Skip Navigation
Gaming @beehaw.org 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. :)

288

You're viewing a single thread.

288 comments

  • I 100% agree with accessibility features. This includes some of the newer considerations.

    • no-strobe mode
    • normalized volume mode (makes it so sound doesn't spike up suddenly, sudden loud noises are not nice)
    • greater setting for subtitles, size, color, descriptive vs transcription. And keep ui elements out of the caption zones!
    • documentation written in simple language for ease of readability.
    • read back for all written content. Not just the first damn word of a text box. (Seriouly a lot of games do this now its this is just annoying!)

    I once saw a thing where a DM (D&D) had an anonymous survey of common sensitive topics. He'd gage what his players where comfortable with prior to starting a campaign and adjust the story accordingly. Games just need this.

    • greater setting for subtitles, size, color, descriptive vs transcription. And keep ui elements out of the caption zones!

      I can not tell you how many times I have missed key dialog because the Xbox achievement pane pops up over it for a full 5 seconds.

      Starfield has also been atrocious about random NPC flavor text covering the main dialog, so I will miss full sentences in the middle of quests.

      • I've only seen that a couple times, but yeah, the fact that NPCs can be off doing their own thing -- the engine is a pretty open sandbox -- can mean that they're talking during a cutscene, and the way Starfield works, whichever character started talking first gets priority for the caption -- the other caption only comes up after the first one finishes.

        I kind of wish that they'd just stack the captions onscreen.

    • no-strobe mode

      If this is for epileptic users who can get seizures from strobing, I disagree. This is a safety feature. It should not be in the video game, where it may-or-may not be reliably implemented and the algorithm to avoid it may differ from game to game. This is something that the OS should implement across the whole system. Like, if the user having a seizure is a risk, then I don't want to trust that every game developer or movie maker or person embedding an animated GIF on a website is going to have a toggle and that it works. I want my OS telling my video card "give me average brightness frame to frame, and if average brightness is gyrating too much frame to frame, then put a clamp on that now".

      For video game consoles, maybe it should be the TV that implements it, rather than the console.

      It should even be possible to stick an intermediate hardware box between the display and the video-outputting device that detects and filters it, if one wants to use existing displays. Like, I get if someone wants to have detection and filtering, but has a large-screen display that they don't want to replace. If I had photosensitive epilepsy, I would definitely want to be sticking such a box on any large displays that I'm looking at in the dark.

      To put it another way: if someone not having a seizure depends on 4chan users not posting animated GIFs with particular characteristics, then the system is already horribly broken.

You've viewed 288 comments.