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. :)

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.

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.

Lojcs,

Stopping rendering / game logic / music if you alt tab. And resource management overall. It grinds my gears when games use resources even when there’s nothing happening. (Civ6 for instance constantly uses absurd amounts of cpu just for idling in game and doesn’t use any more when calculating so turns.)

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

The question of pause-a-game-when-not-focused is a big question for me. I don’t know if there’s a perfect answer, though I’d at least like a toggle.

I run a Linux environment, with multiple workspaces. I can switch between workspaces by whacking a key combination. So I really, really frequently am swapping between them, even when playing games.

I totally understand how some people might want a game to auto-pause when they switch away from it. I remember once seeing a video recording of some guy who was handling support calls. He was playing video games in between calls, and every time a call came in, he would switch over to his support software and do work. Now, setting aside the question of whether his manager was okay with that, that’s a very legitimate use case where you’d want a game to auto-pause on switch. Otherwise, you have to manually pause and then switch.

On the other hand, I often want to switch away when the game is doing something time-consuming. Starfield can take a while to do a rest, and I’ll often be looking at something on another workspace while resting. I definitely don’t want the game to pause then, else I just have to sit there staring at a screen with a progress bar moving. Same thing with turn-based games that have an AI phase, where the AI is computing something. If a game has any moments with downtime, I’d like to be able to run it in the background without it pausing. It’s really annoying when a game developer tries to “helpfully” auto-pause the game, when I don’t want that. I’d be fine with that as a default, but if there’s no toggle, it’s really irritating (Starfield does have a toggle, albeit one hidden in a config file and without a UI widget for it).

On idles, I agree. Especially for turn-based games like Civilization, it’d be nice to at least have the option to forego idle animations, which would be a big battery usage saver for laptops. The only thing it should need to do, even in the foreground, if you’re not pushing buttons, is be playing music.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Unciv, but it’s a full open-source reimplementation of Civilization 5 for Android and desktop OSes, using simple graphics. It really does drive home how much graphical fluff there is in the series – not that that’s necessarily bad, but it really is not necessary to play the game. And for a lot of people, it’d be nice to have battery-friendly games.

vrighter,

there is no such thing as “idling” in a game, when viewed through the lens of software engineering. Even if you aren’t giving the game any new inputs, the game is still doing the work of rendering the screen. Calculating a turn is actually only a small part of the process.

Lojcs, (edited )

Calculating a turn is the most intensive part of the process. I don’t expect it to use no cpu. But Civ6 has no right to use similar cpu power to stelarris running at max speed while just rendering grass. And considering that it continues to use that even if its paused and minimized, I think it’s pretty clear that they just don’t care about power consumption.

saigot,

I generally want the opposite. If I alt tab while waiting for a long operation I want it to keep going while I’m tabbed out, and I especially want the music to continue so I don’t forget I have the game running

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

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.

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.

Checho, (edited )

Transmog

Also being able to adjust subtitles size is nice

Brasidas,

This really should be the default in all RPGs. It’s so annoying Starfield doesn’t offer that.

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.

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.

AdellcomdoisL,

I think this might be a thing in modern games, but I don’t play enough new releases to be sure: Changing the accessibility settings before anything else in the game. The first time I encountered this was on The Division 2, a Ubisoft game of all things, and being able to tune my subtitles, visual cues, sound options, among others before even the Press Start to begin the game is an incredibly comfortable feeling.

A minor feature that is unfortunately underused is having an archive/library/compendium of characters, plot events and the like. The Yakuza series has entries for its major characters, which is a bliss in games that are essentially soap operas introducing new families and plot twists every with every new installment, and being able to catch up after a few days/weeks without playing is a relief.

Plume,

It’s a thing… here and there. Far Cry 6 by default has voice reader accessibility feature turned on, which is nice. Say what you will about Ubisoft, they’re good with accessibility stuff.

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.

Sabata11792,
@Sabata11792@kbin.social avatar

Give me a cheat menu or something after beating the game. Let me run around as God causing chaos and break the game. Easy extra hours.

Plume,

And let us skip the damn hour long tutorial on replays, while you’re at it!

raptir,

For survival/crafting/whatever games - let me adjust drop rates and toggle things on and off individually, rather than just choosing a difficulty.

What I mean by this is looking at something like Ark versus Subnautica. Ark gives a super fine grained level of customization around spawn rates and other settings. You don’t even need to strictly enable or disable hunger but can set the decay rate, for example.

Plume,

Custom difficulty mode in general. The Long Dark does exactly what you described. :)

GrayBackgroundMusic,

I’ve stopped playing Subnautica because it’s too grindy/stingy. Sometimes games get better about this further in, but I don’t wanna have to play 10 hours of garbage to get to the good stuff. (side note, I use Skip First Hour mod in factorio for this. Love it.)

CharlesReed,
@CharlesReed@kbin.social avatar

Bit of an older game, but Don't Starve was great at this. At the beginning of a game you could set and customize the entire world/map that you were going to be dropped into, including how little or lot of each and every resource individually (eg, you could have a lot of trees, but few rocks, some carrots, but no berries, etc). IIRC you could also pick the world size, how much the land branched out into 'islands', weather patterns, the day length, stuff like that. It's essentially creating your own difficulty.

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.

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
    •