Hear me out. A few games have shader installations that will usually apply any new settings you put down AFTER you restart the game, and a lot of other games have graphics settings that will only apply after you’ve rebooted the game.
I don’t think it would cost developers ANY amount of money or any significant development time to add a “Reboot game” button (or toggle) every time the player presses the quit button, or give the player a prompt every time they change a setting that requires a game restart (like in both PC versions of GTA V).
I also think ANY game should have a “full potato” mode capable of running in older computers with NONE of the fancy graphics stuff that we have access to today, despite having a decent computer now.
A way to start a fresh save. Or better yet, allow multiple saves/profiles. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to search online for where save files are located and delete them myself.
And if it’s a Steam game, you also have to worry about cloud saves undoing whatever you did. Please, just make it simple for players to do this.
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?
Om that note, see the save-tree would be nice. So you know when saves diverge and such.
For real. Especially if there are settings that permanently and drastically alter the game that you select when you start.
Chromatic Aberration toggle
Motion Blur toggle
Distortion Effect toggle
Vignette Effect toggle
FoV slider
DLSS/FSR implementation (cause fuck TAA, like really, really fuck TAA and its smear)
Oh, and Head Bobbing/Camera Shake slider, forgot about these
All fighting games (or anything that runs deterministically on all players’ machines, like fighting games do) should always have a performance test requirement before you hop online. We figured this out over a decade ago, and plenty still don’t do it, resulting in people with weak computers causing matches to appear laggy.
As a society, we should agree on which menu subtitles belong in. Is it language? Audio? Display? Game Settings? Sometimes I’ve seen games put them in multiple menus so that we always find them where we’re looking for them.
I’m no expert on colorblind settings, but I tried playing Monaco with someone who’s red/green colorblind, and that game was nearly impossible for him.
If your game runs online, I should be able to host the server myself, and launching a listen server from within the game ought to be present, too. It might be nice to surface port forward information there as well. LAN is nice; Direct IP connections are better. (Thanks, Larian, for including both!)
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.
As much as Starfield is hated, I like how they did the difficulty settings. Each type of interaction has different settings, the easier the less XP the harder the more XP earned. I like fragmented difficulty settings, not just easy, normal, hard and nightmare fuck myself have no fun.
When I want to quit your game, I mean it.
I do not want to be prompted several times as attempts to keep me in the game when I just want to leave.
Hopefully you never accidentally click the Quit button when you didnt mean to, lol
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.
Historically, it was conventional to have a “you have unsaved work” in a typical GUI application if you chose to quit, since otherwise, quit was a destructive action without confirmation.
Unless video games save on exit, you typically always have “unsaved work” in a video game, so I sort of understand where many video game devs are coming from if they’re trying to implement analogous behavior.
That’s a save changes? prompt, not an are you sure? prompt.
might sharing that, i had kinda started my own recently but curious if i missed anything obvious
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.
This is also hella common in a lot of online or multiplayer live service games recently. Forces you to alt-F4 if on PC. Especially bad with Sony’s playstation ports; they treat it like you’re on the PS5 and can just switch games to automatically close the running one.
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
There’s a roguelike I play, which combats save-scumming by only giving one save slot per character. And so the only reason to save the game, is when you’re done playing. So, you hit Ctrl+S to save, and it instantly quits as well. 🙃
Which is interesting, because at least for me, the main reason I try to save often like that is because of games like bethesda games or other games that don’t autosave and will crash, losing you HUGE amounts of progress.
Ah yeah, it does auto-save regularly, too. But I don’t think, I’ve ever seen it crash without me doing some out-of-game fuckery. 🙃
Well, and of course, losing progress is baked into the gameplay of a roguelike, so whether your savegame corrupts or you die yet another stupid death, you just start another run and you’re right back into the action.
System clock in the top right corner.
separe audio settings for bgm, sound effects, etc
Subtitles for the hearing impaired. Like when a switch flicks it writes click on the screen.
I’m not impaired, but I like to have the sound down for stealth gaming.
“Best I can do is Mario loudly saying “Good Bye!” when you close your Nintendo DS to hide under your pillow.”
~ Nintendo
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.
Ohh, that type of setting.
One option I really appreciated in Uncharted 4 was the ability to restart cutscenes, and I wish it was in every game with cutscenes.
Internet Connection - On/Off
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.
Yeah, you should be able to pick a specific version number for single player games. I’m fine with it defaulting to “latest”, but at least give me the option to stick to a specific version.
Also, fuck the “Would you like to share all data with the publisher, or only limited data” bullshit. It’s a single player game with no multiplayer whatsoever. I shouldn’t need to share any data with the publisher. If I see this shit, the game immediately gets blacklisted in my firewall.
That is a reason why offline installers are so important. At the very least we should be able to disable auto updates and still launch the (outdated) game.
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.
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.
The most frustrating for me was Immortals: Fenix Rising on the Switch. I refused to create an Ubisoft account and actually had to put my system on airplane mode so it would stop trying to force one on me.
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pausing during cutscenes - it’s weird that this isn’t always an option even in AAA
Also skipping them, please.
Another commented said Fully Remappable Controls, but I want to foot stomp it. On PC games, I use EDSF instead of WASD, but if some controls can’t be remapped and they overlap with EDSF then I won’t play the game.
On console, I fucking hate that Elden Ring maps “crouch/sneak” to pushing down on the movement stick. I’m furiously fighting for my fucking life against a boss that attacks every 0.7 seconds. I’m moving that stick as fast as I can, which means I’m pushing hard on it. It sucks to be trying to run away from an attack but then start crouching and sneaking away from a 40ft tall axe coming down on you.
I tend to clutch the remote when stressed. It’s highly frustrating when I’m in the middle of an intense gunfight and suddenly my character tries to melee. Having to push down and hold a thumb stick while doing other actions with my fingers makes my hand sore as well.
The ability to pause should be a requirement for single player games. Not being able to pause long cut scenes, combats, etc. is so frustrating when nobody else is impacted.
Any game completely opposed to pausing for whatever design reason should instead be required to have a minimum of 30 seconds between pauses to allow for interruptions while playing without it allowing for rapid pauses to impact game play. 30 seconds minimum is because of how many interruptions are immediately followed by another interruption by kids/spouses/parents/pets.
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
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.
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.
I have played a lot of games where pausing the game to get to game menus pauses cutscenes, generally ones where they use in game assets to do the cut scene. I would have to check to confirm, but I think BG3 let you pause by going to the menu and there was also a separate option to skip the cuts scene.
Definitely played a lot with unskippable cut scenes too. Mostly avoid those games now.
Ghosts of Yotei lets you pause during cut scenes. It doesn’t let you skip most cut scenes, though.
started Red Dead Redemption 1 last night, seems like just hitting esc during cutscene pauses it.
Admittedly I was wanting to go to settings and drop some settings, but that’s only allowed during gameplay, not cutscenes x)
It’s been a very common feature for the last few years and has been very rare before that so it really depends on when you started playing new releases. I’m in my mid-30s and pausing mid-cutscene definitely happended after I stopped being excited about my birthday.
Yeah, I’m probably what you’d call a patient gamer. Usually not playing anything more recent than 5 years old, and often way older.
Conversely I can’t remember a game in recent memory that didn’t let me pause in cutscenes.
Just off of my head: Ubisoft games, Control, Shadow of Mordor, Crysis, Witchers, Borderlands 2, Devil May Cry, Celeste had it.
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.
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.
Oh yeah that was the worst. Game devs really shooting themselves in the foot with that design.
Once paused, should it just be a single button? Maybe a menu with an “are you sure? Y/n”, or maybe a hold down one or two buttons together for a couple seconds like on consoles?
Yeah, pause and skip should be separate things. I have some games pm PC where the ESC key pauses and brings up the menu but to skip the scene you have to be watching it and then hold some specific button like mouse 1 for a couple of seconds to skip. Those are my favorites because I have time to reconsider skipping!
If your game supports controller give me the option to change the button faces to whatever I prefer. Some people like Nintendo button layout, others PlayStation, other Xbox. Whatever it is, don’t hard code one set - they’re just some pngs, support them all.
An FOV slider. I don’t care if you’re a 2D game, you’re honoring totalBiscuit
In his honor, I still lick walls in videogames to this day.
