Randomly Mine: A Simple Standard

Thanks to Lunar New Year Sales, and a Tax Return, I purchased Division 2. Can't say I'm a fan of the franchise's debut, so whether Division 2 resolves my complaints, only time will tell. I figured $12 was cheap enough to give Ubisoft Massive's latest a test-run.

However, upon completing the introduction, I stumbled into something that should've been a standard eons ago. Something that I love as much as it's been ignored by the entirety of the gaming industry across all genres, platforms, and developers.

WASD keys are used to navigate the menus.

Look, I've spent thousands of hours in editing software. When you're using Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve, everything you do is a repeated task. You're constantly clipping footage, zooming in, zooming out, searching, adjusting, etc. As a result, actions that may only take a few seconds, can add up to minutes or even hours depending on the scale of the project. From that, I and many others optimize our layouts according.

We attach all the most important key functions within reach of our left hand. Ensuring that our left and right hands rarely leave their place.

And yet, for some baffling reason, most games to this day still insist on using arrow keys for navigating menus, leaving right click unbinded, and requiring you to press Esc to return.
Being able to customize and adjust my characters items without ever using my right hand, on the mouse or board was so refreshing that I wrote this post to meditate.

Now, I am saying this with a hint of sarcasm. My opinion on Division 2 won't be determined by this., though, it does tap into a larger aspect about UI design. Why can't players also customize it? Why can we bind virtually everything in regards to gameplay, but for menus, most games operate as a dictatorship? Games, especially ones that demand so much time today, are very personal experiences, and one of the best ways to take advantage of that is let players express it, even through means as simple as customizing controls.

I certainly wouldn't take nearly as much issue with Game UIs, were I able to navigate them as quickly and efficiently as I can in this game. And if they can't do that...

Use WASD.

Arrow Keys are so 1994.