The first time I boot up the game, immediately show me the settings menu. Whether its window settings, sound volume, subtitles, or graphics settings, please do not make me sit through a long cutscene or (god forbid) make me play the game without being able to adjust settings first. Sometimes the window is screwed up, the graphics are pushing my system too hard, or any number of other issues on first boot.

I can think of 1 or 2 games that booted to settings or booted to a truncated settings menu with common settings, but I would love if this became standard for all PC games.

Motion blur - OFF Screenshake - OFF

Internet Connection - On/Off

The ability to pause should be a requirement for single player games. Not being able to pause long cut scenes, combats, etc. is so frustrating when nobody else is impacted.

Any game completely opposed to pausing for whatever design reason should instead be required to have a minimum of 30 seconds between pauses to allow for interruptions while playing without it allowing for rapid pauses to impact game play. 30 seconds minimum is because of how many interruptions are immediately followed by another interruption by kids/spouses/parents/pets.

All controls should be remappable. All means all. Not most, not some, and certainly none of this bullshit where all you can do is toggle between "XBox 360 controller layout A/XBox 360 controller layout B." This is especially true for titles on consoles, many of which still to this very day don't allow you to remap their controls at all.

For 3D games, field of view. Far too many developers of FPS titles in particular have Console Disease, and feel it's somehow acceptable to lock the FOV to 70° or some absurd number. If they allow you to adjust it at all they may be feeling "generous" enough to let you go as high as 90°. That's completely unacceptable. On my 4K monitor that's 25" from my face, I need at least 120°. Honestly, I want to see that slider go up to 180°. That's right, I want to be able to look at your game world like a goddamned pigeon. On that note I really have to wonder what those people with those 3840x1080 überwide monitors do most of the time, other than spending their days in never ending torment.

Allow me to turn off the stupid pre-launch splash titles. Certainly at least after the first startup. I certainly don't need to be told that nVidia is the way it's meant to be played, or that your company licensed Havok, or who your publisher is, or who your publisher's owner is, or who your publisher's owner's owner is, etc. Nobody cares. Usually instead you have to resort to replacing the .mkv or .bik files in the game folder with zero-byte text files or something. It's dumb.

While we're griping, and speaking of Console-Itis, does every PC game now need to have an unskippable message telling me that this game has auto save and urging me not to turn off my PC when the icon is being displayed? Really? Nobody's going to do that. Tell me your game is a shitty console port without telling me your game is a shitty console port. To keep this on topic, let's have a setting to turn that off, too, because it's stupid. Off by default would be nice. Should there be an Idiot Mode toggle?

Granularity in subtitles. It seems too many games only have two settings: All subtitles off, or they assume you're completely deaf. Typically I want to be able to read what characters are saying in their voice lines, but instead the developers also think I need to see the bottom third of my screen filled with [BOOM] [GUNFIRE] [JUKEBOX MUSIC] [FOOTSTEPS] [BOOM] [GUNFIRE] [BOOM] [BOOM] and so on and so forth, all the time. They should either categorize sounds and make their subtitling things individually selectable, or at least if they insist on making it a slider give it three or four levels: Off, cutscene/conversation dialog only, all spoken lines ("Cover me!" "Reloading!" "Never should have come here!" etc.), and then only the top level resulting in every single cricket and rustle of grass being captioned. Some games do manage to accomplish this. Many do not.

Oh, I thought of a good one to add to my wish list. I want every game to bring back the sound test menu. But they won't, because every studio on Earth now wants you to spend an extra $15 for their game's soundtrack. (As if it's not all going to be on Youtube about twelve seconds after release anyway...)

An option to choose what controller glyphs I want to use (Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo, directional) and a option to always use those glyphs even when mouse input is detected, so I can use Gyro without the glyphs constantly flickering ☺️

Not quite a setting, but every game should be required to tell you how long ago the last save was when you quit the game. I absolutely don't understand why it's only a tiny minority of games that does this, it is such an obvious thing to do

This is totally unrealistic but it would be sweet if there was a button for showing you a compilation of recent cutscenes or something for when you havnt played a story heavy game in a while and forgot what’s going on.

Like in the main menu give me a memory button or whatever that basically brings me up to speed to where I left off. Could be replaying cutscenes or showing me text of recent events, who knows 🤷‍♀️

But there are too many times i have to put a deep rpg down and then life gets in the way and picking it up again becomes impossible when it doesn’t feel like I’m there anymore

pausing during cutscenes - it's weird that this isn't always an option even in AAA

When I want to quit your game, I mean it.

I do not want to be prompted several times as attempts to keep me in the game when I just want to leave.

Customisable difficulty. Have a single or multiple presets balanced to what you'd like your players to experience but give me an option to adjust some of the stuff to my liking. There are SO MANY games I'd love to play way more than I do but none of the difficulty options feel "right", bringing the whole experience down.
It's also a great feature from an accessibility standpoint - pretty important thing for those who literally can't play your game for reasons that could be easily worked around if such customisation was there.

"But my artistic integrity and vision!"

No, shut up. Your vision doesn't mean squat if my experience with the game is annoying to the point where I don't even care about the lore implication of an enemy placement or how gameplay systems intertwine with themes and story of the game. It's important, sure, but it shouldn't be more important than player's enjoyment of your product.

Balance your game how you imagine it but let me play with the sliders to make it feel how I want it to. Just drop a scary message about it not being the intended way to play and it'll be fine.

If I'm going to put 100+ hours into a game, there better be a setting to mute BGM, because no matter how good the OST is I will eventually tire of it and want to listen to something else.

Enterable values for mouse sensitivity.

No sliders.

I'm talking, down to at least the thousandths place decimal, and up as high as I fucking want. This allows your mouse sensitivity to not only account for how you play, but also how everybody else plays.

And if you're one of those devs that has the aiming be different than mouse cursor, or even MULTIPLE mouse cursor speed settings, HAVE ENTERABLE VALUES FOR THOSE TOO!!

Sometimes I'm at 1% and it's too high still.

Sometimes I'm at 1% and it's too low and 2% is too high.

For over-the-shoulder games, separate field-of-view AND CAMERA DISTANCE.

For player-hosted games, an option to reject hosts using unsuitable hardware or low bandwidth, high latency networks. My gripe is specific to Warframe on the Switch 1, but if the developers of any game can't/won't operate public game servers and choose to offload the responsibility to the players, the choice should belong to the players.

Local server

Edit: or any server

Here’s a simple one. On PC, a lot of games let you use the keyboard/mouse or a controller. On some games it’ll switch the prompts to the layout of the last type of input you used. However I tend to use a controller for everything, except I’ll use a mouse for more fine tuned control since I suck at aiming with a joystick. But then what happens is the input notifications switch to keyboard/mouse and sometimes don’t switch back.

I’d love to see an option to force which input style gets displayed on screen. Keyboard/Controller/Auto

A way to start a fresh save. Or better yet, allow multiple saves/profiles. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to search online for where save files are located and delete them myself.

And if it's a Steam game, you also have to worry about cloud saves undoing whatever you did. Please, just make it simple for players to do this.

Chromatic aberration and film grain. If your game has either of those and no way to turn them off, I wish you a slow, painful death and I will probably refund it.

All fighting games (or anything that runs deterministically on all players' machines, like fighting games do) should always have a performance test requirement before you hop online. We figured this out over a decade ago, and plenty still don't do it, resulting in people with weak computers causing matches to appear laggy.

As a society, we should agree on which menu subtitles belong in. Is it language? Audio? Display? Game Settings? Sometimes I've seen games put them in multiple menus so that we always find them where we're looking for them.

I'm no expert on colorblind settings, but I tried playing Monaco with someone who's red/green colorblind, and that game was nearly impossible for him.

If your game runs online, I should be able to host the server myself, and launching a listen server from within the game ought to be present, too. It might be nice to surface port forward information there as well. LAN is nice; Direct IP connections are better. (Thanks, Larian, for including both!)

separe audio settings for bgm, sound effects, etc

Pause and save during cutscenes.

1. Developers should spend effort vouching for a launch without startup logos. Even if supporting libraries/publishers are credited some other way, startup movies take up a lot of time when gamers launch the game many times.
2. Trails in the Sky has a feature where you can choose to launch the game directly into your most recent save game rather than ending up at the menus. This would be a boon for many singleplayer games, especially those with densely animated menus.

Subtitles for the hearing impaired. Like when a switch flicks it writes click on the screen.

I'm not impaired, but I like to have the sound down for stealth gaming.

I get enough of this from my glasses, thanks.

If your game supports controller give me the option to change the button faces to whatever I prefer. Some people like Nintendo button layout, others PlayStation, other Xbox. Whatever it is, don't hard code one set - they're just some pngs, support them all.

An FOV slider. I don't care if you're a 2D game, you're honoring totalBiscuit

Please let me invert y-axis for games where I control the field of view. Nothing takes me out of a game like suddenly staring at my feet when I try to look up.

Pause on focus loss/main menu. It's so simple, but often missing.

Every game should have the option to toggle motion blur off, toggle frame gen and upscaling off.

• Description of the effects and hardware demands of graphics options.
• An actual benchmark for 'optimized settings' (even if it's just crunching numbers) instead of hardcoded GPU names.
• Clear indication of which difficulty the game was balanced for.
• Msaa. Hate running old games at 200 fps with jagged edges and blur thanks to fxaa.
• Instant controls switching between controller and keyboard. Tired of games that pick input type at startup, pick input glyphs at startup, ignore first button press from a different input before switching, disable controller if keyboard input is detected etc etc.
• Not games but steam: just let me force steam input on all games like Proton.

Also how 'full potato' do you want it to be? I assume the settings don't scale below low, so it'd be just turning off shadows, reflections etc. Would even the lowest resolution textures fit in the vram of an older card? And besides, the engine is probably designed for modern multi core cpus so even if the graphics could be scaled down it might not run well

Not a setting, but a "here's what you did last time/here's where you need to go now". If it's been a little while since I played the game, I shouldn't be lost trying to figure out where I am or where I'm going.

Nude mode. We're all grown ups here.

A combined off switch for TAA, Ray Tracing, DLSS, frame generation, and all of that nonsense.

I hate that games now turn to soup when in motion, even with motion blur off.