Is Age of Conan's horrible UI related to its console release?

If you've been playing Age of Conan then you know that despite some very kick ass combat mechanics it does have its flaws. It's nothing that prevents you from enjoying the game but it seems like it shipped with a couple of bad design choices which should have been obvious to the developers. The user interface it probably the first thing anyone notices when they start playing Age of Conan. It’s sparse on the surface so as not to distract you from the beautiful graphics and that’s a good decision. However, this hides the fact that underneath its minimalist front is a clunky and unintuitive monstrosity. It has some very weird slash commands and often doing anything not related to combat requires three or four steps.

It's like the game took everything that was boring about World of Warcraft combat and made it better but decided doing it for any other part of the game would be going too far. As a friend of mine remarked they couldn't have made a worse user interface if they had purposely designed it that way. This got me thinking. What if the user interface problems were really done on purpose? Not to frustrate the players, which would simply be a bad business decision, but to make it easier for its eventual port to the Xbox. A lot of tediousness that PC gamers are experiencing with the game seems to be caused by the user interface not being optimized for keyboard and mouse use.

If you look at the menu system for the game this becomes obvious. You can hold down "ctrl" or "alt" to display only the right or left side of any menu window but this only seems to work if you press the actual menu button at the top of the screen. It doesn't seem to work when you hit any of the shortcut keys on the keyboard. Holding "alt" and pressing "I" will still bring up both the inventory and equipment screen. Another good example are the merchants which require you to scroll through a list of all the items in your inventory to select one to sell. This seems like console rpg menu design compared to modern MMOs where you simply click on an item in your inventory to sell it.

I'm sure a lot of these little annoyances will be fixed very quickly in patches. The user interface isn't exactly hard to modify for most games especially if they use a formatting language like XML. I wonder if the initial design team thought they could make a user interface that would be acceptable to both console and PC gamers. There haven't exactly been a lot of MMOs that have worked on both platforms so Funcom was treading new-ish ground here. If I remember correctly FFXI released on the PC first then simplified its menu system for a console release. Funcom probably thought to avoid redesigning the UI by starting out with one that would work on both.

In the end I'll still play the game even if they don't change anything but I beg Funcom not to make me type "/cc addbuddy #name" to update my friends list anymore.