Hear me out. A few games have shader installations that will usually apply any new settings you put down AFTER you restart the game, and a lot of other games have graphics settings that will only apply after you’ve rebooted the game.
I don’t think it would cost developers ANY amount of money or any significant development time to add a “Reboot game” button (or toggle) every time the player presses the quit button, or give the player a prompt every time they change a setting that requires a game restart (like in both PC versions of GTA V).
I also think ANY game should have a “full potato” mode capable of running in older computers with NONE of the fancy graphics stuff that we have access to today, despite having a decent computer now.
Not quite a setting, but every game should be required to tell you how long ago the last save was when you quit the game. I absolutely don’t understand why it’s only a tiny minority of games that does this, it is such an obvious thing to do
pausing during cutscenes - it’s weird that this isn’t always an option even in AAA
Also skipping them, please.
When I want to quit your game, I mean it.
I do not want to be prompted several times as attempts to keep me in the game when I just want to leave.
I just mash mod key + backspace on hyprland to kill it haha. Bye mfer!
But also sometimes lately hyprland hasn’t been playing as nice with steam games and my mouse doesn’t interact with the game. The fix I found is to fling the steam client over to the other monitor. Works I guess. Linux problems lol.
separe audio settings for bgm, sound effects, etc
- Developers should spend effort vouching for a launch without startup logos. Even if supporting libraries/publishers are credited some other way, startup movies take up a lot of time when gamers launch the game many times.
- Trails in the Sky has a feature where you can choose to launch the game directly into your most recent save game rather than ending up at the menus. This would be a boon for many singleplayer games, especially those with densely animated menus.
If I’m going to put 100+ hours into a game, there better be a setting to mute BGM, because no matter how good the OST is I will eventually tire of it and want to listen to something else.
Here’s a simple one. On PC, a lot of games let you use the keyboard/mouse or a controller. On some games it’ll switch the prompts to the layout of the last type of input you used. However I tend to use a controller for everything, except I’ll use a mouse for more fine tuned control since I suck at aiming with a joystick. But then what happens is the input notifications switch to keyboard/mouse and sometimes don’t switch back.
I’d love to see an option to force which input style gets displayed on screen. Keyboard/Controller/Auto
Motion blur - OFF Screenshake - OFF
Hey now… Don’t forget camera bob, “lens dirt,” chromatic aberration, and vignette!
AKA - the video game graphics equivalent of “beer goggles.”
I’m okay with a little chromatic aberration and vignette. Camera bob can go straight to hell.
I’m okay with a little chromatic aberration and vignette.
Why? It’s literally something that pro camera tools have added in-software fixes for to remove them. Like - if you’re simulating an old JVC vidicon tube camera and wanting to make something specifically look like an image capture device from a specific time, I get it, but otherwise, it just seems like a way to hide the fact that your graphics aren’t quite hitting the realism mark and you think if you obscure it a bit, players will think it looks more “real.”
I’m very aware, I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the years removing them from photography projects.
For vignette, it accomplishes a lot of the same thing in games as it does in photography in general: it is a subtle focus shifter. For some games - like some photos - I enjoy that little bit of extra emphasis on the center of the screen.
For chromatic abberation, i generally avoid it in photography, but it can be used for effect. I feel like that’s also true to a point in games. Over the top CA feels like trying to watch something without 3d glasses. A little bit on the fringes can give a smidge of retro (and, oddly, futuristic) style for effectively no compute cost. It’s definitely overused though, and I tend to turn it off more often than not.
Agreed on the “shifting focus” part for vignetting specifically - but everything else… outside of specifically tailoring to fit a particular “aesthetic” I think are crutches that are generally used to obscure an overall graphical presentation in order to work in a similar way to how squinting your eyes works.
I agree that highly stylized games like “Bodycam…”
…use things like a specific kind of grain, noise, distortion, aberration, etc. to create a highly appealing visual aesthetic designed to match an actual low-fidelity police body camera, but Battlefield and CoD have much less excuse in my book.
The camera aesthetic stuff only makes sense on things like the AC-130 killstreak in CoD where you’re emulating the on-aircraft cameras actually used in the real deal.
I’m glowering hard at No Man’s Sky’s permanent chromatic aberration effect applied to the top 20% of your viewport at all times, here.
A way to start a fresh save. Or better yet, allow multiple saves/profiles. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to search online for where save files are located and delete them myself.
And if it’s a Steam game, you also have to worry about cloud saves undoing whatever you did. Please, just make it simple for players to do this.
Internet Connection - On/Off
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Silly Mode, ofc
I can’t think of a setting that would universally apply to all games, like I’d be hard pressed to say a setting in Tetris that would apply to Minecraft. Vision and auditory accessibility is probably about it, but those settings would look pretty different I think depending on the game or genre of game.
All controls should be remappable. All means all. Not most, not some, and certainly none of this bullshit where all you can do is toggle between “XBox 360 controller layout A/XBox 360 controller layout B.” This is especially true for titles on consoles, many of which still to this very day don’t allow you to remap their controls at all.
For 3D games, field of view. Far too many developers of FPS titles in particular have Console Disease, and feel it’s somehow acceptable to lock the FOV to 70° or some absurd number. If they allow you to adjust it at all they may be feeling “generous” enough to let you go as high as 90°. That’s completely unacceptable. On my 4K monitor that’s 25" from my face, I need at least 120°. Honestly, I want to see that slider go up to 180°. That’s right, I want to be able to look at your game world like a goddamned pigeon. On that note I really have to wonder what those people with those 3840x1080 überwide monitors do most of the time, other than spending their days in never ending torment.
Allow me to turn off the stupid pre-launch splash titles. Certainly at least after the first startup. I certainly don’t need to be told that nVidia is the way it’s meant to be played, or that your company licensed Havok, or who your publisher is, or who your publisher’s owner is, or who your publisher’s owner’s owner is, etc. Nobody cares. Usually instead you have to resort to replacing the .mkv or .bik files in the game folder with zero-byte text files or something. It’s dumb.
While we’re griping, and speaking of Console-Itis, does every PC game now need to have an unskippable message telling me that this game has auto save and urging me not to turn off my PC when the icon is being displayed? Really? Nobody’s going to do that. Tell me your game is a shitty console port without telling me your game is a shitty console port. To keep this on topic, let’s have a setting to turn that off, too, because it’s stupid. Off by default would be nice. Should there be an Idiot Mode toggle?
Granularity in subtitles. It seems too many games only have two settings: All subtitles off, or they assume you’re completely deaf. Typically I want to be able to read what characters are saying in their voice lines, but instead the developers also think I need to see the bottom third of my screen filled with [BOOM] [GUNFIRE] [JUKEBOX MUSIC] [FOOTSTEPS] [BOOM] [GUNFIRE] [BOOM] [BOOM] and so on and so forth, all the time. They should either categorize sounds and make their subtitling things individually selectable, or at least if they insist on making it a slider give it three or four levels: Off, cutscene/conversation dialog only, all spoken lines (“Cover me!” “Reloading!” “Never should have come here!” etc.), and then only the top level resulting in every single cricket and rustle of grass being captioned. Some games do manage to accomplish this. Many do not.
Oh, I thought of a good one to add to my wish list. I want every game to bring back the sound test menu. But they won’t, because every studio on Earth now wants you to spend an extra $15 for their game’s soundtrack. (As if it’s not all going to be on Youtube about twelve seconds after release anyway…)
Allow me to turn off the stupid pre-launch splash titles.
I can guarantee that those splash titles are included because of contractual obligations. The same way a movie lists the publishing companies in the intro. Including a “skip after first launch” option would violate their contract. If it were up to a game’s director, they would almost universally prefer to drop you straight at the title screen. But they legally aren’t allowed to do so.
Oh, you want us to publish your game? We can require the game designer to show our logo for {x} seconds when the game launches. Oh, you want your game to be G-Sync compatible? Nvidia can require that you show their logo for at least {x} seconds when the game launches. Oh, you want to use our game engine to build your game? Unreal can require that you show their logo for {x} seconds when the game launches. Et cetera…
Quite famously, Unity had a reputational problem because of this. Free users were required to show the splash screen, but companies with larger war chests could pay the higher rate to skip it. It led to Unity being associated with low-budget and amateurish games, while higher quality games running on the same engine, which would be better advertising for Unity, tended to not show the logo.
Fully remappable controls is my biggest wish. I hate WASD and swear by EDSF, but some games like Fallout 4 hardcode some controls. E is hardcoded to “interact” or “open door” or something, but the game DOES let you map “move forward” to E. So I can run around like normal, but every time I run past a door it auto opens to a zombie hiding behind it.
To be fair to devs, increasing the FOV has a lot of performance implications on how much less they’re culling from the scene as you rotate the camera. In this era of open world games, I suspect it scales very poorly as that FOV increases. Temporarily increasing the FOV is also one of their handy tricks for giving you a sense of speed when you hit a boost button and whatnot, so whatever your FOV is, they need to make it more than that.
Sound test menus are a remnant of arcade design, and when arcades starting dying, this feature made less sense. The OST sale is usually more of a revenue stream for the game’s composer, as I understand it.
performance implications
That might be fine for consoles which have known performance limitations built in. But if I’m on my PC, let me make that decision. Don’t try to make it for me.
I understand the desire, but then that might have implications on support tickets, advertised system requirements, separate maintenance and optimizations for only one platform, etc. It might be that turning up the FOV even a smidge over their maximum requires a super computer that doesn’t even exist yet, depending on what it has to render and how it works under the hood.
Given I’ve never seen that actually become the case even in games with engines I had to apply configuration hacks to increase the FOV, I find all of that highly unlikely.
- Description of the effects and hardware demands of graphics options.
- An actual benchmark for ‘optimized settings’ (even if it’s just crunching numbers) instead of hardcoded GPU names.
- Clear indication of which difficulty the game was balanced for.
- Msaa. Hate running old games at 200 fps with jagged edges and blur thanks to fxaa.
- Instant controls switching between controller and keyboard. Tired of games that pick input type at startup, pick input glyphs at startup, ignore first button press from a different input before switching, disable controller if keyboard input is detected etc etc.
- Not games but steam: just let me force steam input on all games like Proton.
Also how ‘full potato’ do you want it to be? I assume the settings don’t scale below low, so it’d be just turning off shadows, reflections etc. Would even the lowest resolution textures fit in the vram of an older card? And besides, the engine is probably designed for modern multi core cpus so even if the graphics could be scaled down it might not run well
This is totally unrealistic but it would be sweet if there was a button for showing you a compilation of recent cutscenes or something for when you havnt played a story heavy game in a while and forgot what’s going on.
Like in the main menu give me a memory button or whatever that basically brings me up to speed to where I left off. Could be replaying cutscenes or showing me text of recent events, who knows 🤷♀️
But there are too many times i have to put a deep rpg down and then life gets in the way and picking it up again becomes impossible when it doesn’t feel like I’m there anymore
One of the latter Final Fantasies did this. I think it was 13? Despite that game’s many other rather glaring shortcomings, that part was pretty neat. I agree it should definitely be standard for most RPG and heavily story driven games.
I’ve seen a variety of half baked implementations. Sometimes you have a decent in game log but sometimes it’s also just the dialogue of your last conversation and nothing more 🥲
