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. :)
I like how in Breath of the Wild, when it tells you to a button like ‘A’ or ‘Y’ for example, it shows you where that button is relative to the others. This way, if you aren’t super familiar with the controller, you don’t need to take your eyes off the screen.
Games needs to take into consideration people who are not used to playing. Games telling you “Press L3/R3” are the worst especially, most new player don’t even know that the sticks can click!
Hmm. I don’t know.
I agree that it’s a valid insight that a lot of basic input things are not explained and that it’s not obvious to a first time user.
But on the other hand, I think that the vast majority of players have, at this point, learned.
I remember way back when the personal computer was getting going, the first (or maybe second) Macintosh came out with an audio tape that one could play in conjunction with an automated demo showing how to click on things and drag and so forth. What icons and menus were. Today, we just kind of assume that people know that, because they’ve picked them up on the way, so it’s not like individual software packages have a tutorial telling someone what a window is and how to use it.
And I remember being at a library where there was some “computer training for senior citizens” thing going on near me, and some elderly lady was having trouble figuring out double-clicking and the instructor there said “don’t worry, double-clicking is one of the hardest things”. I mentally kind of rolled my eyeballs, but then I thought about that. I mean, I’d been double-clicking for years, and I bet that the first time I started out, I probably dicked it up too.
But I don’t know if the way to do that is to have every game incorporate a tutorial on the console’s hardware doing things like teaching players that the console sticks are clickable. Like, maybe the real answer is that the console should have a short tutorial. Most consoles these days seem to have an intrinsic concept of user accounts. When creating one, maybe run through the hardware tutorial.
Nintendo is very good about this in all their games. I think it’s primarily because on the Switch, if you are using an individual JoyCon, the actual button names are not consistent, so you have to rely on the position of the button to convey which one you want players to press. I don’t think you can control BOTW or TOTK with an individual JoyCon, but I imagine they have those assets just ready to go.