It’s very common practice for non-Roblox games to use the Escape key as a “back” button when navigating UI; closing the current window, going back in a menu, cancelling your current action, etc. It’s an extremely convenient keybind to have, as it’s easily within reach while your hand is resting on the WASD keys, and it helps with accessibility when it’s difficult/slow to manually find and click a “close” button on the screen each time.
Unfortunately, since the Escape key is exclusively reserved for opening the Roblox menu, developers cannot utilize this extremely common and convenient keybind for their own games. Instead, developers need to use a key like Backspace for this purpose, which is very inconvenient to reach over and press when your left hand is on WASD.
Obviously, it’s understandable that Roblox has the restriction in place to stop developers from blocking access to the Roblox menu, but I feel like a fair compromise could be made:
If the developer currently has a CAS binding which sinks the Escape input, holding the Escape key for half a second will still forcibly open the Roblox menu, ignoring any developer overrides. While holding the Escape key in this case, the top-left Roblox menu button would show a “filling up” progress bar animation, to make it very clear to the player that they can still open the Roblox menu by holding Escape. This would let developers access the keybind while still preventing them from locking players out of the Roblox menu.
If the developer has nothing bound to Escape, or the associated CAS binding function does not sink the input, the Roblox menu would open instantly like normal.
Of course the main concern is that irresponsible/malicious developers would try to lock players out of accessing the Roblox menu, but I think this proposal is a fair compromise which gives legitimate developers the flexibility to add a very useful keybind to their games, without letting malicious developers ruin it for everyone. Even if players don’t immediately realize that holding Escape will still open the Roblox menu, most people trying to use the Escape hotkey would also know that Alt+F4 will also get them out of the game.
There are already a lot of other features which can be used irresponsibly (such as bringing up purchase prompts with no warning), but those developers will naturally receive player complaints and suffer reduced popularity if they’re trying to trick players/lock them into the game. (It’s also already possible where younger/less experienced players get stuck when they’re in a first-person game where they can’t move the mouse, and they don’t know the Escape key is even an option.) Legitimate developers will be naturally motivated to use the feature correctly to provide a better UX to players.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would make it easier for myself and other developers to provide a high quality, accessible UI navigation experience to players - while many players do exclusively use the mouse for this, it’s important to remember that some players prefer being able to navigate using the keyboard, whether for ease of use or for accessibility purposes, and we should be able to make this experience feel as natural as possible.
