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. :)

Essence_of_Meh,

Some things were already mentioned so here my other pet peeves:

  • customizable difficulty - no default preset will be as good as one that can be modified to your liking. Sometimes the issue lies with difficulty making things more of a chore than a challenge, sometimes they tune things too much where you get stuck in a weird middle ground where one difficulty is way too easy and the other bashes your teeth in.
  • character speed control on PC - we had this stuff figured out in 2002, when Splinter Cell came out! Why the hell are we still stuck with terribly slow walk and slightly too fast jogging? This isn't hard to implement either - there are already multiple speed states when playing with a gamepad, all that's required is an option to control it with a keybind.
  • visible body in first person games - I always try to immerse myself as much as possible and having a physical body helps sell the idea that I'm a character in this world rather than just a floating camera.
OfficialThunderbolt,

Character speed control is even older than that; many of Sierra’s games in the 1980s/early 1990s (like King’s Quest, Space Quest, etc.) had them. Adjusting them made some of them even easier, because it didn’t affect enemies, allowing you to easily evade them during chase scenes.

I can only think of a few games that have had customizable difficulty. The problem with them is they complicate the user experience, and most people would rather not tinker with them.

Essence_of_Meh,

I was mostly thinking about action (or generally keyboard walking) games but that's good to know, I never got to play those titles honestly.

It's not like customizable difficulty would be mandatory - you have your default presets and an option to customize. You could even add a disclaimer about how "modifying difficulty can break the experience" or whatever.
I'd rather have a choice and not use it than be stuck with options that never feel "right".

I realize that games (and software in general) today are about simplifying things and removing any possibility of user messing up but it can make the end product way less engaging in my opinion.

CarlsIII,

To be fair, the speed options in those Sierra games actually adjusted the speed of the entire game, not just the walking; but I understand what you’re getting at.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

character speed control on PC - we had this stuff figured out in 2002, when Splinter Cell came out! Why the hell are we still stuck with terribly slow walk and slightly too fast jogging?

So, this may not be a real problem if people aren’t dead-set on hard realism, but one point that I recall being made is that in general, in-game characters tend to move more-quickly than real world people do. IIRC from a long-ago article, Quake 2 was calculated to have the main character running at about 35 mph. Even an unencumbered Usain Bolt doing a short sprint isn’t gonna be in that neighborhood. That has some significant tactical impacts in a number of games in terms of, say, the ability to close on a ranged attacker or the value of ambushing.

A number of military sims that I’ve seen – a game genre where having realistic speeds often matter a lot – provide “time compression”, where one can speed up the game world to get through periods where nothing interesting is happening. That does require the game to be able to simulate the world at a higher rate than normal, though.

Essence_of_Meh,

That's not what I mean though. Back in Splinter Cell you could use mouse wheel to increase or decrease your character walking speed - similar to how you can do it with an analog stick. It's about giving player more gradual control on how fast/slow you move.

That said, customizable game time scale (not game speed) is also another thing I'd like to see in games.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Oh, I get what you mean. So you want something like analog input for movement.

Hmm. I think that a lot of FPSes use the mousewheel for “cycle weapon”. I guess you could have some kind of chording support, but I think that the problem is mostly that there isn’t a free analog input on keyboard+mouse for it.

The other thing would be that you only get one analog axis then, and a lot of games will need two analog axes for analog movement.

I was just reading the other day about some keyboard that apparently had keys with pressure-sensitive switches. I have no idea how many games actually support it, and bet that it’s obscenely expensive, but that’d provide necessary analog inputs, assuming that games add support.

googles

Ah, apparently it’s a thing with “gaming” PC keyboards right now.

pcgamer.com/cooler-master-launches-a-keyboard-wit…

Cooler Master launches a keyboard with pressure-sensitive keys for $200

www.amazon.com/…/B01MTA0OAP

tomshardware.com/…/razer-huntsman-v2-analog-keybo…

Razer Huntsman, $250.

thinks

You know, honestly, I think that this is at least partly a special case of what a lot of the other comments have asked for, which is basically a more-powerful input layer on the PC sitting between my devices and the game. Like, if I have a bunch of keyboards and joysticks and mice or whatever, let me attach axes and buttons however I want to functions in the game, do macros, whatever.

I had a comment complaining that I had a controller with two extra buttons than a standard XBox controller, but that most games can’t take advantage of that, even though they provide extensive support for rebinding keys on keyboards.

Someone else wanted to be able to bind any input to any game function, wanted macros and stuff.

You’re wanting the ability to link an analog input to existing code in the game that can take an analog value.

Several people have asked for the ability to rebind controller keys.

I also recall seeing, in a past discussion, a handicapped user talk about how the ability to rebind was important to them for accessibility reasons.

Essence_of_Meh,

I think you're making this a little bit more complicated than necessary. Those gadgets are cool but that would probably require more support by the devs than a simple keybinds and considering how niche this stuff is... I think the latter is a more probable option.

Those two axis you mentioned would be modified together anyway since we'd want the speed modifier to be the same no matter the direction. Alternatively one could make it into a separate variable included in speed calculations - this way you can keep the direct input value provided by the controller (whether it's a gamepad or a keyboard) and have one more piece that can sit unchanged when playing with analog controls.

Mouse scroll was an example since that's how it worked in Splinter Cell back in the day (it's also how Star Citizen does it today). You could just as well use any other key to increase/decrease the this muliplier (or make it mouse scroll + modifier key).

Overall, I do agree that more flexibility in input mapping would be a good thing. Can't go wrong with giving people more choice.

Seigest,
@Seigest@lemmy.ca avatar

I 100% agree with accessibility features. This includes some of the newer considerations.

  • no-strobe mode
  • normalized volume mode (makes it so sound doesn’t spike up suddenly, sudden loud noises are not nice)
  • greater setting for subtitles, size, color, descriptive vs transcription. And keep ui elements out of the caption zones!
  • documentation written in simple language for ease of readability.
  • read back for all written content. Not just the first damn word of a text box. (Seriouly a lot of games do this now its this is just annoying!)

I once saw a thing where a DM (D&D) had an anonymous survey of common sensitive topics. He’d gage what his players where comfortable with prior to starting a campaign and adjust the story accordingly. Games just need this.

PersephoneDives,

greater setting for subtitles, size, color, descriptive vs transcription. And keep ui elements out of the caption zones!

I can not tell you how many times I have missed key dialog because the Xbox achievement pane pops up over it for a full 5 seconds.

Starfield has also been atrocious about random NPC flavor text covering the main dialog, so I will miss full sentences in the middle of quests.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I’ve only seen that a couple times, but yeah, the fact that NPCs can be off doing their own thing – the engine is a pretty open sandbox – can mean that they’re talking during a cutscene, and the way Starfield works, whichever character started talking first gets priority for the caption – the other caption only comes up after the first one finishes.

I kind of wish that they’d just stack the captions onscreen.

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

no-strobe mode

If this is for epileptic users who can get seizures from strobing, I disagree. This is a safety feature. It should not be in the video game, where it may-or-may not be reliably implemented and the algorithm to avoid it may differ from game to game. This is something that the OS should implement across the whole system. Like, if the user having a seizure is a risk, then I don’t want to trust that every game developer or movie maker or person embedding an animated GIF on a website is going to have a toggle and that it works. I want my OS telling my video card “give me average brightness frame to frame, and if average brightness is gyrating too much frame to frame, then put a clamp on that now”.

For video game consoles, maybe it should be the TV that implements it, rather than the console.

It should even be possible to stick an intermediate hardware box between the display and the video-outputting device that detects and filters it, if one wants to use existing displays. Like, I get if someone wants to have detection and filtering, but has a large-screen display that they don’t want to replace. If I had photosensitive epilepsy, I would definitely want to be sticking such a box on any large displays that I’m looking at in the dark.

To put it another way: if someone not having a seizure depends on 4chan users not posting animated GIFs with particular characteristics, then the system is already horribly broken.

Seigest,
@Seigest@lemmy.ca avatar

I mean I just get headaches when games do it too much.

gk99,
  • LET ME TURN OFF THE CLAUSTROPHOBIC VIGNETTE, PLEEEAAASSEEEE. Even games like Cyberpunk 2077 that have gained countless features over the years and have individual HUD on/off switches still ignore this.
  • UGC as a whole. I grew up on Half-Life mods, custom Counter-Strike: Source maps, and LittleBigPlanet. The fact that we’ve pretty much abandoned that outside of Halo, Counter-Strike (just barely, mind you), and more recently Fortnite with proper Unreal Engine support is a terrible thing. It makes more sense than ever in an era of live service where you want players to never stop playing.
ConstableJelly,

What’s a claustrophobic vignette?

conciselyverbose, (edited )

Vignetting is the darkening in a circle pattern at the edge of a photograph/movie caused by the fact that the lens is round and the film/sensor are square.

My guess is that he's referring to games using a similar effect (some do it with blur, too) extremely heavily on a large portion of the edge of the screen to create a tunnel vision effect in some contexts. I couldn't name which games do it, but I've seen it on sprint, stamina depletion, and low health in different games.

ConstableJelly,

I know exactly what you’re referring to, thanks for the examples!

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I always thought that it was intended to either simulate an old television or to make a scene look scarier, but looking at the wiki page I’ve linked to, it looks like there are a number of stylistic uses.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

The parent is just saying that he finds it to be claustrophobic.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vignetting

It’s a visual effect where the center of the screen is slightly-lighter than the edges.

I very often see an option to toggle them in video game graphic settings, so I expect that some people don’t like it.

ConstableJelly,

Ah thanks. I looked at vignette on Wikipedia; looks like “vignetting” is a separate entry 🤷.

saigot,

I think companies are more hesitant about ugc these days because of all the extra moderation required.

For instance someone made a sexual assault simulator as a custom overwatch map, and it made headlines, which is extra harmful for a company that is trying to recover from all the SA accusations.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

LAN, direct IP connections, private servers, and when it makes sense, same-screen multiplayer. Several of these used to be standard. Games as a service are creating a dark age in video game history where lots of these works will arbitrarily disappear, and they don't have to.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

While I don’t disagree, if part of the game runs on the server and the game publisher is the only one with the server, it makes the game hard to pirate, so they’ve a potent incentive to do this.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

And I've got a potent incentive to not buy it when it's got a built-in expiration date. Baldur's Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 are both available DRM-free and sold through millions of copies. BG3 has LAN, split-screen, and direct IP connections for its multiplayer, even.

saigot,

Also much harder to build cheats

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

It's harder to cheat when the server is authoritative, but it really doesn't matter who holds that server.

saigot,

If you have access to the server code you can reverse engineer it to look for vulnerability, and you can test it without having to worry about anticheat catching you.

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

Security through obscurity isn't real security, and I'd argue that for some genres, especially FPSes, cheating is just going to be a fact of life due to how many software and hardware layers there are between human and game. So I'd rather be able to run my own server and only invite people who I know aren't going to cheat rather than say that the company should be able to sell me a worse version of the game (where I don't get to run the server) under some false pretenses that we're better off.

blaine,

I'm still waiting for split-screen coop on the PC version of the Master Chief Collection. Something they managed to achieve easily enough when Halo CE launched on PC 22 years ago still eludes developers today...

Phanatik,

Do you mean local split screen?

PleasantAura,

Having played Halo CE for PC recently…no, it doesn’t have split screen at all. That was only on the Xbox version (which is technically superior in quite a few ways). The only way to have split screen on Halo CE on PC is via console commands/mods. That said, I do agree with your overall point and I would love to be able to do split screen MCC on my PC without mods.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I suppose that if you were hellbent on specifically setting this up, you could maybe do multiple VMs split onscreen, though last I looked, the situation for sharing 3d hardware across multiple VMs wasn’t great, and I am sure that it would be horribly inefficient, since each VM would be storing a duplicate copy of textures in VRAM. I have no idea how the PC version of Halo CE deals with weird aspect ratios.

It also wouldn’t have some integration like switching to a single large screen for cutscenes or the menu. But if you were just specifically hellbent on creating a multiplayer, single-screen Halo experience on the PC, you might be able to pull it off like that.

Another approach, if the hardware cost is acceptable, would be to have a laptop per player and then stream the output video to some multiplexing hardware that puts multiple screens on one TV. That would buy you per-player audio, which I don’t believe was possible on the original XBox release.

Plume,

That reminds me:

If there is split screen on console…

…why the fuck do I need to mod it into the PC version?!

It’s already there, leave it in! ;_;

Phanatik,

Call of Duty games are terrible for this. You can't just play split screen Spec Ops or multiplayer anymore unless you play on a console or you emulate it.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

There’s actually legitimately at least some functionality required there that exists on the console there that doesn’t on the PC. The consoles already have a console-level concept of a player-to-controller mapping. That doesn’t exist on the PC, so the individual game would need to implement it – it’s not entirely free.

A common approach on the PC to handling controllers is to assume that there is one player and that whichever controller is receiving input last is the controller to use. This deals nicely with the case where there are multiple specialized controllers used for different software packages, like “the user has a steering wheel, a flightstick, an XBox controller, a Playstation controller, and a Switch controller plugged in” case. Problem is, then you can’t go just assume that Controller 1 is the Player 1 controller, and Controller 2 is the Player 2 controller. That case doesn’t come up on consoles, because they constrain the controller situation so that you can’t do that, so the problem doesn’t arise on consoles.

Skyline969,
@Skyline969@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

blazera,

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.

Haatveit,

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?

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

They also aren’t measuring the same thing, even aside from the factors you mentioned.

A 4k screen is 4k on the long dimension.A 4k texture is a square that’s 4k in both dimensions.

Also, the 4k texture is typically lossily-compressed, so in practice, you’re getting less data than the resolution might suggest.

conciselyverbose,

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.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

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.

ono,

Baldur’s Gate 3 does this, and the number of saves is configurable. It’s nice.

TimTheEnchanter,

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!

gamermanh,
@gamermanh@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

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

TwilightVulpine,

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.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

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.

TwilightVulpine,

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.

drangus,

The ability to turn off various typical live service features. Hiding the store and annoying announcements would be awesome.

Plume,

The fact that you can’t is a feature… just not for you.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

I mean, if a game publisher wants to try to offset the game price via adding advertisements or to try to market the game via your social network or whatever, fine. I’m not going to try to tell game publishers how to do their business.

However, as a game consumer, I’d like to be informed before I buy a game whether game publishers are doing this in a game before I purchase it, so that I have the opportunity to opt out of buying it. Personally, I’d rather that they at least offer a “premium” version without stuff like this; the mobile video game industry often does an “adware and a premium no-ads” model.

Steam defaults to notifying people on your friends list what games you are playing, though they let you turn it off. I doubt that any user wants that on, all else held equal, other than the specific case of multiplayer games where users play multiplayer games with their friends. It might help a game publisher market their game to other users, but I’d rather just pay whatever extra it takes to make up the difference. I’m not going to say that it’s worth it to every user to pay a little more to maintain game immersion, but it is to me.

OneCardboardBox,

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.

joneskind,

As I travel a lot, I would love to see a true eco mode for my laptop. Something that would keep my fans quiet (2500rpm max).

Some games allow for FPS capping and lower settings, but it’s not always the case. Sometimes tweaking the settings doesn’t seem to make any difference to power consumption. Sometimes your only way to cap FPS is to rely on VSync, which doesn’t make much when you play on 120Hz screen.

Metro Exodus is a good example of an almost impossible to tweak game.

I think it would be nice to have a dedicated travelling mode. It would effectively help people with lower specs and entice developers to produce a more efficient code, rather than pushing for costly gears.

As a developer myself I know very well it costs money. But if I had a wish to make I’ll go for this one

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Hmm. I think that a better way to do it is probably in the OS, rather than in-game, on a per-game basis.

Processors thermal-throttle today, and OSes can limit what modes they’re allowed to shift into. And my guess is that usually, if someone wants to constrain performance, they want to do it systemwide, rather than for an individual game.

On the game developer end, if the player wants to play both in a performance-limited and not-performance-limited mode, I’d think that there are probably two ways to go about that:

  1. Permit for two different sets of saved video settings, where the player can flip between them. Honestly, I think that this is probably more tweaking than most players are going to do.
  2. Provide some kind of adaptive quality mechanism. Then, if the computer becomes “lower end”, then the adaptive quality system just twiddles settings until the target framerate is maintained.

There’s also a third point you make here, and that is that in a world with battery-powered devices, CPU/GPU usage actually matters. It’s not zero-cost to just use whatever’s available. I remember submitting an issue some time back for Caves of Qud, where the thing ran a busy loop when the window didn’t have focus, even though the game was paused (which the dev fixed, kudos to them). I noticed it because the fans would spool up when the game was in the background. That’s a game that, because it’s turn-based, has the potential to use very little CPU time, even when the game is in the foreground.

I think that there’s a fair argument that historically, most game developers, aside from maybe mobile or portable console guys, haven’t needed to worry much about consuming resources if they were available.

Speaking as a player, though, I don’t much care about power consumption if a system has wall power. But I care a lot about it if it’s battery-powered.

For phones, I kind of wish that Google would consider providing a “battery usage” rating in the app store that provides some kind of approximate metric for how much CPU time the game uses while active – if Google is going to send all kinds of telemetry from devices, might as well use that for something useful. Maybe permit the game developer to register multiple “modes” (high-power, low-power) and give a ranking for each. As things stand, though, there’s no way for the potential customer to know power consumption, and this would help push that information out to the customer.

joneskind,

I think that a better way to do it is probably in the OS, rather than in-game, on a per-game basis

Low power mode on macOS gives that kind of feature. It works well because the computer never goes beyond a certain threshold of power. I guess it’s a simple downclock of some sort, but the caveat is that it won’t adapt to more demanding zones of the game.

Permit for two different sets of saved video settings, where the player can flip between them. Honestly, I think that this is probably more tweaking than most players are going to do.

I used to do exactly that with macros in World Of Warcraft. I had 3 different kind of setup for Efficiency, Balanced and Quality gaming. That game was the first that I know of to introduce built-in FPS capping during WOTLK extension, and 10 different settings mode plus the ability to make even more custom tweaks. My only wish is that every game developer to do the same.

Provide some kind of adaptive quality mechanism. Then, if the computer becomes “lower end”, then the adaptive quality system just twiddles settings until the target framerate is maintained.

Speaking of WoW, there is a target FPS setting that will make the game lower the compute demand, but it wouldn’t help in my case since it’s meant to use as much compute power as possible to reach an FPS goal. It could do the trick if it could be coupled to a Don’t use more than 50% of the compute power, but I’m not sure a game can understand how much a computer has without reaching its limit first. Maybe some kind of benchmarking could help though.

Speaking as a player, though, I don’t much care about power consumption if a system has wall power.

Me neither. But I do enjoy a silent machine !

For phones, I kind of wish that Google would consider providing a “battery usage” rating in the app store that provides some kind of approximate metric for how much CPU time the game uses while active.

That would be very useful indeed! And another incentive for developers to write better code.

Thank you for your answer anyway!

StillNotAHero,

I like how in Breath of the Wild, when it tells you to a button like ‘A’ or ‘Y’ for example, it shows you where that button is relative to the others. This way, if you aren’t super familiar with the controller, you don’t need to take your eyes off the screen.

Plume,

Games needs to take into consideration people who are not used to playing. Games telling you “Press L3/R3” are the worst especially, most new player don’t even know that the sticks can click!

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

Hmm. I don’t know.

I agree that it’s a valid insight that a lot of basic input things are not explained and that it’s not obvious to a first time user.

But on the other hand, I think that the vast majority of players have, at this point, learned.

I remember way back when the personal computer was getting going, the first (or maybe second) Macintosh came out with an audio tape that one could play in conjunction with an automated demo showing how to click on things and drag and so forth. What icons and menus were. Today, we just kind of assume that people know that, because they’ve picked them up on the way, so it’s not like individual software packages have a tutorial telling someone what a window is and how to use it.

And I remember being at a library where there was some “computer training for senior citizens” thing going on near me, and some elderly lady was having trouble figuring out double-clicking and the instructor there said “don’t worry, double-clicking is one of the hardest things”. I mentally kind of rolled my eyeballs, but then I thought about that. I mean, I’d been double-clicking for years, and I bet that the first time I started out, I probably dicked it up too.

But I don’t know if the way to do that is to have every game incorporate a tutorial on the console’s hardware doing things like teaching players that the console sticks are clickable. Like, maybe the real answer is that the console should have a short tutorial. Most consoles these days seem to have an intrinsic concept of user accounts. When creating one, maybe run through the hardware tutorial.

theangriestbird,

Nintendo is very good about this in all their games. I think it’s primarily because on the Switch, if you are using an individual JoyCon, the actual button names are not consistent, so you have to rely on the position of the button to convey which one you want players to press. I don’t think you can control BOTW or TOTK with an individual JoyCon, but I imagine they have those assets just ready to go.

Tunawithshoes,

I love books, mail or notes. Honestly all those lovely small lore parts.

But I would like an option to have them read to me. I don’t need a fancy actor, it could be simple as text to speak.

But I struggle to keep concentration on a paper. Instead I would love to hear it read to me while I go back to my looting.

Fisch,
@Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

Now that machine learning is getting really good at generating good sounding speech, this could become a thing. Paying someone to record every line of these small lore things would be too expensive for the small use it has, so I think that would be the only option.

Xel,
@Xel@mujico.org avatar

Subtitles forced as on.

Or at the very least, the option to choose subtitles right away at the very start of the game.

I fucking hate when games have intro scenes or full chapters where you can’t pause or bring up the menu and you cannot turn on subtitles and I just don’t play games without subtitles (when the game has dialogue).

Plume,

Just letting people pause cutscenes to access the menus would be a huge start.

Fisch,
@Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

I don’t like when games just throw you into the action without giving you the chance to tweak settings before (or even until completing the tutorial) in the first place. Like, why?

fell,
@fell@ma.fellr.net avatar

@Plume Oh yeah and this: Start the game in a neutral area or room where you can test the controls and sound are working properly and ensure the performance is right BEFORE the intro cutscene plays.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

A number of PC games – where the hardware’s performance capabilities are going to change from player to player – have a “benchmark” option accessible, usually in the video settings, that does a “fly-through” of some relatively-intensive levels, and then gives FPS statistics (I think usually an average count, though come to think of it, a 95% number would be nice too). Thinking of a recent example, Cyberpunk 2077 does this. The earliest game that I recall that had some similar feature was Quake, with the timedemo command, though that wasn’t accessible outside of the console.

That doesn’t deal with testing controls, but it does deal with performance (and can hit a number of the engine’s features), so it does part of what you want.

Fisch,
@Fisch@lemmy.ml avatar

A benchmark for tweaking graphics settings is also something I think every game should have. Just let me run a benchmark and tweak the settings before starting the game.

Honeybee,

Left handed mode. I didn’t realise how much I liked it until no man’s sky. It moves the body of the character to the right hand side of the screen. So you can see the character holding the items in the left hand.

Most games just mirror the item into the other hand and that’s it.

flameguy21,

It’s mental to me that most console games still don’t let you change the controller bindings like you can on PC.

TychoRC,

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.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

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.

saigot,

Steams controller rebinding tools are a real killer feature.

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

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.

flameguy21,

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?

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