I remember when they became standard way to select weapons, abilities and so on in the Xbox 360/PS3 generation and how modern and next-gen they felt. When you wanted to change equipment in older PS1 or PS2 games, typically you had to pause the game to dig around in an inventory to pick a new weapon, then exit back to the game and oh boy does it feel clunky when returning to those older games.
I assume the change was motivated partly by the dpad finally being completely supplanted by the left analog stick for movement so designers could come up with new uses for it
PC games had of course used the number keys as hotkeys since day 1 so the change was mostly a console thing
Turok was ahead of its time in so many ways, it did (effectively) dual analog controls for an fps and a radial menu for selecting weapons, all the way back in 1997 on the n64
Metal Gear Solid 1-3 also kinda did radial menus with its L2/R2 menus for weapons and equipment in the PS1/PS2 era
Vagrant Story comes to mind for this. You run into enemies you have to swap out your weapon for and it takes pausing the game and going into the inventory to do so.
Playing something like Doom Classic Complete or Half Life 2 Xbox and having to cycle through every weapon in inventory before getting to what you want.
That's why Bungie went for the 2 weapon limit in Halo. Just need one face button to swap between your two guns. Then consoles became the lead platform for most FPS games and PC gamers got big mad for a while when every game aped Halo
Radial menus that slow time are the objectively superior pad method. Playing Doom 2016 on Nightmare with a 360 controller.
Doesn't really work for games with a heavy focus on multiplayer though
Secret of Mana/Seiken Densetsu 2 had radial menus on the SNES. That's the earliest I can remember.
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The arkham games did a great job of this. All your gadgets are on the D pad, combat gadgets 1 press away, puzzle gadgets 2 presses. So you can switch between them on the fly.
You can also just hold aim and press one of the face buttons to quickly use the main combat gadgets quickly without selecting them
We did lose one important thing in the transition: pause menus with absolutely baller music, like Goldeneye.
Btow and totk have peak weapon selection. I haven't played either game in over a year can't couldn't tell you how to switch weapons, but if your put a controller in front of me, I could do that immediately. Let's ignore all the time I spent learning how to wind bomb.
Pretty sure radial menus have been a thing since at least ratchet and clank 1
I'm more forgiving towards the hard pause to enter the inventory than I am the scrolling menu where you can't skip options. Pausing and selecting is my breather moment, time to look over my options and decide how to handle this. Unless it's a constant because you need X type for Y enemy, then it becomes annoying.
Actually, out of all the systems, I like how .hack//G.U handled weapon swaps in the second and third volumes. Equip up to 3 weapons, use a skill assigned to a weapon to hot-swap mid-battle. Made it feel really slick to chip an enemy into Break range, Rengeki to a clean kill and better weapon for the other 2 you're facing.
A lot of single player games pause the game anyway when open one but radial menus or other sorts of quick select screens are just overlays and don't take you out of the game. You typically just hold a button to open them and close them by letting go of said button
There's just much less friction and it doesn't feel like it interrupts the flow of the game
I remember when d-pad had become a thing, do that count?
