What is something (feature, modes, settings...) you would like to see become a standard in video games?

Plume (She/Her)@beehaw.org to Gaming@beehaw.org – 143 points –

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. :)

289

You are viewing a single comment

I'm still waiting for split-screen coop on the PC version of the Master Chief Collection. Something they managed to achieve easily enough when Halo CE launched on PC 22 years ago still eludes developers today...

Having played Halo CE for PC recently...no, it doesn't have split screen at all. That was only on the Xbox version (which is technically superior in quite a few ways). The only way to have split screen on Halo CE on PC is via console commands/mods. That said, I do agree with your overall point and I would love to be able to do split screen MCC on my PC without mods.

I suppose that if you were hellbent on specifically setting this up, you could maybe do multiple VMs split onscreen, though last I looked, the situation for sharing 3d hardware across multiple VMs wasn't great, and I am sure that it would be horribly inefficient, since each VM would be storing a duplicate copy of textures in VRAM. I have no idea how the PC version of Halo CE deals with weird aspect ratios.

It also wouldn't have some integration like switching to a single large screen for cutscenes or the menu. But if you were just specifically hellbent on creating a multiplayer, single-screen Halo experience on the PC, you might be able to pull it off like that.

Another approach, if the hardware cost is acceptable, would be to have a laptop per player and then stream the output video to some multiplexing hardware that puts multiple screens on one TV. That would buy you per-player audio, which I don't believe was possible on the original XBox release.