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Plume (She/Her) @beehaw.org

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

  • Here's a really small and easy to fix pet peeve of mine: graphics options that cycle through the levels of fidelity with inconsistent scales. I like to set my graphics to max, try it out, and then adjust down where needed. It's very annoying if a game doesn't stop where the max option is, so if it's currently at "High" I have no idea if the next option to the right is going to be "Very High" or "Low" again. So I often end up overshooting the highest setting and having to go back one, or purposefully going to the lowest setting and then one further.

    • Yup. Ideally there should always some kind of indicator, like a bar, that lets you easily see how many steps there are and which one is selected.

      Also: If there are graphics presets available, if there's one that's called "highest" or "max" then that should actually crank everything to the highest possible setting.

      • that should actually crank everything to the highest possible setting.

        While I can understand where you're coming from, one thing I wonder about -- I think that a lot of people want to use the max setting and expect it to work. It's not unreasonable for a developer to choose ranges such that a max setting doesn't run reasonably on any current hardware, as doing that may provide for scalability on future hardware. Like, it's easy for me to make a game that can scale up to future hardware -- e.g. try to keep more textures loaded in VRAM than exists on any hardware today, or have shadow resolutions that simply cannot be computed by existing hardware in a reasonable amount of time. But maybe in five years, the hardware can handle it.

        If a game developer has the highest-quality across-the-board quality setting not work on any existing system, then I think that you're going to wind up with people who buy a fancy PC, choose the "max" setting, and then complain "this game isn't optimized, as I bought expensive hardware and it runs poorly on Ultra/Max/whatever mode".

        But if the game developer doesn't let the settings go higher, then they're hamstringing people who might be using the software five or ten years down the line.

        I think that one might need a "maximum reasonable on existing hardware" setting or something like that.

        I've occasionally seen "Insane" with a recommendation that effectively means something like that, "this doesn't run on any existing hardware well, but down the line, it might". But I suspect that there are people who are still going to choose that setting and be unhappy if it doesn't perform well.

289 comments