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. :)
Cut-scenes that can be paused, skipped and replayed later.
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.
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.
It’s mental to me that most console games still don’t let you change the controller bindings like you can on PC.
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.
Steams controller rebinding tools are a real killer feature.
Final Fantasy XVI’s Active Time Lore. Being able to pause the game and have a list of relevant characters, places, and concepts for the scene you’re in is so helpful for my ADHD, for when I take a break from a game and come back not knowing what’s going on. I want to see this in every story heavy game.
- 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.
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.
Phobia-friendly settings/modes. There are so many games that I can’t play or have to find a mod for because the fantasy genre is obsessed with giant spiders. The only way I could ever play Skyrim was with the Arachnophobia mod that replaced all spiders with bears. I haven’t played Grounded, but I know it has an arachnophobia setting that can simplify/cartoonify the spiders or replaces them with floating orbs. I’d love to see these types of settings in more games, and ideally similar settings available for other common phobias/triggers besides spiders and blood.
Satisfactory swaps the giant spiders with cat heads and even with my slight arachnophobia, I still prefer the spiders. The cat head floating towards you are somehow even creepier.
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.
Baldur’s Gate 3 does this, and the number of saves is configurable. It’s nice.
