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. :)
Cut-scenes that can be paused, skipped and replayed later.
This so much. Hate it when the cat desides to destroy the whole flat for no actuall reason. You test the pause button just to see it is skipping and you did not safe before the cutscene. so no going back watching the scene.
I would be nice if the game detects that it’s been quite some time since I last played, and give a quick refresher of the keybinds as well as brief rundown of recent missions completed / story-so-far.
Parent mode lol
Or … adult mode 😜
500 games in backlog-mode
I loved how the Witcher 3 did a brief recap of the current story step in the loading screen, just enough to make you remember what was going on.
Dragon Quest XI also! I love this feature. Final Fantasy XII-2 also did it in a nice cinematic way, like you’re watching a show, with snippets of cutscenes after a voice says “Final Fantasy XIII-2, the story so far…”
Yes! I gave up playing Doom Eternal and then went back to it after a few months and I just kept getting killed instantly. I forgot how to play it!
Ghost of tsushima does that and won my heart for it. (well for that it won even more)
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!
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.
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.
I need this, ha ha!
That and a consistent single key pause button would be fantastic for a parental features
dragon quest 11 did this, it was so helpful
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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.
This saved my butt the other day! I got some message that my current save was corrupted or detected tampering? and to stop playing on it. I was able to go back a couple of auto saves, find a good one, and not have to do a bunch of content over again!
It’s not a technical limitation but a balance one usually
20 Auto save slots can mean going really far back on decisions the dev might want to be more permanent for you
Having at least an extra 1 for avoiding soft locks though is a really good idea, and it’s annoying when it happend
At the point the game allows multiple manual saves, rewinding decisions is trivial. There is not much of a point in restricting autosaves too.
The only way a game can enforce permanent decisions is if it only has auto-saves, in which case it could have a couple hidden backup saves just to prevent any issue from ruining people’s progress. Even then that’s not enough if players are willing to tinker, but at least it’s not trivial.
Online saves are an option too but I wouldn’t be too fond of a game that is needlessly restricted to online-only just to make decisions permanent.
Also, at least on the PC, it’s possible to just back up saves.
I mean, I feel like there’s legitimately value to having an “ironman mode”, but I’d really like to have the option not to use it, for a number of reasons.
One of which is that sometimes games have bugs – I just hit a bug in Starfield that was easily worked around by rolling back to an earlier save and taking a slightly different action. However, Starfield had autosaved between the action that triggered the bug and it becoming visible to the player, which would have been a problem if (a) I hadn’t manually saved prior to that and (b) Starfield didn’t do the multiple-autosave-slot thing.
The player can always impose not using saves on themselves, but they can’t debug games.
Definitely, technical problems are another reason not to be overly strict.
Ironman mode absolutely has value, but this gets into a greater discussion that I feel more gamers should keep in mind. The value of these restrictions and challenges are your entertainment as well as fairness towards the people you are actively playing with. Game rules are all arbitrary by definition. It doesn’t really matter if someone playing by themselves completes an Ironman mode fairly or cheats at it.
It’s because gamers were convinced to take game rules more seriously than they deserve that today some believe that fictional items in a remote server they don’t control can be worth hundreds of dollars. That hundreds of hours of RPG grind are somehow a necessary requirement to play a match of a game with someone else, and also that paying to rush this entirely artificial aspect of the game is worthwhile.
If the developers of a game prefer that it’s played in Ironman that’s fair, but there is no need to come up with exceedingly complex and restrictive solutions to police how people play. If they don’t want to play differently, that’s fine too.
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.
The only way I could ever play Skyrim was with the Arachnophobia mod that replaced all spiders with bears
I can only imagine this.
Villager: “Chosen One, you must slay the Queen…”
Poorly-recorded masculine voice cutting in: “Bear”
Villager: “…before her egg sacs hatch and all of her…”
Poorly-recorded masculine voice cutting in: “bear cubs”
Villager: “…start swarming over the area!”
One fun thing about the mod is that it doesn’t disable crawling on the walls/ceiling or descending from a web, so sometimes you’ll wander into a cave and a massive bear will just roar at you as it slowly floats down from the ceiling before it can charge at you properly. All the cobweb/spiders’ eggs items were replaced with “Cave Bear Honeycomb,” too.
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.
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.
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.
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Turn them all into bears! When you cut a bear it bleeds more bears.
Why does the developer hate arkoudaphobics?
Mine (thalasaphobia) would be tough to remove.
I’ve noticed that at some point since it came out, Horizon: Forbidden West actually added a thalassophobia relief option into the settings! It brightens everything underwater and allows for infinite breath underwater regardless of if you’ve unlocked it in the story or not
That’s really cool! I struggle with some games because of it. Subnautica is an absolute no for me, but even No Man’s Sky and Minecraft can trigger it.
It’s fish and children, isn’t it?
Just looking at the Man Attacked by Babies sculpture at the Vigeland Sculpture Park sends shivers up and down parent commenter’s spine.
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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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.
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.
Yeah, but if that’s the only way a game developer implements it, they’re tying themselves to Steam. I mean, if I were a game developer, I wouldn’t want to do that, as it’s a lot of lock-in.
I think that Valve’s service is a pretty good one, but they’re taking a 30% cut for doing a number of things for game developers. If they become the only game in town, it’s possible that they might start taking more than 30% and those developers are going to be kind of stuck with that.
It’s common across games, so it doesn’t make sense for game devs to reimplement the wheel, but I’d think that putting as much as possible in the game engine would be a reasonable place.
Not being able to bind the controller on PC is even more insane to me. Why can I change my entire keyboard layout but not change the controller AT ALL?
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.
I bought FFXVI on launch day and decided to go the story difficulty. Best decision ever, and such an interesting way to do it. You basically get these special rings that make aspects of the game easier, like dodging and attack timing. You can always unequip them if you want to try the game with harder mechanics. The rings also take accessory slots, which you only have 3 of, so you have have to consider things like “Do I want this agility boost? Or my time-stop dodges?” Interesting to trade out game nerfs for stats or other effects.
But yeah. Story modes are great. I played Horizon on easy. Had a blast and didn’t get frustrated.
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.
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.
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. :(
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.
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).
Here’s a really small and easy to fix pet peeve of mine: graphics options that cycle through the levels of fidelity with inconsistent scales. I like to set my graphics to max, try it out, and then adjust down where needed. It’s very annoying if a game doesn’t stop where the max option is, so if it’s currently at “High” I have no idea if the next option to the right is going to be “Very High” or “Low” again. So I often end up overshooting the highest setting and having to go back one, or purposefully going to the lowest setting and then one further.
Yup. Ideally there should always some kind of indicator, like a bar, that lets you easily see how many steps there are and which one is selected.
Also: If there are graphics presets available, if there’s one that’s called “highest” or “max” then that should actually crank everything to the highest possible setting.
that should actually crank everything to the highest possible setting.
While I can understand where you’re coming from, one thing I wonder about – I think that a lot of people want to use the max setting and expect it to work. It’s not unreasonable for a developer to choose ranges such that a max setting doesn’t run reasonably on any current hardware, as doing that may provide for scalability on future hardware. Like, it’s easy for me to make a game that can scale up to future hardware – e.g. try to keep more textures loaded in VRAM than exists on any hardware today, or have shadow resolutions that simply cannot be computed by existing hardware in a reasonable amount of time. But maybe in five years, the hardware can handle it.
If a game developer has the highest-quality across-the-board quality setting not work on any existing system, then I think that you’re going to wind up with people who buy a fancy PC, choose the “max” setting, and then complain “this game isn’t optimized, as I bought expensive hardware and it runs poorly on Ultra/Max/whatever mode”.
But if the game developer doesn’t let the settings go higher, then they’re hamstringing people who might be using the software five or ten years down the line.
I think that one might need a “maximum reasonable on existing hardware” setting or something like that.
I’ve occasionally seen “Insane” with a recommendation that effectively means something like that, “this doesn’t run on any existing hardware well, but down the line, it might”. But I suspect that there are people who are still going to choose that setting and be unhappy if it doesn’t perform well.
Maybe they should come up with better names because people aren’t going to get better about this. Instead of high graphics, call it “16vram mode” or something.
- 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.
As someone who is a little bit more interested in the story, I would love it if games had better story recaps for when you put the game down for extended periods of time too. If it’s a game with player choice track the major choices the player makes as well. I restart games so much because I like to jump around between games and then when I get back to some I can’t remember enough about what was happening to have any investment in the story anymore.
Witcher 3 was great with this
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.
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.
justpause mod in Satisfactory. Agree, should be standard.
For any RPG (especially one with multiple characters):
Highly flexible keyboard controls to manage inventory.
I want text-editor levels of search, move, drop, swap, open, and close. Give me regexes, custom filters, and macros. Give me unlimited tags for items, and simple interfaces to manage them (eg: sell all that have a tag, move all items tagged with a characters’s name to their equipment slots).
It doesn’t need emacs keybindings, but that would be a big plus.
