DraQ
Arcane
Quake's interface was pared down as much as possible. It was conscious decision - Q1 was designed as pure action game. They even threw away use key and didn't incorporate crouching/crawling mechanics. They wanted nothing whatsoever in their game that could possibly slow player down.Leaning, crouching and looking up and down were functions accessible by the UI, but that doesn't reflect on the usefulness of the UI hud itself, which was well organized and flexible. It puts a lot of modern games to shame, imo. SS1 was released in 1994 when those actions weren't even a part of core gameplay mechanics in first person games on the market. Quake launched two years later in 1996 without leaning, crouching, crawling, mouselook, or a snazzy interface hud you could interact with using a mouse, presumably because Id software thought it'd be too advanced for gamers to understand (this was the definitive reason given for the adsence of mouselook by Romero, btw).
The only truly retarded part there was making +mlook only accessible via console.
That's still rather crap.I agree with this. The fact that the UI is clunky and intrusive and more reminiscent of a flight simulator than a first person shooter is not just an intrinsic part of not just the claustrophobic, vulnerable horror aspect of the Shock series, but also plays into the themes of being an 80s Cyberpunk hacker. It's not a UI built for gameplay or convenience, it's an alienating, awkward over-designed OS UI that tells its own story about Tri-Op.
UI should never make it tricky or obtuse to perform actions that wouldn't be tricky and obtuse IRL (unless you're making QWOP or something and this is the whole point).
Sure, keep the inventory system and hardware buttons (both were quite decent actually), even force player to activate and use mouse pointer to change weapon settings and reload it (it even makes sense when you are a hacker rather than trained combatant to fumble around while trying to reload your gun while being shot at), but controls for running, jumping, turning around, crawling, crouching and leaning should be as unobtrusive as possible. This includes fully rebindable keys. Any other option is shit.