What is something (feature, modes, settings...) you would like to see become a standard in video games?

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. :)

Flickerby,

Fully (or at least more) customisable controller settings. It’s not difficult. Let me bind what controls I want to what button I want. And adjust the stick dead zone, god damn. Why are you giving me pre set control schemes when we’ve had fully customizable controls figured out for decades? Fuck you game

Suppoze,
@Suppoze@beehaw.org avatar

Yes! To add to this, please let me invert the analog stick camera controls. Both axis! My biggest pet peeve is when a game let’s you invert the Y axis, but not the X… Why? You were so close dammit how much effort is adding the other really?

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I can understand inverting the Y axis, because aircraft use the opposite of what FPSes typically do – push forward to pitch the plane’s nose down.

But why do you want the X axis to be reversed? I can’t think of any system out there that operates with an inverted X axis.

thinks for a while

I guess maybe the tiller on a boat.

smeg,

It’s more for the camera control rather than the character control

Suppoze,
@Suppoze@beehaw.org avatar

It makes sense for me in third person games. Imagine a stick stuck in the protagonist head from behind. You are the camera behind the character, imagine you grabbing the stick and rotating the head with that. You have to pull the stick down for the character to look up, and push it upwards to look down. By the same logic, you have to move it left for the character to look right, and vice versa. The stick is the analog stick on the gamepad.

Once you get used to this control scheme, it’s quite hard to re-learn non-inverted controls.

Explanation image I found: content.spiceworksstatic.com/…/yvgNiFE.jpg

prole,

You should look into Steam Input (if you have a Steam Deck, you may have already messed with it), but it allows a mind-blowing amount of control customization for any game you’re launching through Steam. Most games will also have community presets you can easily use.

Inverting view or turning on gyro controls is trivial. It goes shockingly deep. You can create radial menus if you want, it’s wild.

callouscomic,

Games that don’t need patches.

arquebus_x,

Welcome back to the 1980s!

GrindingGears,

For real, or at least without forced updates.

My biggest, biggest pet peeve of the PS4/PS5 era, is this. I’m in my 40s, I’m a senior management level professional, I’m on some boards, I’ve got very young kids. The amount of times I get to sit down and just go ahhhhh and fire up the PlayStation, number in the very low single digits each quarter. This means my PlayStation has to update what feels like two hundred thousand things, and I just want to play a god damn game. Nope, I have to update the new system software, have to update the games update, something for the sound, it literally feels like it never ends. So my three free hours turns into me throwing the controller and just moving on to something else more often than not, only for the cycle to repeat. It’s infuriating.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I think that one issue is that – at least with Steam, and I think on consoles, though I haven’t checked the current gen – if there’s an outstanding update for a game, one is required to wait until an update is applied before playing the game.

That often really doesn’t need to happen. One could have a console just let one play what’s already download, and when an update can be done, do it.

This doesn’t solve things for multiplayer games – or, more-generally, games with some level of online functionality. There, updates may require everyone to be running the latest version, or Twitter support may be broken on an older version (come to think of it, I bet that all that Twitter removal of third-party API access probably broke a bunch of games with social media integration).

And sometimes, like with actively-exploited security holes, a developer may really, really not want people to use existing versions.

Maybe let the developer flag an update as “mandatory” and only force updates if the “mandatory” flag is set.

One other thing that might solve your problem – I haven’t looked at current-gen consoles, but at least the last time I looked at an XBox, I believe that there was an option for it to turn itself on nightly, check for updates, and for installed games, download and install any updates. That might address your “I turn on my console about once a year and then it has a huge backlog” issue, if your console has that and you toggle on that nightly update setting.

GrindingGears,

They’ve had that standby mode for a few years for sure (I mostly use PS, but Xbox will have the same). I don’t know why though, for whatever reason after a while it just stops working. Might be the routers cycling or whatever, but it’ll stay on standby forever, but when you login there’s still a sea of updates and most stuff is unable to be played. I hear you on the multiplayer requirements and whatever too, personally I’m never a multiplayer. I’d accept the risks of a game being out of date if it just allowed me to skip updating.

Clav64,

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.

jjjalljs,

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.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

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.

littlecolt,

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.

masquenox,

A way to rapidly exit a game a la The Binding Of Isaac: Afterbirth. It has saved that game from being rage-deleted off my machine plenty of times.

littlecolt,

Does Alt+F4 not work well enough?

root,

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.

whoisearth,
@whoisearth@lemmy.ca avatar

Parent mode lol

feebl,

500 games in backlog-mode

root,

Or … adult mode 😜

Brasidas,

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!

Taringano,

Ghost of tsushima does that and won my heart for it. (well for that it won even more)

shrugal,

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.

littlecolt,

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…”

TheCrimsonSpark,

default game master volume starting at 50%

mojo,

Then people would report it as a bug that the game is too quiet

littlecolt,

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.

littlecolt,

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.

JakenVeina,

Borderless Windowed mode. Seriously, there is 0 excuse for PC games to not support it, it’s 2023.

Plume,

I’m gonna be honest, I never really understood what it did. The difference between fullscreen and windowed mode is kind of obvious, but borderless? I get what it does, it’s like windowed mode but borderless and it can take the whole screen. But then why not just make it fullscreen? I don’t understand it.

And especially when apparently some games run better with it? Which… I don’t know, I just don’t understand it.

JakenVeina,

It means you can take focus away from the game without it throwing a hissy fit. I.E. you can click out of it.

Omega_Haxors, (edited )

I want there to be systems that have absolutely no game design in them. Stuff that literally is just there to add random possibilities to the experience. Extremely basic and consistent rules which are extremely easy to grasp but result in all sorts of crazy shit. Stuff like redstone from minecraft or fairy dust in Stardew Valley. I want to completely forget about the game for a bit and just get completely lost in the intricacies.

A perfect example of this: Adding a joker (wildcard) to poker. It’s just one basic card, you know what it does, but the amount that one card can completely break the game leads to far more interest than the base game could ever provide.

liminalDeluge,

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.

nekohime, (edited )

deleted_by_author

    •
    PelicanPersuader,
    @PelicanPersuader@beehaw.org avatar

    Mine (thalasaphobia) would be tough to remove.

    whatwhatwutyut,

    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

    PelicanPersuader,
    @PelicanPersuader@beehaw.org avatar

    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.

    jaywalker,

    Turn them all into bears! When you cut a bear it bleeds more bears.

    tal,
    @tal@lemmy.today avatar

    Why does the developer hate arkoudaphobics?

    arquebus_x,

    It's fish and children, isn't it?

    tal,
    @tal@lemmy.today avatar

    Just looking at the Man Attacked by Babies sculpture at the Vigeland Sculpture Park sends shivers up and down parent commenter’s spine.

    tal,
    @tal@lemmy.today avatar

    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!”

    liminalDeluge,

    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.

    MangoKangaroo,

    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.

    bipmi,

    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.

    liminalDeluge,

    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.

    Trainguyrom,

    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

    Jako301,

    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.

    sandriver,

    I have cognitive impairments and it does my head in that it’s still hit or miss whether games have rewindable text and voiceovers. Definitely my favourite thing in a game is eing ale to open a dialogue log and even replay voiced lines. Should be in every game, it’s such a small accessibility thing.

    Poopfeast420,

    I’ve been playing a bunch of CRPGs the last couple of months (BG3, BG1 Enhanced, Pillars 1, Divinity 2, Pathfinder Kingmaker currently) and games like this need keywords highlighted in texts and tooltips. Some of the newer ones do this a bit already, but it’s pretty inconsistent and not enough in my experience.

    BG3 could use some lore popups, so you can learn more about the world, the gods, races, etc. Also, even some really basic mechanics could use it, if you just have very little experience. What does Save or Saving Throw mean exactly, which stat matters for specific spells, etc.

    Pathfinder does the lore popups already and some stats get an explanation, but not nearly enough for me as a complete newcomer to the system.

    shrugal,

    I like the way Age of Wonders 4 does it: Keywords in tooltips are highlighted, and you can hover over them to get another tooltip with an explanation and more highlighted keywords to hover over. This means you can easily explore the basic mechanics right there in the tooltips.

    knatschus,

    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

    Plume,

    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. >.<

    Fisch,
    @Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

    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?

    MonkderZweite,

    Like in Ark Survival. I bet every asset and texture is duplicated in every map, be it needed or not.

    Fisch,
    @Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

    I have a friend who plays that and owns all DLCs, it’s over 500gb total. That’s way too much.

    Fisch,
    @Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

    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.

    TwilightKiddy,

    Laughs in WarCraft III: Reforged

    ArmokGoB,

    Holding down MMB for callouts in online games. Apex and Risk of Rain 2 both do it and it’s super useful.

    saigot,

    I think you are in luck, most competitive shooters have it these days, I can’t really think of a big one that doesn’t, some are better than others though. Counterstrike, overwatch, warzone, fortnite, valorant, rainbow six all have them.

    ArmokGoB,

    Destiny 2 doesn’t have it, and I don’t think BattleBit has it. I don’t really play battle royales anymore. I’m glad it’s becoming more widely used.

    MangoKangaroo,

    Less a design choice and more a technical feat, but I’m hoping that we start to see the phase-out of loading screens and more of a push toward seamless gameplay. I was watching a video from the newest Spiderman and it was pretty damn cool. Practical for all games? Maybe not for a while. But I certaintly would like to see more investment in leveraging improvements in disk and memory capabilities going forward.

    tal, (edited )
    @tal@lemmy.today avatar

    I would guess that loading screens will never fully go away. Especially on consoles, where everyone has a fixed set of hardware resources, and the developer knows what that is and is aiming at optimizing for that target, being able to fully remove one area from memory before loading the next gives you potentially twice as much memory to work with. That’s a big-enough gain that game developers are not going to want to give that up, since the alternative is being able to only have half (or less, if multiple areas are near each other) the complexity for their areas. If hardware gets more memory, at least some developers are going to want to increase the complexity of the environments they have rather than eliminating load screens. Otherwise, their scenes are going to look significantly-worse than their competitors who have loading screens.

    There may be specific games that eliminate loading screens, at least other than the initial startup of the game. Loading screens might be shorter, or might just consist of a brief fade. But I don’t think that we’ll ever reach the point that all developers decide that that tradeoff to fully-eliminate loading screens is one that they want to make.

    The shift from optical media and rotational drives to SSDs has reduced the relative cost of loading an area. But it hasn’t eliminated it.

    I think that a necessary condition for loading screens going away is basically a shift to a memory architecture where only a single type of storage exists – that is, you don’t have fast-but-volatile primary storage and slow-but-nonvolatile secondary storage, but only a single form of non-volatile storage that is fast-enough to run from directly. We don’t have that technology today. Even then, it might not kill loading screens, since you might want to have different representations (more-efficient but less-compact for the area surrounding the character, and less-efficient but more-compact for inactive areas).

    MangoKangaroo,

    See, I figured consoles might actually be more likely to cross that finish line first. My logic is that the controlled platforms would give developers a) potential access to a more bare-metal style of storage medium maybe not practical on PC, and b) a consistent performance target (no needing to account for people using those pesky hard drives!)

    I feel like we’re maybe already starting to see this with the PlayStation 5, but it probably also depends on how much work actually goes into optimization for these development teams.

    gazter,

    I think the key here is integrating loading into the gameplay. The old Metroid trick of having the player traverse a basic hallway while the game loads the next area in the background is a good, if basic, example.

    AceFuzzLord,

    Most loading screens are just more of a nuisance than anything, but if they don’t remove them, maybe they could get creative in how they work/look?

    The main series Danganronpa games did loading screens in a very creative way that made them feel special. The room and all the things inside would start popping up and build the room as it loaded in. More loading screens like that would be lovely if they aren’t able to remove them.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • gaming@beehaw.org
  • fightinggames
  • All magazines
    •