[Design Issue] Frustrating UX regarding conflicts between user settings and 'Hardcore Mode'

[CodeHatchling]

Problem: It is frustrating to resolve a conflict between the user settings and the restrictions imposed by Hardcore mode.

When the user starts a game in hardcore mode, if one or more user settings is incompatible, it notifies the user that Hardcore Mode has been disabled due to X setting.

• The setting in question that is conflicting is not specified clearly. The notification's description of the setting is vague in that multiple different settings can be the one it refers to.
• In the notification, there are no menu navigation steps that specify the location of the setting. Due to the high number of categories and settings, clarification becomes less of a convenience and more of a necessity.
• The 'Reset to defaults' hotkey option is misleadingly worded, suggesting that pressing it will reset everything listed to the default value. This is mainly due to the pluralization of 'defaults'. This can lead users to clicking the option once and assuming that the other settings were already on their defaults.

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Solution 1: When the user selects hardcore mode and there is a conflicting setting, the game notifies that the conflicting settings has been overidden for the play session. The game then runs in hardcore mode as expected.

• This is already the case with most features that conflict with hardcore mode, like save states.

Solution 2: When the user selects hardcore mode and there is a conflicting setting, the user may click a button on the notification window to 'fix' the conflicting setting(s), or to 'dismiss' the warning and proceed with hardcore mode disabled.

• The 'fix' option can potentially only apply to the current gameplay session.

Solution 3: When the user selects hardcore mode and there is a conflicting setting, it outlines an exact navigation path with the setting's name listed verbatim, and what value it needs to be changed to in order to resolve the conflict.

• This may become unworkable if multiple settings are conflicting.

Solution 4: When navigating the settings menu, options that conflict with hardcore mode are highlighted with an alert symbol. If a menu category contains a conflicting item, the menu category is similarly highlighted. The alert is removed if the setting is changed to a compatible value. This may be done with a button next to the item.

Solution 5: Change the hotkey hint's description from 'Reset to defaults' to 'Reset highlighted option to default' to reflect its actual functionality.

[Jamiras]

The setting in question that is conflicting is not specified clearly.

And you didn't specify either, which makes it hard to know what to do about it.

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There are only a couple of frontend settings that disable hardcore: having cheats enabled, and several things related to adjusting the framerate. In those cases, the disallowed values are not the default, so having a "Reset to Defaults" might be useful. But if you changed them from the default, you should know how to change them back to the default.

Most of the disallowed settings are core settings, and some of those are the defaults. The most egregious is the fbneo-allow-patched-romsets, which is enabled by default and affects all arcade games. As this is a core setting, there's nothing we can do in the front end to make it easier for the user to find and/or change, and since "enabled" is the default, resetting to defaults wouldn't help.