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. :)
Keep a rotating history of 20 or so autosaves/checkpoints, not 1, in case the last autosave was at a bad spot. Storage space is cheap. Yeah, I can do that myself with manual saves, but why make me do that? Maintaining that isn't a fun part of the game for me, and it's easy for the developer to do.
Baldur's Gate 3 does this, and the number of saves is configurable. It's nice.
This saved my butt the other day! I got some message that my current save was corrupted or detected tampering? and to stop playing on it. I was able to go back a couple of auto saves, find a good one, and not have to do a bunch of content over again!
It's not a technical limitation but a balance one usually
20 Auto save slots can mean going really far back on decisions the dev might want to be more permanent for you
Having at least an extra 1 for avoiding soft locks though is a really good idea, and it's annoying when it happend
At the point the game allows multiple manual saves, rewinding decisions is trivial. There is not much of a point in restricting autosaves too.
The only way a game can enforce permanent decisions is if it only has auto-saves, in which case it could have a couple hidden backup saves just to prevent any issue from ruining people's progress. Even then that's not enough if players are willing to tinker, but at least it's not trivial.
Online saves are an option too but I wouldn't be too fond of a game that is needlessly restricted to online-only just to make decisions permanent.
Also, at least on the PC, it's possible to just back up saves.
I mean, I feel like there's legitimately value to having an "ironman mode", but I'd really like to have the option not to use it, for a number of reasons.
One of which is that sometimes games have bugs -- I just hit a bug in Starfield that was easily worked around by rolling back to an earlier save and taking a slightly different action. However, Starfield had autosaved between the action that triggered the bug and it becoming visible to the player, which would have been a problem if (a) I hadn't manually saved prior to that and (b) Starfield didn't do the multiple-autosave-slot thing.
The player can always impose not using saves on themselves, but they can't debug games.
Definitely, technical problems are another reason not to be overly strict.
Ironman mode absolutely has value, but this gets into a greater discussion that I feel more gamers should keep in mind. The value of these restrictions and challenges are your entertainment as well as fairness towards the people you are actively playing with. Game rules are all arbitrary by definition. It doesn't really matter if someone playing by themselves completes an Ironman mode fairly or cheats at it.
It's because gamers were convinced to take game rules more seriously than they deserve that today some believe that fictional items in a remote server they don't control can be worth hundreds of dollars. That hundreds of hours of RPG grind are somehow a necessary requirement to play a match of a game with someone else, and also that paying to rush this entirely artificial aspect of the game is worthwhile.
If the developers of a game prefer that it's played in Ironman that's fair, but there is no need to come up with exceedingly complex and restrictive solutions to police how people play. If they don't want to play differently, that's fine too.