Not to brag or anything, but I've played a lot of video games this year. Yessir, I've explored new worlds, conquered enemies, and navigated more than my fair share of menus and skill trees. And do you know what I've really started to notice? Far too many console games have started to adopt a free-floating mouse-style cursor for menu navigation, as if that's a thing any of us wanted.
While there are plenty of games that are guilty of this, I really started to notice it as a I played back through Assassin's Creed Origins and Odyssey, but I really got under my skin when I booted up the otherwise-excellent Valhalla for the first time. I genuinely sat at the start screen tapping the DualSense left stick up and down for a good few seconds before I realised that once again, Ubisoft had decided it would be better for console users to drag around a cursor to the select the things they need.
Why are you making me drag a cursor and then hold down a button to confirm my selection? What's wrong with a tap and a press? Do you hate me, Ubisoft? I don't know who needs to hear this, but a controller is not the same as a mouse and keyboard. Navigating a menu in this way with a mouse = good. The exact same thing bolted onto a console = bad. Very bad.
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It's not just Ubisoft that does this, to be clear. I was horrified to find that Spider-Man: Miles Morales insists on pulling the exact same shit. How is that Sony knows the best way to navigate its shiny new UI is the way a controller should work with a menu, and yet one of its prominent launch titles insists on making you pretend you're playing on PC? It's worth noting that Miles Morales also gives you the option to navigate the menu using the D-Pad, but why have the cursor-style navigation at all? You're just encouraging nonsense, frankly.
It's a minor inconvenience, but one that really starts to rankle after a while - especially when you remember that so much of the PS5 (and Xbox Series X) was built to be faster, sleeker, and more efficient. What a shame I'm spending more time than I should be in menus, then. It would be fine if you could at least make use of the DualSense touchpad to skirt around the screen, but clearly that's too much to ask.
Drag and hold. Drag and hold. Drag. Wait a second. Hold. We're starting a new generation of powerful consoles with an emphasis on speed and snappiness, so if somebody could pass that on to whoever keeps designing these menus and decided navigating them as if you're using a mouse is a really crap idea, that would be fantastic. Together we can put a stop to this before it goes any further. Are you in? Of course you are. Just hold the button for a few seconds to confirm your choice, yeah?
Featured Image Credit: UbisoftTopics: PlayStation 5, News, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Assassin's Creed Valhalla