This is my #1 request. I only have time for 1 game, so if I return to something, I sometimes have to start over bc I've no clue where I left off.

oh man. It's wild how prestige games are always trying so hard to be like prestige movies and TV, but somehow they have not yet adopted the practice of the recap.

Ohh, Pokémon games used to have this!

I need this, ha ha!

That and a consistent single key pause button would be fantastic for a parental features

dragon quest 11 did this, it was so helpful

Yes! I almost always change a few of the buttons when I get the chance. Extra points if the game is nice enough to let you know when your changes conflict with other presets.

A lot of PC games let you change mouse and keyboard bindings, but not controller bindings, because they have "keyboard and mouse mode" or "console mode" if the controller is used.

I've got no problem with having a sensible set of defaults, but if I get a controller with more buttons, unless this is a competitive multiplayer game that needs a level playing field, I'd like to be able to take advantage of them.

oooooh i love that. Like Amazon Prime Video's X-ray feature (which i really wish other streaming services would adopt).

This so much. Hate it when the cat desides to destroy the whole flat for no actuall reason. You test the pause button just to see it is skipping and you did not safe before the cutscene. so no going back watching the scene.

Baldur's Gate 3 does this, and the number of saves is configurable. It's nice.

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

I loved how the Witcher 3 did a brief recap of the current story step in the loading screen, just enough to make you remember what was going on.

Parent mode lol

Yes! I gave up playing Doom Eternal and then went back to it after a few months and I just kept getting killed instantly. I forgot how to play it!

Ghost of tsushima does that and won my heart for it. (well for that it won even more)

The only way I could ever play Skyrim was with the Arachnophobia mod that replaced all spiders with bears

I can only imagine this.

Villager: "Chosen One, you must slay the Queen..."

Poorly-recorded masculine voice cutting in: "Bear"

Villager: "...before her egg sacs hatch and all of her..."

Poorly-recorded masculine voice cutting in: "bear cubs"

Villager: "...start swarming over the area!"

Satisfactory swaps the giant spiders with cat heads and even with my slight arachnophobia, I still prefer the spiders. The cat head floating towards you are somehow even creepier.

One of my all-time favorite games, Barony, just added an option that replaces spiders with isopods. I'm not an arachnophobe, but I thought it was funny and thoughtful that they did that.

This starts to devolve as an idea kinda fast because someone out there has a phobia for every single thing. I do agree though on spiders specifically. I do not have arachnophobia but its so common and giant spiders are kinda overplayed in fantasy anyways, that I dont think theyd be missed.

When I first played house flipper my apartment was in the middle of a roach infestation. I was very happy to have the option to turn off roaches

Search bars for settings are pretty great, especially when they match against alternate names for the same option.

Dear God, yes, font size options, PLEASE! I cannot express just how depressing it is to finally get a game I've been wanting to play so badly for years only to immediately realize I can't play the damn thing because I can't see the text to read it and figure out what the hell is going on or what I'm supposed to do. :(

One of my favorite steam deck features is being able to use gyro controls for any game. It's not always as smooth as the Switch, but it works pretty well to add a bit of additional fine-grained control to the course-grained control of the R-stick.

Doom on the switch was amazing for this. I tried to play Doom eternal on the ps4, afterwards, and it was just such a disappointment because it didn't have gyro.

Hell yeah. I didn't put this in my post because I didn't want it to turn into a debate about the validity and viability of gyro controls (it is, if you don't think so, you're just wrong). So thanks for putting it.

My problem with analog sticks in FPSes isn't fine-grained control -- most games have zoom, and auto-aim has done a lot to mitigate lack of acuracy. My problem is coarse-grained control -- that is, it takes ages in an FPS to turn around at maximum turn speed, whereas a mouse player can rapidly snap around if they are, say, attacked from the side or behind.

I've seen some people talk about hacking together some mechanism to try to deal with this using the Steam Controller and Steam Input -- I think that it might have been something like a double-tap-to-rapidly-turn, but my impression is that whatever was going on there was more-elaborate than just the combination of an analog stick and a gyro for fine movement.

Do you just eventually get used to gyro aim?

Everyone I know that's gotten good with it swears up and down about it but 10 or so hours with Splatoon 2 and I felt like I didn't get ANY better with it

This is from someone who's pretty damn good at fps games, usually top 3 on the scoreboard no matter what game it is, so I'm not just bad at the games themselves

I bought FFXVI on launch day and decided to go the story difficulty. Best decision ever, and such an interesting way to do it. You basically get these special rings that make aspects of the game easier, like dodging and attack timing. You can always unequip them if you want to try the game with harder mechanics. The rings also take accessory slots, which you only have 3 of, so you have have to consider things like "Do I want this agility boost? Or my time-stop dodges?" Interesting to trade out game nerfs for stats or other effects.

But yeah. Story modes are great. I played Horizon on easy. Had a blast and didn't get frustrated.

One of the worst arguments I had online was me saying that's great in single player but not unilaterally in multiplayer, and people got mad. I still think about it sometimes.

But generally yeah, agreed. Caves of Qud added a roleplay mode so dying sends you back to town instead of forcing a new game, and it's real nice even if it's not the traditional rogue like.

I'm so happy Baldur's gate 3 does this. I have all the borderlands games and for some awful reason they don't have local split screen. Just why?

And also sound files for different languages. I'm only going to need one of them, there's no point in having to download it for like 7 different languages.

Oh! Yes! That's one thing that's been driving me nuts too. Games are getting larger and larger but there's no actual good reasons as to why. >.<

Laughs in WarCraft III: Reforged

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!

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.

As someone who is a little bit more interested in the story, I would love it if games had better story recaps for when you put the game down for extended periods of time too. If it's a game with player choice track the major choices the player makes as well. I restart games so much because I like to jump around between games and then when I get back to some I can't remember enough about what was happening to have any investment in the story anymore.

In the complete opposite direction, "I just want to enjoy the story" mode, which simplifies or removes more mechnically difficult sections of the game. A few games have this and it's great. I appreciated it in Danganrompa.

Then people would report it as a bug that the game is too quiet

Yup. Ideally there should always some kind of indicator, like a bar, that lets you easily see how many steps there are and which one is selected.

Also: If there are graphics presets available, if there's one that's called "highest" or "max" then that should actually crank everything to the highest possible setting.

Linux-friendly anti-cheat

Anti-cheat systems in general tend to be fragile to changes in the game environment.

Honestly, I used to want that, and I'll believe that game devs could do better than they do today, but honestly, I think that the problem is, end of the day, fundamentally not a technically-solvable one. The only way you're going to reasonably-reliably do anti-cheat stuff is going to be to have a trusted system, where the player can't do anything to their system.

I'd say that it's one of the stronger arguments for consoles in general versus PC gaming. On a console, the playing field is pretty much level. Everyone has the same software running on their system, the same number of frames on their screen. Maybe there might be limited differences to the controller or better latency to a server, but that's it. It's hard to modify the system to get that edge. A console is pretty close to the ideal system for competitive multiplayer stuff. On a PC, in a (real-time) competitive multiplayer game, someone is always going to have some level of an edge. Like, the ability to get higher resolution or more frames per second, the ability of games to scale up to use better hardware, is fundamentally something of a pay-to-win baked into the system.

There will always be a place for competitive multiplayer games, but I honestly think that a better route forward for many games is to improve game AI from where it is today and then use computer opponents more heavily. While humans make for a very smart enemy "AI" in a lot of ways, and using them may be a technically-easier problem than doing comparable enemy AI, there are also all kinds of baggage that fundamentally come with competitive multiplayer play:

• Limited lifespan for the game. At some point, nobody (or not many) people will be playing the game any more, even if it doesn't depend on the game publisher to operate online servers. At that point, the game will head into the dustbin of history -- it'll be hard to meet the threshold to get enough people together at any one time to play a game. Multiplayer games are mortal, and single-player games are immortal.

• You can't pause. Or, well, you can, but then that doesn't scale up to many players and can create its own set of problems. A lot of people need to change an infant's diaper or get the door or take a call. They can play against computers, but they can't (reasonably) play against other players.

• Cheating.

• Griefing.

• Sometimes optimal human strategy isn't...all that much fun to actually play against. Like, I remember playing the original Team Fortress, and that a strategy was to have classes that could set up static defenses (pipe bombs, lasers, turrets, etc) set them up right atop spawn points. That may well be a good strategy in the game, but it's also not a lot of fun for the other players.

• Immersion. Doesn't matter for all games, but for some it does. I don't expect humans to role-play, to stay in character, because I know that it's work and i don't want to hassle with it myself. But, end of the day, playing against xxPussySlayer69xx is kind of immersion-breaking.

• Latency is always going to be an issue. You can mitigate it a bit with prediction and engine improvements or more telecom infrastructure, but the laws of physics still place constraints on the speed of light. There are ways you can minimize it -- LAN parties, if you can get enough people. Regional servers, though that guy who lives in Hawaii is always gonna just have a hard time of it. But it's always going to be there; you're never going to truly have a level playing field.

• The game is intrinsically mandatory-online. If you have a spotty or no connection, the game doesn't work.

Another issue is the advance of technology. If it isn't there now, I can imagine a generic AI engine, something like Havok is for physics, becoming widespread. And as that improves, one can get more-and-more compelling AI. Plus, hardware is getting better. But humans are, well, human. Humanity isn't getting better at being a game opponent over the years. So my long-run bet is gonna be on game AI tending to edge in on humans as an opponent for human players.

Texture resolution isnt the same as screen space resolution, textures have to be wrapped around what might be complex, high surface area models. And dont forget how close you can get to things, where just a fraction of a whole model is filling your whole screen.

The option would still be nice but 4k textures do have an effect even on lower resolution screens.

I don't think making it the default is realistic.

But steam offers games to offer custom branches for users to select. It would not be particularly difficult for publishers to provide one (or more) lower resolution asset branch for users to select. I really wish Steam had taken advantage of publishers wanting to support Steam deck to nudge them into doing this.

You can't?! I thought this was already a standard thing

justpause mod in Satisfactory. Agree, should be standard.

I don't think I count as a polyglot (Native English, Spanish proficient, learning Japanese and German) but what is that even useful for? I feel like it'd be really confusing to have two subtitles for the same dialogue.

I just watch, in whatever language I want to practice.

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?

And always have a way to pause cutscenes.

And to rewatch if you accidentally dismiss the cutscene.

Cut scenes should have the standard playback controls: Pause, stop, next/previous part, subtitles. They should also be available for later replay.

I thought modern games didn't do this anymore.

Character speed control is even older than that; many of Sierra's games in the 1980s/early 1990s (like King's Quest, Space Quest, etc.) had them. Adjusting them made some of them even easier, because it didn't affect enemies, allowing you to easily evade them during chase scenes.

I can only think of a few games that have had customizable difficulty. The problem with them is they complicate the user experience, and most people would rather not tinker with them.

character speed control on PC - we had this stuff figured out in 2002, when Splinter Cell came out! Why the hell are we still stuck with terribly slow walk and slightly too fast jogging?

So, this may not be a real problem if people aren't dead-set on hard realism, but one point that I recall being made is that in general, in-game characters tend to move more-quickly than real world people do. IIRC from a long-ago article, Quake 2 was calculated to have the main character running at about 35 mph. Even an unencumbered Usain Bolt doing a short sprint isn't gonna be in that neighborhood. That has some significant tactical impacts in a number of games in terms of, say, the ability to close on a ranged attacker or the value of ambushing.

A number of military sims that I've seen -- a game genre where having realistic speeds often matter a lot -- provide "time compression", where one can speed up the game world to get through periods where nothing interesting is happening. That does require the game to be able to simulate the world at a higher rate than normal, though.

A number of PC games -- where the hardware's performance capabilities are going to change from player to player -- have a "benchmark" option accessible, usually in the video settings, that does a "fly-through" of some relatively-intensive levels, and then gives FPS statistics (I think usually an average count, though come to think of it, a 95% number would be nice too). Thinking of a recent example, Cyberpunk 2077 does this. The earliest game that I recall that had some similar feature was Quake, with the timedemo command, though that wasn't accessible outside of the console.

That doesn't deal with testing controls, but it does deal with performance (and can hit a number of the engine's features), so it does part of what you want.

Estimating loading progress is one of the most hilariously difficult problems to solve in coding video games, to this day, unfortunately.

quick, how fast can you load 1GiB of data?

on an ssd, on an hdd

as one big file or as 1000 tiny files (defragmented and packed vs all over the place, for hdds)

on a freshly booted up system? Loading for a 2nd time on a pc with a fuckton of ram, so all data is still in the fs cache.

Someone who actually loads all data into a memdisk?

It's just not possible to accurately predict. There are way too many factors.

The question of pause-a-game-when-not-focused is a big question for me. I don't know if there's a perfect answer, though I'd at least like a toggle.

I run a Linux environment, with multiple workspaces. I can switch between workspaces by whacking a key combination. So I really, really frequently am swapping between them, even when playing games.

I totally understand how some people might want a game to auto-pause when they switch away from it. I remember once seeing a video recording of some guy who was handling support calls. He was playing video games in between calls, and every time a call came in, he would switch over to his support software and do work. Now, setting aside the question of whether his manager was okay with that, that's a very legitimate use case where you'd want a game to auto-pause on switch. Otherwise, you have to manually pause and then switch.

On the other hand, I often want to switch away when the game is doing something time-consuming. Starfield can take a while to do a rest, and I'll often be looking at something on another workspace while resting. I definitely don't want the game to pause then, else I just have to sit there staring at a screen with a progress bar moving. Same thing with turn-based games that have an AI phase, where the AI is computing something. If a game has any moments with downtime, I'd like to be able to run it in the background without it pausing. It's really annoying when a game developer tries to "helpfully" auto-pause the game, when I don't want that. I'd be fine with that as a default, but if there's no toggle, it's really irritating (Starfield does have a toggle, albeit one hidden in a config file and without a UI widget for it).

On idles, I agree. Especially for turn-based games like Civilization, it'd be nice to at least have the option to forego idle animations, which would be a big battery usage saver for laptops. The only thing it should need to do, even in the foreground, if you're not pushing buttons, is be playing music.

I don't know if you've ever seen Unciv, but it's a full open-source reimplementation of Civilization 5 for Android and desktop OSes, using simple graphics. It really does drive home how much graphical fluff there is in the series -- not that that's necessarily bad, but it really is not necessary to play the game. And for a lot of people, it'd be nice to have battery-friendly games.

there is no such thing as "idling" in a game, when viewed through the lens of software engineering. Even if you aren't giving the game any new inputs, the game is still doing the work of rendering the screen. Calculating a turn is actually only a small part of the process.

I generally want the opposite. If I alt tab while waiting for a long operation I want it to keep going while I'm tabbed out, and I especially want the music to continue so I don't forget I have the game running

This is a thing thats (slowly) becoming mainstream I think. Rainbow 6 siege has it (or it did when I last played at least) and Battlebit Remastered has it. In Battlebit you can actually lean left / right all the time, no matter if youre against a corner or not. You can even do it in open fields

I like the way Age of Wonders 4 does it: Keywords in tooltips are highlighted, and you can hover over them to get another tooltip with an explanation and more highlighted keywords to hover over. This means you can easily explore the basic mechanics right there in the tooltips.

What's a claustrophobic vignette?

I think companies are more hesitant about ugc these days because of all the extra moderation required.

For instance someone made a sexual assault simulator as a custom overwatch map, and it made headlines, which is extra harmful for a company that is trying to recover from all the SA accusations.

And let us skip the damn hour long tutorial on replays, while you're at it!

It's a thing.. here and there. Far Cry 6 by default has voice reader accessibility feature turned on, which is nice. Say what you will about Ubisoft, they're good with accessibility stuff.

Custom difficulty mode in general. The Long Dark does exactly what you described. :)

I've stopped playing Subnautica because it's too grindy/stingy. Sometimes games get better about this further in, but I don't wanna have to play 10 hours of garbage to get to the good stuff. (side note, I use Skip First Hour mod in factorio for this. Love it.)

Bit of an older game, but Don't Starve was great at this. At the beginning of a game you could set and customize the entire world/map that you were going to be dropped into, including how little or lot of each and every resource individually (eg, you could have a lot of trees, but few rocks, some carrots, but no berries, etc). IIRC you could also pick the world size, how much the land branched out into 'islands', weather patterns, the day length, stuff like that. It's essentially creating your own difficulty.

One issue is that this can be a vector for malware. I kind of wish that game engines came standard with something like the Javascript engine in browsers, with some sort of sandbox for mods. I'm not saying that that'd solve everything -- the game code that the mods invoke probably isn't hardened -- but it'd be better then just having arbitrary modifications go in. Especially with mod systems that auto-download new versions -- even if the mod author is on the up-and-up, if someone compromises his account or computer, they've compromised all the computers using the mod.

EDIT: This isn't just a problem specific to mods, either. A lot of online software library systems that provide auto-updates (pip for Python, rvm for Ruby, etc) can be a vector into systems. Providing auto-updates where many, many people have rights to push updates to computers is convenient in terms of getting software working, but unless the resulting code is running sandboxed, it's creating an awful lot of vectors to attack someone's system. This isn't to impugn any one author -- the vast bulk of people writing mods and open-source software are upstanding people. But it only takes one bad egg or one author who themselves has their system compromised to compromise a lot of other systems, and in practice, if you're saying "subscribe to this mod", you're doing something that may have a lot of security implications for your system.

Consoles and phones already do a decent job of sandboxing games (well, as far as I know; I haven't been working on security for either of them, but from what I've seen of the systems, they at least aim to achieve that). So maybe someone can compromise an app, but there's a limited amount they can do aside from that. Maybe dump your name and location and such, but they can't get control of your other software. However, Linux, Windows, and MacOS don't have that kind of app sandboxing generally in place. I know that Linux has been working towards it -- that's one major reason for shifting to Wayland, among other things -- but it's definitely not there today.

For servers, I think that part of the way that sysadmins have been trying to deal with this is running containers or VMs on a per-service basis. Looking at !homelab@lemmy.ml, I see a lot of people talking about containers or VMs. But that's not really an option today for desktop users who want to run games in a sandbox; it's not set up automatically, and 3D card support spanning containers is not great today, or at least wasn't last time I looked at it. I can run Ren'Py games in a firejail today successfully on Linux, but that's not out-of-box behavior, Steam definitely doesn't have it in place by default, I have no idea whether it's possible for WINE (which is important for a lot of Windows games that run on Linux) and at least some if not all of the mechanisms firejail uses for graphics won't permit for access to the 3D hardware.

That reminds me:

If there is split screen on console...

...why the fuck do I need to mod it into the PC version?!

It's already there, leave it in! ;_;

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...

While I don't disagree, if part of the game runs on the server and the game publisher is the only one with the server, it makes the game hard to pirate, so they've a potent incentive to do this.

This really should be the default in all RPGs. It's so annoying Starfield doesn't offer that.

Just letting people pause cutscenes to access the menus would be a huge start.

I don't like when games just throw you into the action without giving you the chance to tweak settings before (or even until completing the tutorial) in the first place. Like, why?

The ability to wear a cosmetic armor over your actual armor in RPGs and the like is on my wish list as well. Terraria does it quite well. :)

The fact that you can't is a feature... just not for you.

I agree with you on the TAA part but what does that have to do with ray tracing?

Most loading screens are just more of a nuisance than anything, but if they don't remove them, maybe they could get creative in how they work/look?

The main series Danganronpa games did loading screens in a very creative way that made them feel special. The room and all the things inside would start popping up and build the room as it loaded in. More loading screens like that would be lovely if they aren't able to remove them.

I would guess that loading screens will never fully go away. Especially on consoles, where everyone has a fixed set of hardware resources, and the developer knows what that is and is aiming at optimizing for that target, being able to fully remove one area from memory before loading the next gives you potentially twice as much memory to work with. That's a big-enough gain that game developers are not going to want to give that up, since the alternative is being able to only have half (or less, if multiple areas are near each other) the complexity for their areas. If hardware gets more memory, at least some developers are going to want to increase the complexity of the environments they have rather than eliminating load screens. Otherwise, their scenes are going to look significantly-worse than their competitors who have loading screens.

There may be specific games that eliminate loading screens, at least other than the initial startup of the game. Loading screens might be shorter, or might just consist of a brief fade. But I don't think that we'll ever reach the point that all developers decide that that tradeoff to fully-eliminate loading screens is one that they want to make.

The shift from optical media and rotational drives to SSDs has reduced the relative cost of loading an area. But it hasn't eliminated it.

I think that a necessary condition for loading screens going away is basically a shift to a memory architecture where only a single type of storage exists -- that is, you don't have fast-but-volatile primary storage and slow-but-nonvolatile secondary storage, but only a single form of non-volatile storage that is fast-enough to run from directly. We don't have that technology today. Even then, it might not kill loading screens, since you might want to have different representations (more-efficient but less-compact for the area surrounding the character, and less-efficient but more-compact for inactive areas).

Now that machine learning is getting really good at generating good sounding speech, this could become a thing. Paying someone to record every line of these small lore things would be too expensive for the small use it has, so I think that would be the only option.

All the From Software RPGs since Demon's Souls work like that too. (Not the lack of menu, but the lack of an interactive save system because it's just constantly autosaving).

It's incredibly convenient to always be able to quit the game at any time and know you'll be in the exact place and position you were when you start up again. And it has the added benefit of preventing players from save scumming.

That could also work with savegames, in that you can have saves, but make the default on startup be to restore where one was in the last game. Many games provide a "continue" option at the top of the main menu, I think reflecting the fact that that's what a player wants to do 99% of the time.

Two caveats:

• If it's an action game and there's loading involved, it'd be nice to know when the load is done, since you may immediately have to be reacting to something in-game. I'd rather have it attempt to load the game and then go into a "pause" mode, maybe with some overlay or something indicating the current game state (like to remind you what level or wherever you are).

• It's possible -- because we live in an imperfect world with imperfect software -- for save games to get into a broken state, and if so, you don't want to make it impossible to reach the main menu if trying to load the last save game is crashing the thing. Maybe make the game detect that the last load failed, akin to web browsers, and then head to a menu in that case.

I dislike this.

This was going to be my point, the "quick save and quit" option, regardless of how the "normal" save system works. It's fine if the game only wants you to create a save point you can reload from at certain locations, but a quick save that disappears when you reload it means you can put down the game immediately when the real world comes a-knocking.

greater setting for subtitles, size, color, descriptive vs transcription. And keep ui elements out of the caption zones!

I can not tell you how many times I have missed key dialog because the Xbox achievement pane pops up over it for a full 5 seconds.

Starfield has also been atrocious about random NPC flavor text covering the main dialog, so I will miss full sentences in the middle of quests.

no-strobe mode

If this is for epileptic users who can get seizures from strobing, I disagree. This is a safety feature. It should not be in the video game, where it may-or-may not be reliably implemented and the algorithm to avoid it may differ from game to game. This is something that the OS should implement across the whole system. Like, if the user having a seizure is a risk, then I don't want to trust that every game developer or movie maker or person embedding an animated GIF on a website is going to have a toggle and that it works. I want my OS telling my video card "give me average brightness frame to frame, and if average brightness is gyrating too much frame to frame, then put a clamp on that now".

For video game consoles, maybe it should be the TV that implements it, rather than the console.

It should even be possible to stick an intermediate hardware box between the display and the video-outputting device that detects and filters it, if one wants to use existing displays. Like, I get if someone wants to have detection and filtering, but has a large-screen display that they don't want to replace. If I had photosensitive epilepsy, I would definitely want to be sticking such a box on any large displays that I'm looking at in the dark.

To put it another way: if someone not having a seizure depends on 4chan users not posting animated GIFs with particular characteristics, then the system is already horribly broken.

I've never heard any difference among the 3D audio settings. Even with Pulse headsets on PS5, which are allegedly designed for this sort of thing, all of the settings sound exactly the same.

Hmm. I think that a better way to do it is probably in the OS, rather than in-game, on a per-game basis.

Processors thermal-throttle today, and OSes can limit what modes they're allowed to shift into. And my guess is that usually, if someone wants to constrain performance, they want to do it systemwide, rather than for an individual game.

On the game developer end, if the player wants to play both in a performance-limited and not-performance-limited mode, I'd think that there are probably two ways to go about that:

1. Permit for two different sets of saved video settings, where the player can flip between them. Honestly, I think that this is probably more tweaking than most players are going to do.

2. Provide some kind of adaptive quality mechanism. Then, if the computer becomes "lower end", then the adaptive quality system just twiddles settings until the target framerate is maintained.

There's also a third point you make here, and that is that in a world with battery-powered devices, CPU/GPU usage actually matters. It's not zero-cost to just use whatever's available. I remember submitting an issue some time back for Caves of Qud, where the thing ran a busy loop when the window didn't have focus, even though the game was paused (which the dev fixed, kudos to them). I noticed it because the fans would spool up when the game was in the background. That's a game that, because it's turn-based, has the potential to use very little CPU time, even when the game is in the foreground.

I think that there's a fair argument that historically, most game developers, aside from maybe mobile or portable console guys, haven't needed to worry much about consuming resources if they were available.

Speaking as a player, though, I don't much care about power consumption if a system has wall power. But I care a lot about it if it's battery-powered.

For phones, I kind of wish that Google would consider providing a "battery usage" rating in the app store that provides some kind of approximate metric for how much CPU time the game uses while active -- if Google is going to send all kinds of telemetry from devices, might as well use that for something useful. Maybe permit the game developer to register multiple "modes" (high-power, low-power) and give a ranking for each. As things stand, though, there's no way for the potential customer to know power consumption, and this would help push that information out to the customer.

I think you are in luck, most competitive shooters have it these days, I can't really think of a big one that doesn't, some are better than others though. Counterstrike, overwatch, warzone, fortnite, valorant, rainbow six all have them.

A couple of points on FOV:

• High FOV gives you more peripheral vision, which -- if you can get used to extremely-high FOVs -- is a major advantage in competitive multiplayer FPSes. I know that users used to play with very high FOVs on Quake and the like; I don't know if that's a thing today. That's an argument for constraining FOV in competitive multiplayer environments. Marathon used to incorporate this into the game, have a fisheye powerup that temporarily provided better peripheral vision. So if you want a level playing field for competitive multiplayer games, you cannot let it be changed by players. If you want a level playing field, the only thing you can do is adjust where their head is relative to the display, help them calibrate their head placement.

• Even for single-player FPSes, it has some degree of impact on difficulty. Having a high FOV will generally make a game easier, since having more peripheral vision is advantageous.

• Games virtually always use a higher FOV than would be accurate for the real world, based on the distance from the eye to display and the size of the display. In the real world, your monitor or TV screen -- if at a sane distance from you -- provides a very limited field of vision. Trying to play an FPS through a tiny window into the world like that would be a huge disadvantage. They just try to jack it up to a level where it won't actually make people sick.

• The "optimal" FOV will differ on a per-player basis (some people can handle higher FOV without being sick). What would be a physically-accurate FOV also depends on the size of the display and how far away from the display the player is sitting, which the developer does not know and varies on a per-player basis (unless the player is wearing a VR headset).

• For consoles, I'd argue that this should probably be implemented at a console-wide level, maybe on a per-user basis, since what a user can handle and where their head is relative to the display should be constant across games. Doesn't make sense to require a player to set it manually on a per-game basis, since they're just going to have to be setting the same number.

Rewinding is technically possible, and there are games that incorporate rewinding into the game, like Braid or Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Probably some newer ones. However, that only works if the game developer conforms to a lot of constraints. I don't think that it will ever be a standard feature on all video games.

• Not all functions are "reversible"; you can't just run everything "backwards" easily on a general-purpose computer. One specific operation that is famously not-easily-reversible -- and that we are so confident that this is not easily reversible that we make a lot of computer security rely on it -- is multiplying two prime numbers together. So you'd have to impose dramatic constraints on how games can be written to provide the ability to just say "start running the game in reverse". (Related trivia: the question of whether the real world can theoretically be run in reverse if you could look perfectly at everything in the universe for just one moment, the arrow of time, is, as I understand it, something of an open question in physics.)

• One tactic for "rewinding" is to basically store checkpoints periodically and then retain enough information, like the player's inputs, such that one can basically "fast forward" from a checkpoint. If you can "fast forward" cheaply enough in terms of CPU time, then rewinding to a checkpoint, and then fast-forwarding to a given point, once for each frame, looks like you're running in reverse. This is basically how modern movie codecs work today: you have keyframes that are basically a "checkpoint" of a frame that are stored, maybe every few seconds or so. Then you have information necessary to compute the next frame from the existing one. So when you seek backwards in a movie, internally what a movie player is likely doing is seeking backwards to the keyframe prior to the time where you're trying to seek to, then playing forward. That "seek back to a checkpoint, then play forward" is a lot more technically-easy to do than to require a game to truly be reversible, since in many games, it's possible to store a fairly-small amount of information to record the game world at that point in time -- and "play forward". But many games also can't store their entire world in a small amount of space, and for some, it's hard to perform saves cheaply-enough in terms of CPU time -- constantly and frequently-enough, maybe every couple seconds. If you can't reduce the game state to a very small amount of information, then you are only going to be able to rewind so far. Implementing this is, today a requirement of a number of multiplayer games -- nearly all multiplayer game engines basically rely on each computer involved being able to deterministically generate the same world state on each participating computer. One technique to reduce apparent latency to other players is to do client-side prediction, predict what the other user is going to do, like continuing to walk in the same direction that they're walking, and then render each frame as if they had done that. Sometimes, that prediction is incorrect, and in those cases, they're going to need to be able to re-generate the world state; what they do is constantly internally checkpoint and then roll world state forward by replaying inputs when they actually learn what that other player was doing. So some games and game engines already basically implement the internal functionality required for this sort of approach, at least over a limited period of time. But it requires the developers to constrain what they do throughout the game to some degree.

I’m a lefty, but there was no way in hell I was moving the mouse to the other side every time I used the family computer, so I just learned how to use my right hand.

"We're rich!"

Apex nailed the communication aspect. It's the gold standard as far as I am concerned.

I'm gonna be honest, I never really understood what it did. The difference between fullscreen and windowed mode is kind of obvious, but borderless? I get what it does, it's like windowed mode but borderless and it can take the whole screen. But then why not just make it fullscreen? I don't understand it.

And especially when apparently some games run better with it? Which... I don't know, I just don't understand it.

I've had a couple of games I've encountered that are literally unplayable at 21:9. You're either stuck with textures stretched to oblivion or it cuts off a significant chunk of the screen. Admittedly this is mostly with older games that predate 21:9 displays but holy crap is it annoying when I can't play a game because it can't handle my display and stretches instead of displaying at the configured resolution

If you make inverted the default, then it wouldn't be inverted any more! It would just be normal.

Welcome back to the 1980s!

For real, or at least without forced updates.

My biggest, biggest pet peeve of the PS4/PS5 era, is this. I'm in my 40s, I'm a senior management level professional, I'm on some boards, I've got very young kids. The amount of times I get to sit down and just go ahhhhh and fire up the PlayStation, number in the very low single digits each quarter. This means my PlayStation has to update what feels like two hundred thousand things, and I just want to play a god damn game. Nope, I have to update the new system software, have to update the games update, something for the sound, it literally feels like it never ends. So my three free hours turns into me throwing the controller and just moving on to something else more often than not, only for the cycle to repeat. It's infuriating.

Sounds quite specific but I can see it. A "turn off gore" feature could help?

Does Alt+F4 not work well enough?

A number of games would benefit from also showing a DPS number on weapons. Same idea. Yeah, I can do it in my head, but you're running on a computer that can flawlessly do billions of calculations a second. Why not do the extra step for me?