I’ve been thinking about making this thread for a few days. Sometimes, I play a game and it has some very basic features that are just not in every other game and I think to myself: Why is this not standard?! and I wanted to know what were yours.
I’m talking purely about in-game features. I’m not talking about wanting games to have no microtransactions or to be launch in an actually playable state because, while I agree this problem is so large it’s basically a selling when it’s not here… I think it’s a different subject and it’s not what I want this to be about, even if we could talk about that for hours too.
Anyway. For me, it would simply be this. Options. Options. Options. Just… give me more of those. I love me some more settings and ways to tweak my experience.
Here are a few things that immediatly jump to my mind:
- Let me move the HUD however I want it.
- Take the Sony route and give me a ton of accessibility features, because not only is making sure everyone can enjoy your game cool, but hey, these are not just accessibility features, at the end of the day, they’re just more options and I often make use of them.
- This one was actually the thing that made me want to make this post: For the love of everything, let me choose my languages! Let me pick which language I want for the voices and which language I want for the interface seperatly, don’t make me change my whole Steam language or console language just to get those, please!
- For multiplayer games: Let people host their own servers. Just like it used to be. I’m so done with buying games that will inevitably die with no way of playing them ever again in five years because the company behind it shut down the servers. for it (Oh and on that note, bring back server browsers as an option too.)
What about you? What feature, setting, mode or whatever did you encounter in a game that instantly made you wish it would in every other games?
EDIT:
I had a feeling a post like this would interest you. :3
I am glad you liked this post. It’s gotten quite a lot of engagement, much more than I expected and I expected it to do well, as it’s an interesting topic. I want you to know that I appreciate all of you who took the time to interact with it You’ve all had great suggestion for the most part, and it’s been quite interesting to read what is important to you in video games.
I now have newly formed appreciation from some aspects of games that I completely ignored and there are now quite a lot of things that I want to see become standard to. Especially some of you have troubles with accessibility, like text being read aloud which is not common enough.
Something that keeps on popping up is indeed more accessibility features. It makes me think we really need a database online for games which would detail and allow filtering of games by the type of accessibility features they have. As some features are quite rare to see but also kind of vital for some people to enjoy their games. That way, people wouldn’t have to buy a game or do extensive research to see if a game covers their needs. I’m leaving this here, so hopefully someone smarter than me and with the knowledge on how to do this could work on it. Or maybe it already exists and in this case I invite you to post it. :)
While I did not answer most of you, I did try and read the vast majority of the things that landed in my notifications.
There you go. I’m just really happy that you liked this post. :)
I wish I could choose size of font, so many games have a font that only works on certain TVs or played in handheld mode.
Also I wish we could all align in settings menu at some point, so I’m not hunting down these weird unexpected settings.
Cut-scenes that can be paused, skipped and replayed later.
Unless it’s an online multiplayer game, let me pause whenever! Playing Starfield now and it’s so annoying that you can’t pause during dialogue or ship fight by hitting ESC.
default game master volume starting at 50%
It’s mental to me that most console games still don’t let you change the controller bindings like you can on PC.
A lot of PC games let you change mouse and keyboard bindings, but not controller bindings, because they have “keyboard and mouse mode” or “console mode” if the controller is used.
I’ve got no problem with having a sensible set of defaults, but if I get a controller with more buttons, unless this is a competitive multiplayer game that needs a level playing field, I’d like to be able to take advantage of them.
Steams controller rebinding tools are a real killer feature.
Final Fantasy XVI’s Active Time Lore. Being able to pause the game and have a list of relevant characters, places, and concepts for the scene you’re in is so helpful for my ADHD, for when I take a break from a game and come back not knowing what’s going on. I want to see this in every story heavy game.
Phobia-friendly settings/modes. There are so many games that I can’t play or have to find a mod for because the fantasy genre is obsessed with giant spiders. The only way I could ever play Skyrim was with the Arachnophobia mod that replaced all spiders with bears. I haven’t played Grounded, but I know it has an arachnophobia setting that can simplify/cartoonify the spiders or replaces them with floating orbs. I’d love to see these types of settings in more games, and ideally similar settings available for other common phobias/triggers besides spiders and blood.
Satisfactory swaps the giant spiders with cat heads and even with my slight arachnophobia, I still prefer the spiders. The cat head floating towards you are somehow even creepier.
Parent mode, haven’t played in a while? Here is a recap of the story so far and here is what you did last time you played.
Ohh, Pokémon games used to have this!
Story mode / Infinite lives / invincibility modes.
Difficulty should not be a barrier for entry. I like how Insomniac games like Ratchet and Clank, and to a lesser extent Spiderman, offer a really easy mode for those who just want to blast away or swing around New York.
One of the worst arguments I had online was me saying that’s great in single player but not unilaterally in multiplayer, and people got mad. I still think about it sometimes.
But generally yeah, agreed. Caves of Qud added a roleplay mode so dying sends you back to town instead of forcing a new game, and it’s real nice even if it’s not the traditional rogue like.
I think that part of the problem in the case of Caves of Qud is that traditionally, the roguelike genre was aimed at having relatively-quick runs. So losing a run isn’t such a big deal. Your current character is expendable. But many roguelike games – like Caves of Qud – have, as they’ve gotten ever-bigger and gotten ever-more-extensive late games, had much, much longer runs. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead can have a character easily last for weeks or even months of real time. If you sink that much time into a character, having them die becomes, I think, less-palatable to most players. So there’s an incentive to shift towards the RPG model of “death is not permanent; it just throws you back to the last save”.
Just as some roguelikes have had longer runs, some games in the genre have intentionally headed in the direction of shorter runs – the “coffee break roguelike”. The problem there is that roguelikes have also historically had a lot of interacting game mechanics in building out a character, and if you put a ten-minute cap or so on a run, that sharply limits the degree of complexity that can come up over any given run for a character.
No Denuvo
DRM-free versions (fuck every AAA client, give me the setup files and piss off)
Linux-friendly anti-cheat
If your game has an online component, release the server files so the community can self-host!Basically, anything that preserves a game well beyond its prime.
Linux-friendly anti-cheat
Anti-cheat systems in general tend to be fragile to changes in the game environment.
Honestly, I used to want that, and I’ll believe that game devs could do better than they do today, but honestly, I think that the problem is, end of the day, fundamentally not a technically-solvable one. The only way you’re going to reasonably-reliably do anti-cheat stuff is going to be to have a trusted system, where the player can’t do anything to their system.
I’d say that it’s one of the stronger arguments for consoles in general versus PC gaming. On a console, the playing field is pretty much level. Everyone has the same software running on their system, the same number of frames on their screen. Maybe there might be limited differences to the controller or better latency to a server, but that’s it. It’s hard to modify the system to get that edge. A console is pretty close to the ideal system for competitive multiplayer stuff. On a PC, in a (real-time) competitive multiplayer game, someone is always going to have some level of an edge. Like, the ability to get higher resolution or more frames per second, the ability of games to scale up to use better hardware, is fundamentally something of a pay-to-win baked into the system.
There will always be a place for competitive multiplayer games, but I honestly think that a better route forward for many games is to improve game AI from where it is today and then use computer opponents more heavily. While humans make for a very smart enemy “AI” in a lot of ways, and using them may be a technically-easier problem than doing comparable enemy AI, there are also all kinds of baggage that fundamentally come with competitive multiplayer play:
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Limited lifespan for the game. At some point, nobody (or not many) people will be playing the game any more, even if it doesn’t depend on the game publisher to operate online servers. At that point, the game will head into the dustbin of history – it’ll be hard to meet the threshold to get enough people together at any one time to play a game. Multiplayer games are mortal, and single-player games are immortal.
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You can’t pause. Or, well, you can, but then that doesn’t scale up to many players and can create its own set of problems. A lot of people need to change an infant’s diaper or get the door or take a call. They can play against computers, but they can’t (reasonably) play against other players.
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Cheating.
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Griefing.
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Sometimes optimal human strategy isn’t…all that much fun to actually play against. Like, I remember playing the original Team Fortress, and that a strategy was to have classes that could set up static defenses (pipe bombs, lasers, turrets, etc) set them up right atop spawn points. That may well be a good strategy in the game, but it’s also not a lot of fun for the other players.
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Immersion. Doesn’t matter for all games, but for some it does. I don’t expect humans to role-play, to stay in character, because I know that it’s work and i don’t want to hassle with it myself. But, end of the day, playing against xxPussySlayer69xx is kind of immersion-breaking.
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Latency is always going to be an issue. You can mitigate it a bit with prediction and engine improvements or more telecom infrastructure, but the laws of physics still place constraints on the speed of light. There are ways you can minimize it – LAN parties, if you can get enough people. Regional servers, though that guy who lives in Hawaii is always gonna just have a hard time of it. But it’s always going to be there; you’re never going to truly have a level playing field.
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The game is intrinsically mandatory-online. If you have a spotty or no connection, the game doesn’t work.
Another issue is the advance of technology. If it isn’t there now, I can imagine a generic AI engine, something like Havok is for physics, becoming widespread. And as that improves, one can get more-and-more compelling AI. Plus, hardware is getting better. But humans are, well, human. Humanity isn’t getting better at being a game opponent over the years. So my long-run bet is gonna be on game AI tending to edge in on humans as an opponent for human players.
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- Make the story automatically skippable. Every time. Many games explain the mission/objective in a short sentence or in the minimap anyway. Don’t make me watch a long cutscene or press/hold a button to skip the dialog. I’m never going to care.
- Always have a tutorial or practice area to remind me how to play the game after I put it down for a month or so. Bad enough that the controller map is hidden in the menus (if there even is one). It don’t help much to just say what all 16 +/- buttons do, depending on what mode I’m in. I have to actually use them to get back into the swing of things, and I’d rather not jump right into the action (and potentially lose progress) right away.
In the complete opposite direction, “I just want to enjoy the story” mode, which simplifies or removes more mechnically difficult sections of the game. A few games have this and it’s great. I appreciated it in Danganrompa.
Keep a rotating history of 20 or so autosaves/checkpoints, not 1, in case the last autosave was at a bad spot. Storage space is cheap. Yeah, I can do that myself with manual saves, but why make me do that? Maintaining that isn’t a fun part of the game for me, and it’s easy for the developer to do.
Baldur’s Gate 3 does this, and the number of saves is configurable. It’s nice.
