Radial Menus in Video Games (2022)
champicky.com
champicky.com
They do not exist to benefit mouse+kb users. Mouse+kb users are absolutely better off imho with an always on and hotkeyed action bar down the bottom/side. If you don't know the hotkey you can still flick the mouse over and back faster than activating a radial menu.
When you see a radial menu in a PC game you can bet it's because the game had consoles in mind first and foremost.
It was actually a very good solution for minimizing binds. Yes, using direct hotkeys is better, but most players in a playerbase are pretty casual and usability is more important.
Wacom's tablet drivers let you build radial menus for your programs. I've never bothered as I'm a "five thousand keyboard shortcuts" kind of artist but there are artists who love 'em.
Sure, you can map extra keybinds, but convenient keybinds are actually a scarce resource if you're essentially the "full stack" of the art pipeline (from sculpting, modeling, retopology, texture painting, to animating). This isn't even including keybinds for any custom tooling.
One thing I really appreciate about Blender specifically is that you can search through all the available operations with F3. This offers a nice trade-off between muscle memory, keybind consumption, and not needing to use the mouse.
Fortnite's emote wheel is a good counter-example - it wouldn't be easy to implement in any other way. You don't want to dedicate 8 separate buttons just for emotes, and any form of a linear list of options would be hard for players to learn via muscle memory.
An emote wheel with 8 options makes it easy to remember - press some key to emote, then drag down to play emote X, or up for emote Y. As an added bonus, it works well with directional control pads, but that's not the primary benefit.
Here's "Nothing Else Matters".
They are extremely common these days and I think for good reason, if you utilize multiple modifier keys for different wheels then you can provide a ton of options with two key combos (modifier + action) or one key + directional and they are removed from the UI when you don't need them.
I vastly prefer them over icons with hotkeys or other solutions.
Which game first used radial menus that mapped directly onto the analog stick / joycon? That is, the angle of the stick maps directly to the angle of the selected item on the radial menu? This way you can immediately select any item, as well as switch from any current selection to any arbitrary new selection.
I first saw this in Horizon: Zero Dawn, but I haven't played many console games.
Contrast this with the Secret of Mana games where you have to repeatedly press the D-pad arrows to cycle to the desired menu item — in that style, the radial nature of the menu is entirely cosmetic.
He told me there was once an experimental keyboard that used the two thumbsticks on an Xbox controller like a dual radial menu to input text - the left thumbstick would select a character group, and the right thumbstick would input a character from that group.
The learning curve was deemed too steep for the average customer, but apparently those who spent enough time using the prototype were able to type an order of magnitude faster than with traditional on-screen keyboards.
The memory sticks out as an amusing idea, and potentially a really cool "power-user" input modality for game controllers.
As a result, actions can gain keybindings like 1379, while remaining fully discoverable.
Radial menus can be such a cool UX optimization. Once muscle memory kicks in you don't waste a second.