It feels like the game was made by two different teams. Out in the outer layers of the menu, you have the classic Halo style menu, which layers down into other options. Once you go into multiplayer, it suddenly switches to a awkwardly big tile based system. And the tiles don't make much sense. Player names are vertical but also on their side, so you have to tilt your head to read it. It feels like a decision made just so you could have spartan poses and have them visible. Then they went and layered them over each other in the lobby, so you STILL have to cycle through everyone to see their armor like Reach.
And the traffic flow (I don't know what other devs call it) is all wonky. When you press start and go down to the options, for some reason the least trafficed option (video settings) is the first one, and the File Browser is the last one, when I need to access my files much faster. In Reach, you were only two steps away from saving recent films. You have to go digging with a shovel to do this in Halo 4. Also, the file browser doesn't even work and you can't see recommendations if you have too many friends, so I can't remark on that because the feature is basically absent at the moment.
I'll look around later today and actually take notes, but the big word here is digging. It feels like you have to dig to get anything done in Halo 4's UI. Reach's UI was brutalist but it knew it had to give you access to your files in a straightforward manner. It feels like Halo 4 is trying to be pretty and not functional.
Good observations, in particular the bold.
Here's the experience of picking a Spartan Ops mission:
Select Infinity from main menu.
Selection Spartan Ops from sub menu.
Get taken to a totally different screen with three huge tiles that take up most of the screen - Play Chapters, Find Game, View Episodes. Select the first.
Now we're at a menu with a timeline across the top and large tiles on the bottom.
Pressing down dumps the timeline and Episode selection off the screen, replacing it with large tiles. We can only see 4.5 of the 5 large tiles. We can no longer tell what Episode we're looking at. Select an episode.
A large box now fills the screen, with the option to Play Chapter or set the difficulty, along with the title shot for the mission and a brief description. Meanwhile the next mission tile is scrunched up on the right of the screen.
So we have five entirely different layouts for each menu. And the final menu, while only containing two options (play, set difficulty) takes the the entire screen and is missing information (Episode name). To change episodes we need to back out, swing up to the timeline menu, swing over, then back down into the episode select, and drill into it for the play option.
For most of these menus, the players in the lobby are hidden from view.
With Bungie's UI all these options were housed in one static menu. You picked the mission, difficulty, drilled into the options and then began the mission from a short list of options on the left. Depending on what you picked, dedicated spaces populated with the relevant information. And lobby was static and visible the entire time.
Halo 4's UI is really inefficient, where every screen is huge yet contains little information and bears little resemblance to the layer you entered from or will be going to, and it add steps to the navigation process.
343 had a high bar to clear with the UI, as Bungie's work was world class (David Candland is brilliant). But this is the other end of the spectrum entirely.
