Settings you believe ANY game should have? (This is me advocating for a restart/reboot button on ALL games)

Hey now... Don't forget camera bob, "lens dirt," chromatic aberration, and vignette!

AKA - the video game graphics equivalent of "beer goggles."

Those two features frequently make me nauseous! Being able to turn them off or at least down is a necessity for me.

Also fuck Bloom to hell

And by OFF, we mean actually off. The last thing I want is the game to push out a minor update 5 years after its last update, and all of the mods I have are now broken.

Reminds me of one of my biggest pet peeves - a bunch of games will pop up a warning "Oh no, you're not on the Internet! Some stuff won't work!" on start up, always. Hate it, unless I'm trying to connect to a multiplayer mode of some sort.

A setting like this should ideally prevent those.

If there is something better than opensnitch for this on Linux someone tell me. It‘s so annoying to block applications from accessing the internet on it. I‘ve tried like 4 different methods.

Cutscenes especially. The pause button should pause cutscenes, with an option to skip the cutscene on the pause menu. The pause button should never just outright skip the cutscene. It should always pause the cutscene.

So many times as a kid that my mom would walk in and start talking right as a cutscene started. And when I’d go to pause it, it would just skip the entire fucking cutscene instead.

I'm sure I have seen it before, but I can't think of a single game that lets you pause during a cutscene. It really sucks for turn-based games where you need to watch whats happening when it's not your turn in order to respond correctly.

I remember a game I used to play years ago that had no ability to pause, so what i would do is alt+tab to the task manager and suspend the process, and then resume it later. Obviously that's way more clunky than just hitting a pause button.

Watch Dogs 2 had an “invasion” system like Dark Souls, but it also allowed pausing in the world anytime you weren’t being invaded. It’s been a nice thing to point to anytime Souls fans make that excuse.

Yeah no-pause feature was cool for one or two games as a gimmick, but Jesus h christ I'm an adult now and sometimes you need to freeze everything RIGHT NOW and single player games that you can't pause are stupid as hell. Like I get maybe not pausing for accessing gear menu. But then at least give us a separate pause in case I have to run to the post office or take a business call or something

I recently started another play through of RDR2, while figuring out the settings on my old Linux gaming PC. I'd forgotten how long it is between save points during that oh-so-long first segment up in the mountains. Christ. Having to play for half an hour just to get to a point where I could save up.

Allow me to turn off the stupid pre-launch splash titles.

I can guarantee that those splash titles are included because of contractual obligations. The same way a movie lists the publishing companies in the intro. Including a “skip after first launch” option would violate their contract. If it were up to a game’s director, they would almost universally prefer to drop you straight at the title screen. But they legally aren’t allowed to do so.

Oh, you want us to publish your game? We can require the game designer to show our logo for {x} seconds when the game launches. Oh, you want your game to be G-Sync compatible? Nvidia can require that you show their logo for at least {x} seconds when the game launches. Oh, you want to use our game engine to build your game? Unreal can require that you show their logo for {x} seconds when the game launches. Et cetera…

Fully remappable controls is my biggest wish. I hate WASD and swear by EDSF, but some games like Fallout 4 hardcode some controls. E is hardcoded to "interact" or "open door" or something, but the game DOES let you map "move forward" to E. So I can run around like normal, but every time I run past a door it auto opens to a zombie hiding behind it.

To be fair to devs, increasing the FOV has a lot of performance implications on how much less they're culling from the scene as you rotate the camera. In this era of open world games, I suspect it scales very poorly as that FOV increases. Temporarily increasing the FOV is also one of their handy tricks for giving you a sense of speed when you hit a boost button and whatnot, so whatever your FOV is, they need to make it more than that.

Sound test menus are a remnant of arcade design, and when arcades starting dying, this feature made less sense. The OST sale is usually more of a revenue stream for the game's composer, as I understand it.

While we're griping, and speaking of Console-Itis, does every PC game now need to have an unskippable message telling me that this game has auto save and urging me not to turn off my PC when the icon is being displayed? Really? Nobody's going to do that. Tell me your game is a shitty console port without telling me your game is a shitty console port.

This one, along with “press any button to start”, annoy me so much. There is absolutely no reason to have to press a button before even entering the main menu. If you need it to determine the type of input device, that can be the first press on the menu.

Treat PC games as PC games, even if you make them cross platform.

Sliders are the problem.

They encourage a maximum and a minimum.

Just let people enter values.

I prefer the 4 circles glyphs that shows the appropriate face button highlighted. It's device agnostic and helpful when I'm switching between playing on my Switch and playing on my PC with an Xbox controller.

This would be killer!

I like this, and I think it should be complemented with a "Save and Quit to OS" button.

Like a timestamp on the save?

Also skipping them, please.

One of the latter Final Fantasies did this. I think it was 13? Despite that game's many other rather glaring shortcomings, that part was pretty neat. I agree it should definitely be standard for most RPG and heavily story driven games.

Oddly enough I think that porn games are a little closer to do what you suggest because rewatch the cutscenes is kinda important it seems in that genre 😅

Relatedly, I've noticed ports of console games, particularly by Japanese devs, and especially Sqeenix, not actually having an option to quit to desktop. Sometimes hitting Esc will pop a plain system theme window with an option to close the program, but I've seen ones that didn't even have that and had to be killed externally. It's not as bad as it used to be, but even exiting DragonQuest 11 is a pain.

I just want to let you know that when I was director of production at a multimedia studio, one of the rules in my ux design "bible" was that an interface must never present an "are you sure" prompt to a Quit action. Yes there were fights over it.

I just mash mod key + backspace on hyprland to kill it haha. Bye mfer!

But also sometimes lately hyprland hasn't been playing as nice with steam games and my mouse doesn't interact with the game. The fix I found is to fling the steam client over to the other monitor. Works I guess. Linux problems lol.

Games that honor alt-f4 INSTANTLY are amazing

Hopefully you never accidentally click the Quit button when you didnt mean to, lol

Similarly, granular audio options that separate dialogue from ambient from music from system sounds. Definitely don’t need my ears blown out just to hear dialogue.

I like having the background music very low, but not off, system sounds a bit above that, sound effects higher than system but lower than dialogue, which is maxed. And of course ambient sound levels really depend on the game and what kind of ambiance it has.

Same thing with granular contrast/gamma/etc. Don’t just provide a few preset options, especially if they can only be set before you start the game (also they should never only be set from the main menu, never). Let the player choose whatever they want on the fly. I love playing with everything bright so I can see wtf I’m doing, I don’t give half a shit if the devs think it should be so dark it’s not navigable. I disagree.

I’d love it if a group could collude on a standard for music signals.

Imagine this: You have a music player following this signal standard.

Game starts, it signals GAME_STARTED, and the media player signals STOP_GAME_MUSIC, so the game itself plays no BGM, leaving it to the music player. But, then the game can also signal later on: THEME_MENUS, THEME_EXPLORE, THEME_COMBAT, THEME_BOSS; and the media player can respond to that by cross fading between playlists built for each.

Every time I see a slider for any damn setting that ends up going from, say, 3.48 to 3.51 unless I go REALLY SLOWLY, in which case maybe it goes 3.48 3.49, 3.51, or whatever nonsense where I can't just get my nice round number. Let me type the stupid number.

also, a standard to mouse sens values, a value of 10 should be same across everything, games made in the same engine usually handle the values the same which is great, I for example have the same sens across all source games, but this usually doesnt carry to diferent engines let alone random one off games with custom engines

Fucks sake this for me. Why the fuck there isn't standardization between games on this is beyond me. I have to go through fucking with mouse sensitivity on every damn game. This is part of the reason I died out of multiplayer tbh.

Low fov and really far camera is ass

Almost as bad as low fov and too close camera and too low camera.

And some games don't let you use both at the same time!

I think it'd be better to have assist modes than difficulty options. As difficulty is traditionally associated with changing things like health and damage (or worse, opaquely disabling mechanics) that are fundamental to game balance I think it is too easy to be abused as a cop out from having to balance the game.

Things like slowing the pace of the game, adding aim assist, visual indicators for audio cues, more lenient hit boxes, more frequent saves would be way more useful imo. Optional mechanics or modifiers can exist, but they shouldn't be bundled with other random stuff.

But my artistic integrity and vision!"

No, shut up. Your vision doesn't mean squat if my experience with the game is annoying to the point where I don't even care

Nah, miss me with this bullshit. Not every game is for you, and it doesn't have to be. An artist is not required to water down their vision because you're picky.

I like how No Man's Sky implemented it:

I'm generally with you, but there are implications for the online game and matchmaking in the likes of Dark Souls games. By the time they got to Elden Ring, they seemed to care way less about things like invasions.

for that matter, why can't we ever add a note or a tagline to save files?  too many rpg's and console rpgs have multiple save slots, multiple endings and all that other added content jazz, but no way to internally identify the save files that matter?

And that movement blur, whatwasitsname?

Amen

Take it a step further, and require optional direction indicators. Not only do you get click on screen. You also have an option to get a little arrow pointing to which direction it came from. I have several friends with a bad ear. They can hear fine out of one ear, but not the other. That direction indicator allows them to track sound cues that would otherwise be useless to them.

The newer God of War games were pretty good about this, for instance. There were collectable ravens, which were usually found via sound cues; they would loudly caw for you to be able to track them down before you saw them. But if you only have one good ear, you can’t tell which direction the sound is coming from. The direction indicator bridges that gap, by adding a little arrow next to the raven cawing sound alert. For a more straightforward example, if an NPC says something, you get an arrow pointing to the NPC. Handy for when random NPCs have off-screen chatter.

"Best I can do is Mario loudly saying "Good Bye!" when you close your Nintendo DS to hide under your pillow."

~ Nintendo

I've seen games with either a totally separate "accessibility" section or tab, or the settings in related tabs and those settings also all in the accessibility menu.

I really really like this modern gaming thing where accessibility settings are now standard.

I cannot name the amount of times I've tried to press escape and skipped a cut scene when all I'm trying to do is bring up the menu to pause. I'll add to this 'cinema mode' which some games have. Let's you go in and view cutscenes again. Should be standardized.

And FOV axis setting. I hate when there's a limit on X axis FOV slider and it's still not wide enough for SUW

I'm playing Pokemon Moon right now and as annoying as the rotom can be I find the recap useful if maybe a little bit hand holdy.

Yeah, the steam deck does this, it's a great feature.

Yeah any setting that tries to make things photoreal needs to be able to be turned off. Fringing, vignette, motion blur. What's next? Strobing? Jfc. Like yeah those can all look really good if tumed properly. But tuning for everybody's monitor and everybody's room ambient light or sunlight is really tough. Let people at least turn them off, and if you've got time, you can add in some changeable values.

the bane of my eyes. I don't have glasses, but holy hell this effect starts to strain my eyes when games have it.

Toggleable, please.

Same do it some don't. Standardization would be great! I personally HATE when a game pauses when I tab to something else but I can see the benefit for others.

In his honor, I still lick walls in videogames to this day.

I always dread picking up a new game that is kinda demanding on the hardware because I hate to keep testing all graphical settings to have the best graphics with good fps. The least they could do is show a split scene with each setting on or off so you can judge with your eyes, but a button that you set the fps and the game crunches some numbers and benchmark to find the best quality graphics settings it can do at the target fps.

If it can adjust the graphics on demand would also be awesome because some games can have variable demands during gameplay.

And x-axis, just to be thorough. Especially for third person games since they still can't all agree on what the default should be.

I don't think I can name one game without a motion blur slider, or toggle.

Okay you can now control the shadow casting behavior of every single entity in the game individually. Happy?

A combined button would be great, but just having all of these settings able to be directly turned off would be great.

????

Why have you included ray tracing and DLSS among the actual blur causers?