I'm a little worried about the Sanctuary. I wonder if it is accessible at any time or what? Because, if not, in some ways I think I preferred the old clothing system to the Sanctuary/GTA system. Sure it was a pain because the inventory lists were too long, and the 360 was pretty slow at displaying them, and about half of the dyes were the color of dried blood. But it was always accessible! If anything, I'd advise all console designers (Bioware I am also glaring AT YOU) to eliminate any fancy UI you have going on, and trade it in for FAST MENUS. Sure, you're worried that 50% of your game is staring at Inventory screens, so they'd better be gorgeous but... first of all, your Inventory screens are still far, far, far away from works of art. And second, once your client is more than an hour through the game, she's no longer interested in how your radial menu swirls into action, or how fricking gimongous your completely played out "MEDIEVALE FONTE" is. Arial and fast as shit would be a lot, lot better.I'm exaggerating, of course, and you should let your art team take a crack at something a little better than a monochrome and sans-serif menu, but not to the detriment of performance. Twelve pages of Inventory and stat sheets wouldn't be so bad if it only took a second to page through all of them and find the thing you need (although branching menus are better, hello, they are casual gamers but not completely braindead). This is actually my biggest gripe with all of these console RPGs, and I really wish that someone would take it seriously and stop pussyfooting around with it. Taking away aprt of the inventory and putting it in a graphical wardrobe may improve immersion slightly, but it may also bore the player to tears after the first two chapters.
This is why my #1 RPG interface of recent years is Resonance of Fate. It even has a clothing room a la GTA, but it's all so fast and elegant that it's not really a problem. Sure, gameplaywise, it's scarcely an RPG. But regardless of how you feel about that, after twelve hours, if you hate RoF, it's because you don't like the game, not because you're sick and tired of holding down the radial menu button, or of retracing your steps to the castle for the 400th time.
This is why my #1 RPG interface of recent years is Resonance of Fate. It even has a clothing room a la GTA, but it's all so fast and elegant that it's not really a problem. Sure, gameplaywise, it's scarcely an RPG. But regardless of how you feel about that, after twelve hours, if you hate RoF, it's because you don't like the game, not because you're sick and tired of holding down the radial menu button, or of retracing your steps to the castle for the 400th time.
I'm glad it sounds like they made Sanctuary fast and painless. I have no problem with a sort of a "visual menu" as long as it doesn't degrade performance. And I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about, a problem often amplified by console access speeds.