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. :)
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289 comments
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.
Estimating loading progress is one of the most hilariously difficult problems to solve in coding video games, to this day, unfortunately.
I provided one technical approach above.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.