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. :)

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

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.

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.

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.

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

sub_,
  • Dual subtitles, aka polyglot mode. Doubt that it’d ever happen, probably I’m the only one who wants it. Sometimes I’d just merge 2 subtitles with python script and upload it to my Plex.
  • Fast forward and save states especially for classic remaster. Some have this, some don’t
  • Bigger subtitle fonts
Live2day,

I don’t think I count as a polyglot (Native English, Spanish proficient, learning Japanese and German) but what is that even useful for? I feel like it’d be really confusing to have two subtitles for the same dialogue.

I just watch, in whatever language I want to practice.

sub_,

I think the term came from polyglot books, i.e. books that are written in 2 languages on each side.

Often times for me, the spoken foreign language can be quite fast or filled with colloquials, so I prefer to have subtitles in that language, and also English subtitles. Or in some cases, such as for Japanese voiced games, I’d prefer to have a Japanese subtitles to help me recognize the Kanjis, and additional English subs for translation.

I tried this method on Plex, uploaded dual subtitles for some movies, and it helped me a lot in acquiring new vocabularies. I think Netflix allows users to do the same thing too.

Live2day,

I could see it being a lot more useful for Japanese or other no Latin alphabet languages. Especially for the kanji. I’m too early in Japanese to watch content.

gaydarless,

Conversation logs (for the games where they make sense). I loved having this available in Dragon Age: Origins and it helped me remember my rationale for doing specific things. Also was just fun to read back through.

trustnoone,

I wish I could choose size of font, so many games have a font that only works on certain TVs or played in handheld mode.

Also I wish we could all align in settings menu at some point, so I’m not hunting down these weird unexpected settings.

brie,

Search bars for settings are pretty great, especially when they match against alternate names for the same option.

Zoop,

Dear God, yes, font size options, PLEASE! I cannot express just how depressing it is to finally get a game I’ve been wanting to play so badly for years only to immediately realize I can’t play the damn thing because I can’t see the text to read it and figure out what the hell is going on or what I’m supposed to do. :(

Thalestr,
@Thalestr@beehaw.org avatar
  • The option to skip puzzles and not get punished for it.
  • Independent difficulty options for things like exploration, combat, crafting, etc. Whatever the game has.
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!

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.

Arkham,

Gyroscope controls. Especially for first-person shooters and other first-person games. I used to be a diehard mouse and keyboard player when it came to FPSes until I played Quake 1 on the Switch with gyro controls turned on. Now I’m trying to find ways to be able to play every FPS in my collection on a TV with gyro aim because it just feels so much better.

gamermanh,

Do you just eventually get used to gyro aim?

Everyone I know that’s gotten good with it swears up and down about it but 10 or so hours with Splatoon 2 and I felt like I didn’t get ANY better with it

This is from someone who’s pretty damn good at fps games, usually top 3 on the scoreboard no matter what game it is, so I’m not just bad at the games themselves

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

Splatoon doesn't give you as much control over it as a Steam controller does. It's only the Y axis, and it's always on. It's much better when you can hold a grip button to toggle it. Then you can use the right track pad or analog stick for big movements and the gyro for fine tuned precision while holding a grip button.

gamermanh,

That sounds like exactly what my issue was with learning: it always being on, any teeny hand movement ever would fuck with the camera, the steam controller sounds much closer to what my mind expected from gyro

With that in mind I just might have to try it out, though now I’m scared of getting good with it and needing to hack gyro into games to play, much like getting good with MKB killed me playing FPS on controller lol

ampersandrew,
@ampersandrew@kbin.social avatar

I'll tell you that my friend sat me in front of Returnal on PS5, and that game felt unplayable without either M+KB or gyro, even though plenty of people managed just fine. There's even a gryo feature in the PS5 pad! They just didn't enable it for the game. On PC, you can use it on Steam controller whether the dev enabled it or not.

Arkham,

I’ve heard of people struggling with it, but personally I got used to it very quickly.

I haven’t played Splatoon but I’ve heard it doesn’t use standard shooter controls, so it may not be the best example of the gyro aim I’m taking about.

If you haven’t yet, you might try grabbing Quake 1 or 2 on the Switch (they’re on sale right now!) and give that a shot with gyro on.

Plume,

Hell yeah. I didn’t put this in my post because I didn’t want it to turn into a debate about the validity and viability of gyro controls (it is, if you don’t think so, you’re just wrong). So thanks for putting it.

deo,

One of my favorite steam deck features is being able to use gyro controls for any game. It’s not always as smooth as the Switch, but it works pretty well to add a bit of additional fine-grained control to the course-grained control of the R-stick.

OhNoMoreLemmy,

Doom on the switch was amazing for this. I tried to play Doom eternal on the ps4, afterwards, and it was just such a disappointment because it didn’t have gyro.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

My problem with analog sticks in FPSes isn’t fine-grained control – most games have zoom, and auto-aim has done a lot to mitigate lack of acuracy. My problem is coarse-grained control – that is, it takes ages in an FPS to turn around at maximum turn speed, whereas a mouse player can rapidly snap around if they are, say, attacked from the side or behind.

I’ve seen some people talk about hacking together some mechanism to try to deal with this using the Steam Controller and Steam Input – I think that it might have been something like a double-tap-to-rapidly-turn, but my impression is that whatever was going on there was more-elaborate than just the combination of an analog stick and a gyro for fine movement.

brie,

W.r.t. mouse controls, having a bit of mouse acceleration can make it a lot easier to balance accuracy and being able to turn around.

AntBas,

Look up flick stick controls on YouTube, it’s hard to get used to it, but if you get it right it’s even better than keyboard and mouse

www.youtube.com/channel/UCoOdtpww47dipbWzNgO6-4g

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.

CarlsIII,

I want to be able to adjust the volume of the rain apart from everything else. Yes, I know a lot of games have an “ambient sounds” slider, but it usually includes other sounds too like Thunder, wind, animal sounds, and other stuff. I just want to make the rain louder. Rain is almost always too quiet in games, and it’s a tragedy.

fell,
@fell@ma.fellr.net avatar

@Plume The Witness has no menu and no savegames. When you boot it up, you're instantly exactly where you left off.

This doesn't work for all games, but I wish more games would do it like that.

JamesBean, (edited )
@JamesBean@kbin.social avatar

All the From Software RPGs since Demon's Souls work like that too. (Not the lack of menu, but the lack of an interactive save system because it's just constantly autosaving).

It's incredibly convenient to always be able to quit the game at any time and know you'll be in the exact place and position you were when you start up again. And it has the added benefit of preventing players from save scumming.

tal,
@tal@lemmy.today avatar

That could also work with savegames, in that you can have saves, but make the default on startup be to restore where one was in the last game. Many games provide a “continue” option at the top of the main menu, I think reflecting the fact that that’s what a player wants to do 99% of the time.

Two caveats:

  • If it’s an action game and there’s loading involved, it’d be nice to know when the load is done, since you may immediately have to be reacting to something in-game. I’d rather have it attempt to load the game and then go into a “pause” mode, maybe with some overlay or something indicating the current game state (like to remind you what level or wherever you are).
  • It’s possible – because we live in an imperfect world with imperfect software – for save games to get into a broken state, and if so, you don’t want to make it impossible to reach the main menu if trying to load the last save game is crashing the thing. Maybe make the game detect that the last load failed, akin to web browsers, and then head to a menu in that case.
Trainguyrom,

Any kind of pause or completion of loading should have a brief moment where you can see the action and get your bearings before it hands control to you. Like how Forza or Euro/American Truck Sim handle loading saves, its paused for a second or so with the player getting full view of the screen then continues so you have a moment to figure out what you need to do

smeg,

This was going to be my point, the “quick save and quit” option, regardless of how the “normal” save system works. It’s fine if the game only wants you to create a save point you can reload from at certain locations, but a quick save that disappears when you reload it means you can put down the game immediately when the real world comes a-knocking.

Sina,

I dislike this.

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