7. Make The Menus Simple And Navigable
If you ever find yourself sitting down for some gaming after a long day at work, and want clear your room of unwanted guests, fire up an RPG. The amount of time we RPG gamers spend in menus seems almost unnatural for a "game", and while it will certainly bore anyone else to tears, it is in the menus where some of the most important time we spend playing these games takes place. The best menu systems in RPG's strike a perfect balance between intuitiveness and depth, and navigating menus should never feel grueling. I recently revisited one of my favorite RPG's from my younger days, Dynamix's excellent Betrayal At Krondor, which was released back in 1993 on PC. The first thing I noticed while replaying the game was what a breeze it was to navigate through the menus. Everything, from character skill upgrades, looting fallen enemies, and buying/selling at shops was as clear and concise as can be. The design of the menu system was such that you were able to work through the various screens in an a way that was intuitive yet still gave you the sense of having complete control over your characters and inventory (the gameplay video above has some menu footage as well). The fact that Betrayal at Krondor was a party-based game as opposed to being single-character makes this even more impressive. A counter-example to this would be the console version of Dragon Age: Origins (Bioware, 2009), which made navigating through your party's screens and trying to get them all equipped with the best weapons and armor a time-consuming and tedious task. Something as simple only showing equip-able armor for your selected character, as opposed to always showing your entire inventory of loot on each character screen, would have been a simple and extremely effective way to streamline the process without sacrificing any depth. Skill trees deserve a special mention here, as well. If skill trees are going to be a part of the game's equation, the upgrade paths should be clear and and easy to understand. They should never look like this: (courtesy of Final Fantasy X)
