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. :)

JokeDeity,

I love a game with a good large settings menu that lets me change as much as possible. If you don’t lock me out of changing all the keybindings then you’re already ahead of the game. I hate when a game has a really badly implemented feature and no way to change it or disable it.

shiveyarbles,

I’d like to see leaning around corners for strategic shooters. I think rainbow six used to have this, I know the original system shock had it.

bipmi,

This is a thing thats (slowly) becoming mainstream I think. Rainbow 6 siege has it (or it did when I last played at least) and Battlebit Remastered has it. In Battlebit you can actually lean left / right all the time, no matter if youre against a corner or not. You can even do it in open fields

iagomago,
@iagomago@feddit.it avatar

Give me Disco Elysium-tier choices in story development and dialogue.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I’d rather not have loading screens at all, but if you need them, I’d kind of like a progress bar, rather then just watching some animated doohicky telling me that hopefully the game hasn’t frozen.

I would imagine that it’s probably possible to, if the game emits checkpoints (“loading terrain”, “loading textures”), etc, to record the timestamps for each of those and then, when it emits the same checkpoints next time through, to be able to estimate how far it is through the process.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

Estimating loading progress is one of the most hilariously difficult problems to solve in coding video games, to this day, unfortunately.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I provided one technical approach above.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

It's always more complicated than that. Perhaps each load is very distinct from the last, which wouldn't be uncommon in open world games, and it means you're always doing that load "the first time"; perhaps it's dependent on something like a random seed or network connectivity, which are both extremely variable; perhaps you add new content or DLC regularly that throws off this calculation. All that for a return on development time invested that's probably not worth the effort. It is worth it to show progress to confirm that the system hasn't locked up, and consoles often have certain thresholds to meet for this sort of thing in certification, but beyond that, it's just an extremely difficult thing to do, even for Microsoft.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

and it means you’re always doing that load “the first time”

So keep the checkpoint list for each world.

perhaps you add new content or DLC regularly that throws off this calculation

If it uses the last checkpoint times, then it should adapt to that.

All that for a return on development time invested that’s probably not worth the effort. It is worth it to show progress to confirm that the system hasn’t locked up

I think that we’re going to have to disagree. I would like to have a progress bar.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

A lot of games don't even have checkpoints, and there are a lot of things that could affect load times very differently. I get that you want this to work well, because we all do, but if it was as easy as your high-level explanation, we'd probably have perfect progress bars in things by now. People far more educated than you or I have tried.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

A lot of games don’t even have checkpoints

The checkpoint I’ve described has nothing to do with “game checkpoints”, where the game saves. This is going to be a checkpoint in the loading process.

People far more educated than you or I have tried.

Let’s pretend for a moment that you aren’t just making an unfounded assertion. Give me a list of names.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

I have coded a load screen progress bar before, in the one commercially-released game I worked on (I will not be disclosing), using my own defined checkpoints, like you mentioned. There's still a ton of variability even there, so some percentages seem to take longer than others on different computers. I did research before starting on the task and found the same thing echoed over all the place. Here's an example.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Which is why my above suggestion is adaptive to individual computers.

I got exasperated when I ripped out a “fake” progress bar in a commercial product – not a game – that another dev had previously added that I was working on and put in a real one. I don’t agree that this is some insumountable problem.

vrighter,

quick, how fast can you load 1GiB of data?

on an ssd, on an hdd

as one big file or as 1000 tiny files (defragmented and packed vs all over the place, for hdds)

on a freshly booted up system? Loading for a 2nd time on a pc with a fuckton of ram, so all data is still in the fs cache.

Someone who actually loads all data into a memdisk?

It’s just not possible to accurately predict. There are way too many factors.

prole,

Maybe not everywhere, because then it wouldn’t be nearly as special, but I absolutely adored the “asynchronous multiplayer” aspects of Death Stranding.

Viewing the “strand contracts” tab and looking at how many other actual humans used and “liked” the infrastructure you created, or helped to create. Creating contracts with players who seem to appreciate your work, so that you see more of their structures, and they see more of yours. Only a couple examples. Trying to find the most optimal place for a bridge, or watchtower so that other players will appreciate it and give you “likes.” That nice feeling of warmth you get when you finish building a road that others had started…

Just the whole freaking thing fits so well into the “we’re all in this together, even if we’re (forcibly) isolated” message the game is conveying. Working together with real people that you will never directly see or speak to, in order to make an incredibly arduous journey a bit easier for all. Amazing.

At least I think that was one of the messages, Kojima can be cryptic at times lol.

Again, I wouldn’t want it to become the next “climb the tower to reveal part of the map” mechanic, and get ruined. You can’t just shoe-horn it in, it has to make sense in context.

MummifiedClient5000,

Cut-scenes that can be paused, skipped and replayed later.

Koordinator_O,

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.

Argongas,

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.

Fisch,
@Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

You can’t?! I thought this was already a standard thing

giloronfoo,

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.

Fisch,
@Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

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.

MonkderZweite,

justpause mod in Satisfactory. Agree, should be standard.

jjjalljs,

Probably difficult for technical reasons, but it would be cool if I could rewind the game arbitrarily in games where you can quicksave/load. Like I can save and try the thing and reload if I don’t like the results, but it’d be neat if I could just rewind.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Rewinding is technically possible, and there are games that incorporate rewinding into the game, like Braid or Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Probably some newer ones. However, that only works if the game developer conforms to a lot of constraints. I don’t think that it will ever be a standard feature on all video games.

  • Not all functions are “reversible”; you can’t just run everything “backwards” easily on a general-purpose computer. One specific operation that is famously not-easily-reversible – and that we are so confident that this is not easily reversible that we make a lot of computer security rely on it – is multiplying two prime numbers together. So you’d have to impose dramatic constraints on how games can be written to provide the ability to just say “start running the game in reverse”. (Related trivia: the question of whether the real world can theoretically be run in reverse if you could look perfectly at everything in the universe for just one moment, the arrow of time, is, as I understand it, something of an open question in physics.)
  • One tactic for “rewinding” is to basically store checkpoints periodically and then retain enough information, like the player’s inputs, such that one can basically “fast forward” from a checkpoint. If you can “fast forward” cheaply enough in terms of CPU time, then rewinding to a checkpoint, and then fast-forwarding to a given point, once for each frame, looks like you’re running in reverse. This is basically how modern movie codecs work today: you have keyframes that are basically a “checkpoint” of a frame that are stored, maybe every few seconds or so. Then you have information necessary to compute the next frame from the existing one. So when you seek backwards in a movie, internally what a movie player is likely doing is seeking backwards to the keyframe prior to the time where you’re trying to seek to, then playing forward. That “seek back to a checkpoint, then play forward” is a lot more technically-easy to do than to require a game to truly be reversible, since in many games, it’s possible to store a fairly-small amount of information to record the game world at that point in time – and “play forward”. But many games also can’t store their entire world in a small amount of space, and for some, it’s hard to perform saves cheaply-enough in terms of CPU time – constantly and frequently-enough, maybe every couple seconds. If you can’t reduce the game state to a very small amount of information, then you are only going to be able to rewind so far. Implementing this is, today a requirement of a number of multiplayer games – nearly all multiplayer game engines basically rely on each computer involved being able to deterministically generate the same world state on each participating computer. One technique to reduce apparent latency to other players is to do client-side prediction, predict what the other user is going to do, like continuing to walk in the same direction that they’re walking, and then render each frame as if they had done that. Sometimes, that prediction is incorrect, and in those cases, they’re going to need to be able to re-generate the world state; what they do is constantly internally checkpoint and then roll world state forward by replaying inputs when they actually learn what that other player was doing. So some games and game engines already basically implement the internal functionality required for this sort of approach, at least over a limited period of time. But it requires the developers to constrain what they do throughout the game to some degree.
HalJor,
@HalJor@beehaw.org avatar
  • 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.
TheresNodiee,

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.

aesopjah,

Witcher 3 was great with this

PelicanPersuader,
@PelicanPersuader@beehaw.org avatar

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.

Klear,

System Shock had that. Enemies never attacked first and they all died in one hit.

exscape,
@exscape@kbin.social avatar

FOV slider and option to disable head bob if present. Games with a too narrow FOV and/or head bob are unplayable for tons of people who suffer from motion sickness, and it's such a shame to have so many good games ruined by it.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

A couple of points on FOV:

  • High FOV gives you more peripheral vision, which – if you can get used to extremely-high FOVs – is a major advantage in competitive multiplayer FPSes. I know that users used to play with very high FOVs on Quake and the like; I don’t know if that’s a thing today. That’s an argument for constraining FOV in competitive multiplayer environments. Marathon used to incorporate this into the game, have a fisheye powerup that temporarily provided better peripheral vision. So if you want a level playing field for competitive multiplayer games, you cannot let it be changed by players. If you want a level playing field, the only thing you can do is adjust where their head is relative to the display, help them calibrate their head placement.
  • Even for single-player FPSes, it has some degree of impact on difficulty. Having a high FOV will generally make a game easier, since having more peripheral vision is advantageous.
  • Games virtually always use a higher FOV than would be accurate for the real world, based on the distance from the eye to display and the size of the display. In the real world, your monitor or TV screen – if at a sane distance from you – provides a very limited field of vision. Trying to play an FPS through a tiny window into the world like that would be a huge disadvantage. They just try to jack it up to a level where it won’t actually make people sick.
  • The “optimal” FOV will differ on a per-player basis (some people can handle higher FOV without being sick). What would be a physically-accurate FOV also depends on the size of the display and how far away from the display the player is sitting, which the developer does not know and varies on a per-player basis (unless the player is wearing a VR headset).
  • For consoles, I’d argue that this should probably be implemented at a console-wide level, maybe on a per-user basis, since what a user can handle and where their head is relative to the display should be constant across games. Doesn’t make sense to require a player to set it manually on a per-game basis, since they’re just going to have to be setting the same number.
exscape,
@exscape@kbin.social avatar

This is less of an issue in multiplayer games, as they rarely have very narrow FOVs by default. The worst offenders are often console ports and slower first-person games.
FWIW while it's a competitive advantage with high FOV, if there is a slider, it's still fair since everybody can use a higher FOV if they want to.
It's not all advantage though, aiming gets harder (aside from the distortions).

I don't see why it matters at all in single-player. So what if it makes the game easier? Who cares?
The fact that I don't have to stop due to almost vomiting also makes it easier in a way, but I really don't mind.

The fact that the optimal FOV differs on a per-player basis is of course exactly why I want a FOV slider everywhere. I usually prefer about 105 degrees horizontal (in 16:9), while some modern games default in the range 75-85.

DAMunzy,

I like how Sony PS5 lets me have subtitles on for all games. I think that’s part of the accessibility features you were talking about.

gamermanh,

I want decent AA back gdi

Ray tracing isn’t worth how horrible TAA can make some games look, imo. We’re getting close, but it’s been years of this and I’m so tired of choosing between ghosting and jaggies. Or worse, some games that just force the ghosting TAA onto you anyway (cyberpunk you fuck)

Fisch,
@Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

I agree with you on the TAA part but what does that have to do with ray tracing?

gamermanh,

RT being a thing + deferred rendering for larger and more complex scenes pcaused rendering engines to change in ways that make AA work less good

Things like MSAA are now basically worthless due to these rendering changes, leading to TAA proliferation as it’s the best AA for it’s cost in modern engines

Fisch,
@Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

MSAA is pretty old at this point and the reason it doesn’t work well anymore is also because there’s now a lot of details in games that doesn’t require more geometry and that’s a good thing. That’s why we now have AA that doesn’t rely on the actual geometry. TAA isn’t the only one though, my favorite is SMAA and FXAA is honestly not bad either (even though it seems to depend a lot on the implementation). Both of these don’t have ghosting and they detect edges that aren’t actual geometry.

gamermanh,

Yeah, I’m aware MSAA is old but I’m comparing current AA to that because it was an output that matches what I want from games now in looks, if that makes sense

Those games that allow SMAA or FXAA I will 100% use one of those options, even if the implementation is hot dogshit (I seriously hate ghosting), but so many games either force TAA (again, fucking cyberpunk) or only offer TAA or nothing (or TAA and upscaling, which works but isn’t a great solution, imo)

I wish I didn’t notice this shit, my wife thinks I’m insane for being bothered by them and I’m so jealous of her for it

Fisch,
@Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

I 100% agree with this. Worst example was Subnautica, I thought motion blur was turned on but it was just TAA.

Fisch,
@Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

3D audio or HTRF or whatever the right term is. Being able to hear what direction a sound comes from makes the game sound so much better. It also kind of sounds clearer imo because you can actually discern the individual sounds and they don’t get “mushed” together.

HalJor,
@HalJor@beehaw.org avatar

I’ve never heard any difference among the 3D audio settings. Even with Pulse headsets on PS5, which are allegedly designed for this sort of thing, all of the settings sound exactly the same.

Fisch,
@Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

I heard a big difference when I installed the 3D audio mod for Skyrim

sparklepower,

i agree with you and i also think all games should have optional subtitles

relevants,

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.

nekusoul,
@nekusoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de avatar

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.

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

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.

jjjalljs,

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.

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