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. :)
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.
This is my #1 request. I only have time for 1 game, so if I return to something, I sometimes have to start over bc I’ve no clue where I left off.
oh man. It’s wild how prestige games are always trying so hard to be like prestige movies and TV, but somehow they have not yet adopted the practice of the recap.
Ohh, Pokémon games used to have this!
That and a consistent single key pause button would be fantastic for a parental features
dragon quest 11 did this, it was so helpful
I need this, ha ha!
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It’s mental to me that most console games still don’t let you change the controller bindings like you can on PC.
Yes! I almost always change a few of the buttons when I get the chance. Extra points if the game is nice enough to let you know when your changes conflict with other presets.
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.
oooooh i love that. Like Amazon Prime Video’s X-ray feature (which i really wish other streaming services would adopt).
Gyroscope controls. Especially for first-person shooters and other first-person games. I used to be a diehard mouse and keyboard player when it came to FPSes until I played Quake 1 on the Switch with gyro controls turned on. Now I’m trying to find ways to be able to play every FPS in my collection on a TV with gyro aim because it just feels so much better.
One of my favorite steam deck features is being able to use gyro controls for any game. It’s not always as smooth as the Switch, but it works pretty well to add a bit of additional fine-grained control to the course-grained control of the R-stick.
Hell yeah. I didn’t put this in my post because I didn’t want it to turn into a debate about the validity and viability of gyro controls (it is, if you don’t think so, you’re just wrong). So thanks for putting it.
Doom on the switch was amazing for this. I tried to play Doom eternal on the ps4, afterwards, and it was just such a disappointment because it didn’t have gyro.
Do you just eventually get used to gyro aim?
Everyone I know that’s gotten good with it swears up and down about it but 10 or so hours with Splatoon 2 and I felt like I didn’t get ANY better with it
This is from someone who’s pretty damn good at fps games, usually top 3 on the scoreboard no matter what game it is, so I’m not just bad at the games themselves
I’ve heard of people struggling with it, but personally I got used to it very quickly.
I haven’t played Splatoon but I’ve heard it doesn’t use standard shooter controls, so it may not be the best example of the gyro aim I’m taking about.
If you haven’t yet, you might try grabbing Quake 1 or 2 on the Switch (they’re on sale right now!) and give that a shot with gyro on.
Splatoon doesn’t give you as much control over it as a Steam controller does. It’s only the Y axis, and it’s always on. It’s much better when you can hold a grip button to toggle it. Then you can use the right track pad or analog stick for big movements and the gyro for fine tuned precision while holding a grip button.
That sounds like exactly what my issue was with learning: it always being on, any teeny hand movement ever would fuck with the camera, the steam controller sounds much closer to what my mind expected from gyro
With that in mind I just might have to try it out, though now I’m scared of getting good with it and needing to hack gyro into games to play, much like getting good with MKB killed me playing FPS on controller lol
I’ll tell you that my friend sat me in front of Returnal on PS5, and that game felt unplayable without either M+KB or gyro, even though plenty of people managed just fine. There’s even a gryo feature in the PS5 pad! They just didn’t enable it for the game. On PC, you can use it on Steam controller whether the dev enabled it or not.
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.
Search bars for settings are pretty great, especially when they match against alternate names for the same option.
Dear God, yes, font size options, PLEASE! I cannot express just how depressing it is to finally get a game I’ve been wanting to play so badly for years only to immediately realize I can’t play the damn thing because I can’t see the text to read it and figure out what the hell is going on or what I’m supposed to do. :(
With games taking more and more drive space i would like to be able to choose if i want to download those 4k textures or this new map that i don’t want to play
And also sound files for different languages. I’m only going to need one of them, there’s no point in having to download it for like 7 different languages.
Oh! Yes! That’s one thing that’s been driving me nuts too. Games are getting larger and larger but there’s no actual good reasons as to why. >.<
I think that’s mainly because of laziness and because they get away with it. Why spend valuable time cleaning out unused stuff and compressing files when people will buy it anyway?
Laughs in WarCraft III: Reforged
- 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.
System Shock had that. Enemies never attacked first and they all died in one hit.
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.
This starts to devolve as an idea kinda fast because someone out there has a phobia for every single thing. I do agree though on spiders specifically. I do not have arachnophobia but its so common and giant spiders are kinda overplayed in fantasy anyways, that I dont think theyd be missed.
Definitely it doesn’t need to exist for every phobia or in every game, but for phobias that really are only present audio-visually (blood splatters, certain noises, monster models, etc) and not narratively (quest-lines and dialogue), I think it is simple enough to have a model-swap setting or similar. I don’t mind the ludo-narrative dissonance of an NPC telling me to go fix their spider infestation in their cellar and then finding a den of cob-web surrounded werebadgers or whatever. Games like Don’t Starve already let the player fully customize the spawn rates of difference monsters, while other games let the player disable their character drowning or burning, for example.
When I first played house flipper my apartment was in the middle of a roach infestation. I was very happy to have the option to turn off roaches
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Turn them all into bears! When you cut a bear it bleeds more bears.
Mine (thalasaphobia) would be tough to remove.
It’s fish and children, isn’t it?
One of my all-time favorite games, Barony, just added an option that replaces spiders with isopods. I’m not an arachnophobe, but I thought it was funny and thoughtful that they did that.
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.
Make 4K textures a separate download, via a free DLC. That way if people only ever play in 1080p, they don’t need to waste disk space on files that will never get used.
Texture resolution isnt the same as screen space resolution, textures have to be wrapped around what might be complex, high surface area models. And dont forget how close you can get to things, where just a fraction of a whole model is filling your whole screen.
The option would still be nice but 4k textures do have an effect even on lower resolution screens.
You are totally correct, but I feel like pointing out that a surprising number of games use the 4k texture nomenclature in a totally illogical way; they label it 4k because it’s meant to look good on a 4k screen, not because the texture itself is at that resolution (or any loosely related resolution).
Which is itself really annoying. But I guess less savvy crowd might not actually understand what ‘real’ 4k textures even refer to?
I don’t think making it the default is realistic.
But steam offers games to offer custom branches for users to select. It would not be particularly difficult for publishers to provide one (or more) lower resolution asset branch for users to select. I really wish Steam had taken advantage of publishers wanting to support Steam deck to nudge them into doing this.
More split screen games, there are gamers that have a SO gamer you know? Or brothers, cousins, neighbors etc.
Only Nintendo keeps this thing alive in a wider scheme.
I’m so happy Baldur’s gate 3 does this. I have all the borderlands games and for some awful reason they don’t have local split screen. Just why?
Wait they don’t have it?
Borderlands is the only game I can play with my girlfriend, I have a PS4.
Oh I should have specified I meant on PC. It’s especially frustrating when the console version has split screen and the PC version does not.
That is one of the biggest disadvantages of the PC IMHO…
I remember what a pain in the ass is to achieve split screen in the Left 4 Dead game… Is that annoying that I actually got the Xbox 360 version to play with my gf lol.
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.
You can’t?! I thought this was already a standard thing
Some of the dialogue is sort of a cut scene. Pressing escape skips the current statement. This is good for when you’ve already heard it, but bad for pausing in the middle.
It seems really stupid that trying to pause will just skip the cutscene and there’s probably no way to watch it again, or is there? They could have just used a different button like the spacebar.
Conversation logs (for the games where they make sense). I loved having this available in Dragon Age: Origins and it helped me remember my rationale for doing specific things. Also was just fun to read back through.
default game master volume starting at 50%
Then people would report it as a bug that the game is too quiet
Pasting my comment from elsewhere in these comments here: The first time I run a game, before anything else, before a developer logo, a splash screen, ANYTHING: I want a screen with volume sliders. This setting needs to be saved upon completion and then ask if you want to see this screen on every launch, or just this one.
I know I am not alone. I am tired of having my eardrums blasted to hell every time I launch a newly installed game. Some games even go back to eardrum-destruction every launch until it loads the user settings.
This shit needs to be standardized. A lot of us wear headphones and are on voice chat or listening to music or whatever when we launch a game, and the deafening EA logo or whatever it may be is NOT welcome.
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Dual subtitles, aka polyglot mode. Doubt that it’d ever happen, probably I’m the only one who wants it. Sometimes I’d just merge 2 subtitles with python script and upload it to my Plex.
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Fast forward and save states especially for classic remaster. Some have this, some don’t
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Bigger subtitle fonts
I don’t think I count as a polyglot (Native English, Spanish proficient, learning Japanese and German) but what is that even useful for? I feel like it’d be really confusing to have two subtitles for the same dialogue.
I just watch, in whatever language I want to practice.
I think the term came from polyglot books, i.e. books that are written in 2 languages on each side.
Often times for me, the spoken foreign language can be quite fast or filled with colloquials, so I prefer to have subtitles in that language, and also English subtitles. Or in some cases, such as for Japanese voiced games, I’d prefer to have a Japanese subtitles to help me recognize the Kanjis, and additional English subs for translation.
I tried this method on Plex, uploaded dual subtitles for some movies, and it helped me a lot in acquiring new vocabularies. I think Netflix allows users to do the same thing too.
I could see it being a lot more useful for Japanese or other no Latin alphabet languages. Especially for the kanji. I’m too early in Japanese to watch content.
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