I tried playing the new God of War, and by that I mean the first one, back when it came out. I didn't think it was too bad, although I prefer the originals.

The second I got to that upgrade screen, though... I stopped playing. It was overwhelming. I think it's likely just the way it was presented. I don't remember it too much, but iirc it seemed really exhaustive and had too much detail crammed into it, as well as not having a lot of contrast between the UI elements. There were a bunch of tabs for all the different things you could upgrade, a bunch of different stuff they did, and even Atreyus had a whole upgrade tree.

If the upgrade stuff would have happened a bit more naturally throughout the gameplay, I think I would have kept playing. It was all dumped on me at once and it didn't feel like it was built up at all.

As stupid as it sounds, very often, less is more. Just today I ran into that at a food place, where I just got one of the menu items but my mom got a create-your-own and spent a long time trying to figure out exactly what ingredients she wanted. It's nice to have the freedom to choose anything you want from a huge list of stuff, but having a much more refined amount of options will usually end up being more satisfying. There have been studies done on this, too.

There's also the point that I'm just not as interested in God of War as I might be something else. If I'm getting a salad or sandwich I'll stick to something simple, but if I'm getting a pizza I'll custom order the shit out of it because I love pizza.

If I could change it, I'd probably scale back the amount of upgrades you can actually obtain. Make the upgrades take a little longer to get, but make them more impactful and things that will directly change the way you play the game instead of just specific stat increases. By the end of the game you'll have got pretty much all of them, and so you'll have a wide variety of things you can do that have built upon each other, and if you have a higher percentage unlocked it doesn't matter if you can actually do more or not, you'll feel more powerful.

A lot of this stuff is psychological, and certain people will have an easier time with these things or just not notice them at all, or they will notice the flaw but power through it because they enjoy the rest of the game. As someone who has well over 100 unplayed games on steam, though, there's always something else I can play if I'm not jiving with something. It's rare I'll continue playing a game I don't like unless I've already put a decent amount of hours into it and it seems like I'm close to the end anyway (howlongtobeat is my best friend).

I wonder how many other people felt that way about the upgrade system, whether they stopped playing because of it or not.