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. :)
Fully (or at least more) customisable controller settings. It's not difficult. Let me bind what controls I want to what button I want. And adjust the stick dead zone, god damn. Why are you giving me pre set control schemes when we've had fully customizable controls figured out for decades? Fuck you game
You should look into Steam Input (if you have a Steam Deck, you may have already messed with it), but it allows a mind-blowing amount of control customization for any game you're launching through Steam. Most games will also have community presets you can easily use.
Inverting view or turning on gyro controls is trivial. It goes shockingly deep. You can create radial menus if you want, it's wild.
Yes! To add to this, please let me invert the analog stick camera controls. Both axis! My biggest pet peeve is when a game let's you invert the Y axis, but not the X... Why? You were so close dammit how much effort is adding the other really?
I can understand inverting the Y axis, because aircraft use the opposite of what FPSes typically do -- push forward to pitch the plane's nose down.
But why do you want the X axis to be reversed? I can't think of any system out there that operates with an inverted X axis.
thinks for a while
I guess maybe the tiller on a boat.
It makes sense for me in third person games. Imagine a stick stuck in the protagonist head from behind. You are the camera behind the character, imagine you grabbing the stick and rotating the head with that. You have to pull the stick down for the character to look up, and push it upwards to look down. By the same logic, you have to move it left for the character to look right, and vice versa. The stick is the analog stick on the gamepad.
Once you get used to this control scheme, it's quite hard to re-learn non-inverted controls.
Explanation image I found: https://content.spiceworksstatic.com/service.community/p/post_images/0000412854/5fca4fbc/attached_image/yvgNiFE.jpg
It's more for the camera control rather than the character control