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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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  • As I travel a lot, I would love to see a true eco mode for my laptop. Something that would keep my fans quiet (2500rpm max).

    Some games allow for FPS capping and lower settings, but it's not always the case. Sometimes tweaking the settings doesn't seem to make any difference to power consumption. Sometimes your only way to cap FPS is to rely on VSync, which doesn't make much when you play on 120Hz screen.

    Metro Exodus is a good example of an almost impossible to tweak game.

    I think it would be nice to have a dedicated travelling mode. It would effectively help people with lower specs and entice developers to produce a more efficient code, rather than pushing for costly gears.

    As a developer myself I know very well it costs money. But if I had a wish to make I'll go for this one

    • Hmm. I think that a better way to do it is probably in the OS, rather than in-game, on a per-game basis.

      Processors thermal-throttle today, and OSes can limit what modes they're allowed to shift into. And my guess is that usually, if someone wants to constrain performance, they want to do it systemwide, rather than for an individual game.

      On the game developer end, if the player wants to play both in a performance-limited and not-performance-limited mode, I'd think that there are probably two ways to go about that:

      1. Permit for two different sets of saved video settings, where the player can flip between them. Honestly, I think that this is probably more tweaking than most players are going to do.

      2. Provide some kind of adaptive quality mechanism. Then, if the computer becomes "lower end", then the adaptive quality system just twiddles settings until the target framerate is maintained.

      There's also a third point you make here, and that is that in a world with battery-powered devices, CPU/GPU usage actually matters. It's not zero-cost to just use whatever's available. I remember submitting an issue some time back for Caves of Qud, where the thing ran a busy loop when the window didn't have focus, even though the game was paused (which the dev fixed, kudos to them). I noticed it because the fans would spool up when the game was in the background. That's a game that, because it's turn-based, has the potential to use very little CPU time, even when the game is in the foreground.

      I think that there's a fair argument that historically, most game developers, aside from maybe mobile or portable console guys, haven't needed to worry much about consuming resources if they were available.

      Speaking as a player, though, I don't much care about power consumption if a system has wall power. But I care a lot about it if it's battery-powered.

      For phones, I kind of wish that Google would consider providing a "battery usage" rating in the app store that provides some kind of approximate metric for how much CPU time the game uses while active -- if Google is going to send all kinds of telemetry from devices, might as well use that for something useful. Maybe permit the game developer to register multiple "modes" (high-power, low-power) and give a ranking for each. As things stand, though, there's no way for the potential customer to know power consumption, and this would help push that information out to the customer.

      • I think that a better way to do it is probably in the OS, rather than in-game, on a per-game basis

        Low power mode on macOS gives that kind of feature. It works well because the computer never goes beyond a certain threshold of power. I guess it's a simple downclock of some sort, but the caveat is that it won't adapt to more demanding zones of the game.

        Permit for two different sets of saved video settings, where the player can flip between them. Honestly, I think that this is probably more tweaking than most players are going to do.

        I used to do exactly that with macros in World Of Warcraft. I had 3 different kind of setup for Efficiency, Balanced and Quality gaming. That game was the first that I know of to introduce built-in FPS capping during WOTLK extension, and 10 different settings mode plus the ability to make even more custom tweaks. My only wish is that every game developer to do the same.

        Provide some kind of adaptive quality mechanism. Then, if the computer becomes “lower end”, then the adaptive quality system just twiddles settings until the target framerate is maintained.

        Speaking of WoW, there is a target FPS setting that will make the game lower the compute demand, but it wouldn't help in my case since it's meant to use as much compute power as possible to reach an FPS goal. It could do the trick if it could be coupled to a Don't use more than 50% of the compute power, but I'm not sure a game can understand how much a computer has without reaching its limit first. Maybe some kind of benchmarking could help though.

        Speaking as a player, though, I don’t much care about power consumption if a system has wall power.

        Me neither. But I do enjoy a silent machine !

        For phones, I kind of wish that Google would consider providing a “battery usage” rating in the app store that provides some kind of approximate metric for how much CPU time the game uses while active.

        That would be very useful indeed! And another incentive for developers to write better code.

        Thank you for your answer anyway!

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