I don’t know about you, but menus are never my favorite part of a video game. Sure, there’s fun to be had in finding the perfect combination of skills and equipment that suits your play style, but the real fun comes from actually using those skills and equipment in the game proper.

Almost every game will demand that you spend a fair amount of time fiddling with its menus. Even if you find a favorite loadout early in the game, there will almost always be some point in the game that requires a specific loadout – maybe it’s a boss that’s only weak to one type of damage, or an area filled with traps and enemies that poison you.

To be clear, I don’t mind when games do this. Just like finding your favorite loadout can be fun, finding the specific loadout that counters a particular obstacle can be just as fun. What’s not fun is the menu tax you have to pay to return to your favorite loadout after clearing that obstacle. It’s just busywork – unequipping all the highly situational skills and equipment you used, trying to remember the ones you like using normally, and then sifting through all the chaff in the menu to find them.

I recognize that many games, especially those with large libraries of equipment and skills, often have options to sort and filter these libraries based on various categories or stats, or even automatically equip the optimal set, but these feel like shoddy half-measures to me. Sorting and filtering may reduce the amount of chaff that you sift through, but you still have to sift. And personally, I’ve never trusted any game’s “Auto-Equip” option. What if I use the “optimize for attack” option, but it leaves me virtually defenseless?

In short, navigating menus is like eating your vegetables – necessary, but not exciting. Any tweak to a game that decreases the amount of time I need to spend fiddling around in menus is, in my opinion, an unequivocal improvement. Why, then, don’t more games cut down on the menu tax by allowing the player to save custom loadouts?

This small feature would be a great quality-of-life improvement for many different games. Obviously, huge party-based RPGs like Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and Trails in the Sky 1^st Chapter would benefit the most from this feature, but many action games also have some kind of weapons, tools, or skills to equip, so even games like Hollow Knight: Silksong or Devil May Cry 5 would benefit too.

I know that this may sound like your average Entitled Gamer Complaint – “why don’t the developers just overhaul their entire game to suit my own preferences?” I understand that game development is arduous and tricky, and that even a small change like this requires many considerations. How many save slots do you allow? Should each member of a party have their own bespoke save slots? If so, what happens if two members have the same item saved?

That being said, I genuinely think that the effort-to-benefit ratio for this feature would be quite small. It wouldn’t really require any changes in the game’s code; it would be closer to a simple input macro, automatically unequipping everything from your character and then re-equipping the saved items. In fact, any games with an “Auto-Equip” function essentially already have this feature – all you need to do is let the player, not the stats, dictate what to auto-equip.

As for the potential issue of overlapping equipment between characters, most games with multiple party members already warn the player when they try to equip the same item to multiple members. Loading a saved loadout would be no different – simply apply the same check and warning for all the items in the loadout.

So, if we’re to assume that saved loadouts could be implemented relatively easily, the question remains: why don’t we see this feature in more games? I can think of two explanations: either most developers are unaware that it is an option, or they are deliberately choosing not to include it. The first option is certainly possible, but given how much thought and effort goes into making any game, I think it’s unlikely. The second option, however, raises some interesting questions.

Why would a developer choose not to implement this relatively simple quality-of-life improvement in their game? I can see a plausible, if flimsy, argument from a design perspective. A developer might worry that it may discourage players from experimenting with new skills and equipment they get later. Personally, I think the opposite is true. Knowing that I could return to a loadout that I know works at the press of a button would embolden me to not only try new skills and equipment, but create entirely new builds that maximize their effectiveness.

Sadly, I think the most likely explanation is the most boring one – time and budget constraints. Games have to ship eventually, ideally before the studio runs out of money. If developers implemented every little quality-of-life improvement they thought of, the game would never come out. Saving custom loadouts would be nice, but it’s not as high of a priority as, say, making sure the equipment menu actually works to begin with.

I hope that one day this feature becomes as commonplace as auto-saves. But until it does, all I can do is keep fighting for it until a developer takes notice.

Can you think of any examples of games that let you save loadouts? Do you wish more games had this feature? Sound off in the comments below or head on over to our Discord and join the conversation!

Featured Image: Square Enix

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