the original Skyrim menu felt different than modern menus. It was fast like the modern menus try to be but it was easy to use and non-confusing, yet it built an atmosphere around the central Imperial Dragon symbol backed by smoke and a memorable menu theme that was amazing and memorable. It’s sad that not only has a lot of stuff in gaming itself fallen, but also the menus. Glad I got to see this video as it made me really think about it, and it’s completely correct.

It's crazy how we live in a time where even the menus/ui suck now.

I’m really glad you talked about loading screens. I really miss the loading screens from Halo CE-4. What I think sucks about the loading screens now is that sometimes they aren’t new player friendly and contain spoilers. 1 example I can remember clearly is when I was watching DeeBeeGeek play halo 2 for the first time and the loading screen with the Gravemind absolutely spoiled the surprise of what he was about to see. I wish companies would bring back those awesome loading screens.

It's so funny to hear how both functionality and theming took a nosedive over the years, because those are supposed to be the main 2 things UI designers/artists pay attention to for a good user experience.

Man, the Black Ops menu, that was probably the best menu i've ever seen! You really don't appreciate how good menus were, until you have a direct comparison, thanks for showing us!

You know the problem is significant when Japanese games, like Ace Combat 7 and Persona 5 Royal, in the last 3+ years have menus that are actually what old menus in Western games had before: designs themed to the games' stories, aesthetically pleasing and easy to navigate.

I remember a couple years ago booting up Xenoblade Chronicles for the first time and just seeing that single sword embedded in a field as that piano played. Immediately told me everything I needed to know about this experience. Some other favorites of mine are Persona 5, Resident Evil 7, Halo 3, Destiny 1, Titanfall 2 (the original one before they changed it for no reason), Va-11 Hall-A, and Batman Arkham City.

Now this is quality content. Glad someone's finally making a dedicated video towards this. It's a bigger deal than people like to think imo

There's a game called ECHO from a now defunct studio called Ultra Ultra that opens on the eyeball of the main character, and she follows your mouse cursor/menu selection left and right to various parts of the menu, and if I recall correctly, once you click new game it transitions seamlessly to the game itself. I love atmospheric stuff like that.

Assassin's Creed had a fantastic menu design too. Accessing it through the Animus in-game integrated it so perfectly into the lore.

AC 1 menu was the actual physical Animus itself in the Abstergo facility which was kinda cool il say. And the fact that you can run around as an assassin in a weird endless simulation void was very immersive for a loading screen.

I completely agree, so glad you talked about this! I've been sitting here silently brooding to myself about menus, less about loading screens but you make a good point. Crappy UI is one of many reasons I won't even touch CoD. It's just a cluttered mess of microtransactions, like the game itself has taken a backseat to the store itself

My favorite menu was Star Wars Episode III the video game. The apocalyptic landscape of lava in the background with the ominous music. The menu sounds effects and the blue computer terminal visual style. There's also a lot of variety of shapes and sizes on the screen. Flashforward to battlefront II EA and it's mostly black and white rectangles

Perfect Dark for the N64 (and it’s 360 remaster) had a really good menu system. At any time while navigating, press B and the menu (which was just an interface for a personal computing device being projected into the eye of the main character) would disappear and you could navigate a fully modeled 3D futuristic secret facility environment with lots of things to do and interact with.

Red dead redemption 1 and 2 have some really good dynamic menus that show the world functioning and alive, so when you press start you feel as if you're being transported to a living breathing world that's still there when you quit playing. Its like a little time machine, I wish we had more menus like that.

Excellent video, and 100% needed. You touched on every issue I've had regarding this topic for years. And I think you hit the nail on the head during the functionality section by linking everything back to mobile game UI design, because that is the real root of the problem imo. Fundamentally it's all just about using as much screen space as possible to advertise monetisation.

I think music plays a big role. Some menus can be relatively simple but the music elevates them, such as Civilization VI and The Talos Principle. Superhot had great UI design. I think the biggest culprit here is mobile design taking over everything else. It wouldn't surprise me if it's all HTML-based, too. Edit: ah, you covered it.

Republic Commando always hyped me up before I start a mission. The others mentioned are incredible and makes you feel excited every time :)

Shout-out to the nostalgia I get when you booted up Destiny 1. It's still great for the current titles screens they have but that original launch one just hits different.

i still remember how amazing it felt to install Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 with how much went into their installers, not to mention UI

I think show streaming service UIs work well because there is a ton of content that you aren't familiar with, and thumbnails help give you at least some idea of what you might be getting into. It's like looking at cover art at the rental store. But the problem is that menus have a ton fewer options, and between their names and description text, the user knows pretty much exactly what they are looking at, and can eventually basically memorize what options there are. There needs to be a totally different design philosophy for game menus vs streaming menus.

I remember playing halo 3 with my brother as a kid, we would always play the campaign together on legendary and see how far we go. But one thing I will never forget is the menu screen, it was perfect. And the loading screen was actually mesmerizing and nice to look at, and didn’t have me siting there twiddling my thumbs waiting for the next mission.

Trying to set up a Custom Game in Halo Infinite for the first time was like trying to decipher alien hieroglyphics.

A really good, recent Menu UI (2019) is Ace Combat 7's. It's in-universe, reflecting the mission briefing screens. It's functional with drop down menus that allow you to view what is in each option before tabbing into them, and the music is nice and subtle, picking up pace when you go into mission select. I'm a big fan of it.

I think sound design and music also plays a big part in that with the general artstyle of a game, my favorite UI/Menus in that aspect gotta be in Persona 5, there aren't many games out there where I enjoy looking at the UI, it just seeps in vibes.

Almost put me in tears with the PS2 console menu, I remember loving so much the feeling of mystery, awe, and curious wonder that the PS2's menu invoked. Just reflecting on it now, it really gave off a sense of "This is a special place, one where you can jump in and immerse yourself in a game, in any game. You'll be able to do things you can't do in real life. Come on in and explore. Are you ready?" Oh, where has that unique atmospheric aesthetic gone....

I remember sitting in the title screen for mass effect 2 for 20 minutes when I played it, and felt literal shivers because it was simple, yet set up the atmosphere for the game. Such a masterpiece

This makes me realize how much something as simple a main menu can improve a game. Thinking back, Warframe drew me in with its early UI design and menu SFX, despite the new player experience being terrible. Unfortunately I watched it go from having excellent looking, immersive, and functional menus for years to having some of the most ugly and nonfunctional ones I have used. Before I stopped playing it altogether, navigating the inventory went from a quick task to sometimes taking minutes. It definitely had an impact on how I approach designing software and game menus, and I think some of what I have seen here will as well.

Halo main menu will always stay with me because nothing beats those late night in the 2000s and hearing the osts hits different, another main menu that was pretty spooky was the original dead rising menu. you knew the atmosphere was gonna be something you never experienced before especially as a kid

To touch a bit more on this, I think games like these also helped a lot of us understand the reality of war a little bit. I know when Sgt. Johnson was shot down, and when Commander Keys got shot in the back, it hit me right in the fucking chest! I was emotionally invested in these characters. They didn't have to die. Now i'm never gonna see them again. Maybe it's cause I have a mental condition with an overactive imagination, but all I could think about was how their families and fellow soldiers must've felt. I don't think games like the weight to them that they used too

Man I really haven’t thought about this but it’s so true. Menus used to evoke feelings and make the into so impactful, now MW2 seems to have been designed by Hulu UI developers it’s insane.

Halo 3 had the strongest main menu I've ever experienced. It was my first halo and still remember how strong it was when u launched it. I still feel sad when I see it to this day cause it reminds me of better times

Great video man. These branching out videos are very insightful. Just out of curiosity do you plan on doing that Turok video?

So this is actually my first time replying to any video and I am doing so to say thank you for making this video. I have been playing indie games for a while now so I have been away from the triple A experience for some time now...that is until yesterday when my friends asked me to download and play Warzone 2. I couldn't get over how cluttered and broken the menus seemed. Between the obsessive advertising and micro-transactions, the seemingly never ending popups and the confusing UI I felt like I was losing my mind and none of my friends seemed to even notice. It made me physically sick to my stomach and felt like I was watching gaming as a genre being strangled by corporations and greed, so thank you for making this. As a side note you should play a game called GTFO on steam or at least look up the UI, menu and loading screens as they are truly incredible. I can't wait to watch more of your content in the future.

I remember Fall of Cybertron, where the menu when you opened it was in Cybertronian at first and then translated from left to right to English. It was so cool and felt really alien, I miss these ideas. PS5 brought the atmosphere back a little by playing the game's soundtrack and showing a wallpaper when hovering over its icon.

One thing I noticed with UIs/menu screens from the late 360 days to now is that the screen is cluttered. So much is plastered on the screen that it is hard to find what you are looking for at times.

I am happy that the Dead Space remake kept the menu design. The main Menu (and when you go back in the game after you a restart) is a hologram like you are using one at that moment on the Ishimura. The camera even moves out of the last save "station". I love thinks like that. It gives you the "I am in this world" feeling the second you start the game.

Really appreciate the Metro and Dead Space menu ontop of everything else. My first time playing Dead Space as a kid I was already stressed out just opening the game. Metro is a nice setting for showing what you're going to be looking at for most of the game, its alive and almost gives the feel of being one of those random radio operators about to listen in on the gang's journey.

One of my favorite UIs ever is the Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars main menu. Each button is in the drop-down style while curving around a ravaged planet earth on one side and video of what the conditions are on the ground. Mission selection was great too, allowing you to click on areas of a map where conflict was taking place. You could also read about unit information, lore, etc with a menu that felt like you were accessing a classified GDI or Nod computer database

my favorite loading screen was from The Darkness on Xbox 360. The loading screens just had your main character spotlighted in a black void, either monologuing or doing some repetive ocd things. As you progress through the game it doesn't take you long to realize that the loading screens are representing Jackie's psyche after "the darkness" emerges and he becomes its host.

Imagine buying a small CRT TV speaker and a classic television and plugging in your XBOX, XBOX 360 and play your fav halo game and sitting there listening to the sad music giving you a feeling of melon collie while looking at the ui/menu that looks like a hyper advanced extratriestrial hardware. Nostalgia.

This was a great video and put into words the way I feel about modern gaming on the whole, in a way. I truly feel like I got lucky growing up through the peak of gaming in the late 90s and 2000s, through 2012 or so when things seemed to drop off. I hope the industry pivots back to that high point one day.

Excellent video and I fully agree with you. Gaming has had a very sad decline over the past 6 or so years and the only way we can reverse it is by talking about it. Educating younger gamers on what once was and calling out devs on their terrible decision making for new games is what has to be done. My favorite menu of all time is HaloReach, so many good memories of a much happier 12 year old me. The newest game I can think of with a normal menu system that is well done and still evokes emotion for me is Battlefield 1’s menu. The music is pure beauty.

I remember need for speed most wanted 2005 and juiced 2 ui, even today it looks modern, and it's a game about cars, so i can look into my cars on carrer while navigating in the menus, like i'm looking to my car while thinking how will be my next ride. Zelda ocarina of time or even skyward sword, when you pause you see that menu with that epic atmosphere, and now with tears of the kingdom (my favorite game) it's so clean and don't feel like a part of adventure or the world, it just exists, but it could have a zonai look or something. I remember that crash team racing had buttons to press while the loading screen, you could press square and fart, for an instance. Something on relativelly recent games i love is that pause menu from super mario odyssey, you have mario and cappy looking to the option you choose and they even change poses depending on the option you are in, it has some details on the screen that looks like maps, and this game has a strong theme of travel everywhere. I remember in ps1, the first game i've played in my life was test drive 5, to me the track selection was magic because you had the earth 3d model to choose where is the track you'll race, and the model rotates indicating where in the world that track was located! As a kid, i was in wonder with that. The direct sequel test drive 6, hasn't this planet model, but there was some magic in car selection/buying: there was classes, that each one looks like a car showroom, sound of engines and suspensions everywhere while you select an option or go back.

Thankfully, some genres outside of FPSes seem not to have fallen into this decline. Hell, if anything, the Persona series went in the opposite direction. Take one look at P5's UI and you'll know that the people behind it knew what they were doing very well.

I appreciate your game industry opinions like this. We all have perspectives and hearing you share sparks more discourse on the topics within us as an audience.

I believe Titanfall 2's UI was pretty good compared to many modern ones.

Remember, the inventory screen for the original Resident Evils? A modern take of that was going to be in the remake of Resident Evil 2. The developers removed it for the boring minimalist RE7 inventory instead.

I am barely 19 and yet this video is making me miss the good old days. When did this childhood integral form of media slip so badly?

Dragon Age Inquisition had a remarkably smart main menu. The background features two lines of templars and mages marching towards a temple in the distance, they are fully animated and rendered and slowly march by but as soon as you hit "start new game" the temple detonates in a vibrant green explosion before a shield knocked from one of the soldier's hands hits the "camera" and transitions you to the character creator. The story begins the very moment you hit start new game on the menu!

I will never forget playin ME1 and opening the character creator. The blue background contrasting with the red error message that says "DATABASE FAILED" which gives an actual reason for you creating the character. Same with black ops. Waking up in a CIA interrogation chamber with all this war imagery in front of the player was sick as f***. I feel like that life is lost in newer games. Probably because devs think children can't see stuff like black ops and it's really gritty imagery. Either that or it's complete eye cancer like 2042s in game UI.

This video immedietly made me think of metroid prime 3's opening and menu screen. I used to sit at it for ages because i loved it so much.

I love this video so much. It’s like you put all my frustrations and distaste for modern UIs and menus and put it into an organized essay. Thank you, sir.

Hugely underrated part of a game; main menus are one of the biggest things I remember from early Halo, COD, etc. MASSIVE thumbs up on this video

The first 30 seconds brought me so much nostalgia😢

As I grew up with early 2000's internet, the modern game UI feels like I've stubled on a pop-up add and need to be very careful where to click or I'll infect my computer with malware by accident.

One of the recent games, that i think nailed a theming part of the ui, is GTFO. When you boot up the game, you hear muffled heartbeat monitor beeps, with lines of code running on the screen that show "the prisoner status" with omious lines like "mental eval: UNSTABLE; suggested action: RETIRE; OVERRIDE: REDEPLOY;" while you see flashes of you fighting in the compoud. When the loading ends, you are welcomed with minimalistic but stylish hud of the map of the compound where you do you missions and your loadout. That's all, apart of "settings" and "quit" buttons, the menu has. And when you chose your mission, you wake up in a some sort of a stasis capsule, and immideatly after that get forcefully put on a elevator that drops you into deep void, while you hear your character nerviously breething and sighing. I really think that opening sets the mood of the game perfectly, by showing you who you're playing as and how dire the situation is. Like you woudn't put a mentally unstable convict on a mission, if you had other more capable ones, something went really wrong. When you select a mission, its description contains short logs of a previous crew, and most of them are their last sentences. And talking about stasis capsule you wake up from. It is later revealed, through the audiologs, that it has an unintended side-effect of worsening your memory, to the point that you may forget who you are. The flashes of "gameplay" you see in the loading, are flashes of your previous deployments that you forgot, confirming that even, if it's your first time playing the game, cannonicaly, your character did it before, but doesn't remember it. UI represents an opressing and lonely atmosphere of the game, where you're rarely in control of what's going to happen. Also I really love its design with little attention to details and effects, like the menu and your hud looks like it's being projected on a glass visor of your helmet, lines of code that pop up from time to time, etc. I really love the game and its UI, so much, but it is sometimes too hardcore for me, and thinking about it, exploring the lore gives more enjoyment then not being able to comlete a level in weeks. So yeah, i'd recommend it, cool game.

Great video. I never really put much thought into game menu UI, but the opening for World at War to start this video really got me. The Halo 2 menu themes live rent free in my head.

That's why I mainly play old games these days. Most are freeware like some old Megaman games, and they exude passion in their gameplay, not to mention their first impressions in their menus. On another note, much more economical too for these days. I've only ever payed 60$ for a new game twice, and I haven't continued that trend in many years.

Detroid Become Human has also a very beutiful menu, a character from the game is there and talks to you, also mentions some things you did in the game when you return. That left an impression

I've found one place for interesting and artistic UI is VR games. I have found they're still themed heavily by their respective games. SuperHot VR has menus you are supposed to grab a gun to shoot to enter, and you start the game by inserting floppy disks into a machine and putting on a vr headset. The vanity plates for game studios are also interesting as hell (Warpfrog's intro in Blade And Sorcery is otherworldly).

One can only hope this video and others like it make their way into game Dev meetings. Because this shit has to change.

I haven't finished the video but one of my favorite menus is the Batman Arkham City menu. As you progress through or back in the menu, Batman jumps between multiple cinematic shots that when viewed one at a time show a small story and finishes with one of 4 villains at the end before looping. Gets me so amped to the idea of flying around the city as the Bat, while also fitting the aesthetic of the game perfectly.

Thank you for including World At War. I'd actually forgotten what the opening menu was like (unlike COD3, MW & MW2), but hearing it again was great.

I think I know the answer. It used to be the case that assets team would usually have a lot of downtime nearing the end of the development, while the programmers always had their hands full until day -1 of the release. So all those nice but unnecessary gimmicks were created because a team of visual artists had nothing else to do. With games-as-a-service it obvious what happened, that effort was funneled into creation of skins and other battle-pass items. For other games, I guess the work was outsourced and streamlined, since it makes more financial sense.

One of my favorite game menus is from Turok Evolution. Just seeing the Sleg’s and Dinosaurs actively moving around in a fully rendered environment was so cool to me as a kid. Another has to go to Peter Jackson's King Kong game, seeing the venture and skull island with that haunting music is so atmospheric even to this day

That Mass Effect OST though.

I definitely notice how so many UIs seem to draw from Assassin's Creed's "generic sci-fi that doesn't fit in with the setting at all" approach...and yet the point of Assassin's Creed is that the dissonance between the UI and the gameplay is meant to simulate that you're not actually playing as a historical character. Instead, you're reliving memories through a modern device that was designed by a soulless corporation that is trying to take advantage of history for its own personal gain. Still, it feels like other Ubisoft games co-opted it while ignoring that context, and then it spread like a virus everywhere else. Also, it’s really funny how Ubisoft is just straight-up the villain of their own franchise at this point. Like, it feels like most of AC's writers don’t even try to obscure it.

Jedi: Fallen Order is a modern menu I like. The music was captivating, and the visual of an Escape pod escaping a Venator provided a good mystery and once you start a new game it transitions to Cal Kestis meditating. Something remarked in the story is how his reconnection to the force makes him remember the trauma Order 66 caused him. My favorite menu has to be halo 3 because of the phenomenal music. Everything came full circle to finish the fight, and that’s what the menu felt like. A finale to a long journey.

Completely agree. WaW still sends a chill down my spine to this day. Haven't had a single modern game immediately bring me into the world of the game better than WaW.

Take me back to the Halo 2 and 3 main menus. I love them so much. Also the Xbox 360 UI and menus are phenomenal, still my favorite. 100% agreed.

I didn't even realise the "modern" Web page format has invaded video games... I hate the big fancy images with no relevant information that look nice (sort of) but don't deliver me efficient information. I guess I'll just keep playing indie games.

One of the things that allowed the nswitxh to come out swinging was the personality it exhudes from the moment it's on, it has the sanitized menu but everything from the on menu sounds changing depending on what area you are exploring, whether you confirm or exit and the sounds that happen every time you take out and especially insert a joy con into the side, that sound is been a part of the presentation from the first trailer. I have yet to see an ad on the "dash" since you have to enter "news" to see ads to the eshop, and even there they're still packaged in an article kind of way

I do really miss how thoughtful and reflective old UI's used to be in games like Halo or World at War. I'm sure being a teenager at the time plays a huge part in my memory and appreciation of them, but I think those games really did just have different priorities that were directly targeted at evoking the vibe or the tonal mission statement of the game rather than naked, cold utility (which barely even works most of the time.) It took me like 20 fucking minutes trying to figure out how to play local vs in Multiversus before we literally gave up and moved on. What the actual fuck has happened?

Great video Luc - I wrote a blog about this a while back, specifically about Halo 3's loading screens vs. Halo Infinite's. There's nothing specifically wrong with Infinite's, but Halo 3 was almost sad, like you were really witnessing Forerunner tech that was super futuristic, but lost to history. Appreciate this much broader look at the industry as a whole - as always, your videos always are super insightful!

Love these new branch out video’s. I’ve been a huge fan of your halo content for years, but it’s great to see your takes on different things. Saw you mention something a little while back, but any chance we get a Marathon series lore video in the nearish future..? 🤔

Very good video, man. But I have one question. I know it's not like the menus from any of the 3 games you've mentioned in the pinned comment but... What do you think of the MW2019 UI?