Hear me out. A few games have shader installations that will usually apply any new settings you put down AFTER you restart the game, and a lot of other games have graphics settings that will only apply after you’ve rebooted the game.
I don’t think it would cost developers ANY amount of money or any significant development time to add a “Reboot game” button (or toggle) every time the player presses the quit button, or give the player a prompt every time they change a setting that requires a game restart (like in both PC versions of GTA V).
I also think ANY game should have a “full potato” mode capable of running in older computers with NONE of the fancy graphics stuff that we have access to today, despite having a decent computer now.
Save&quit at any time
So I can just boot up the game, play for 15 minutes and go do other stuff
Yeah, the steam deck does this, it’s a great feature.
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.
Subtitles. I wish I could have suuttiles for halo, the early games. It’s getting better these days, and should be a setting accessible before starting the game (not after the intro movie, I’m looking at you vanilla wow).
Pause and save during cutscenes.
I cannot name the amount of times I’ve tried to press escape and skipped a cut scene when all I’m trying to do is bring up the menu to pause. I’ll add to this ‘cinema mode’ which some games have. Let’s you go in and view cutscenes again. Should be standardized.
Windowed borderless mode
I should probably know this, but what’s the deal with full screen vs windowed full screen? What’s the difference?
Also why do people wanna play windowed? Maybe depends on the type of game…?
Alt tab out to other apps without the game freaking out due to display settings
Oh I see this makes sense. And theoretically better performance in full screen?
I never saw a major performance difference, but being able to switch windows without the game possibly crashing is great. Especially in single player games, sometimes you just need to pause and check laundry, or check email. Alt tab and good to go.
That’s the benefit I use it for. Some games force minimize when you tab off and they can crash when you try to tab back to them.
There used to be a noticeable graphics performance boost to an app when in full screen mode, but that was back in Windows 7 days and may not be true any more.
Game in one window, other things open in other windows. Game and do other things at the same time.
I never understood why people prefer it over full screen.
It enables quick window switching with no flickering. This may be a strictly Windows issue.
No issues on linux
Yeah you’re probably right. On Linux I just Ctrl Alt right arrow to my next virtual desktop and it’s instant and seamless.
Genuine question: what issue does this address? Are there graphics driver issues with regular full screen in some cases?
Some games minimize and try to lock your mouse to the game if you alt tab out. Windowed mode makes it pretty much seamless, pain free. No difference I ever found, just easier to alt tab out and check a map, take notes, pause and watch a video.
Every game should have the option to toggle motion blur off, toggle frame gen and upscaling off.
I don’t think I can name one game without a motion blur slider, or toggle.
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.
Every time I see a slider for any damn setting that ends up going from, say, 3.48 to 3.51 unless I go REALLY SLOWLY, in which case maybe it goes 3.48 3.49, 3.51, or whatever nonsense where I can’t just get my nice round number. Let me type the stupid number.
Fucks sake this for me. Why the fuck there isn’t standardization between games on this is beyond me. I have to go through fucking with mouse sensitivity on every damn game. This is part of the reason I died out of multiplayer tbh.
also, a standard to mouse sens values, a value of 10 should be same across everything, games made in the same engine usually handle the values the same which is great, I for example have the same sens across all source games, but this usually doesnt carry to diferent engines let alone random one off games with custom engines
You just reminded me of a funny feature I found in Elite Dangerous (space MMO) to prevent combat logging (quitting suddenly during combat like a little b***h): if you press Alt+F4, the game doesn’t immediately exit, but shows you a Quit dialog (to main menu or desktop), and there’s a lengthy countdown if you’re near hostile ships. :)
Doesn’t prevent it entirely, but I thought it was pretty crafty.
Motion blur - OFF Screenshake - OFF
Hey now… Don’t forget camera bob, “lens dirt,” chromatic aberration, and vignette!
AKA - the video game graphics equivalent of “beer goggles.”
Post Processing - Low usually does the trick 😅
But then it sometimes turns ambient occlusion off too… 😞
I’m okay with a little chromatic aberration and vignette. Camera bob can go straight to hell.
I’m okay with a little chromatic aberration and vignette.
Why? It’s literally something that pro camera tools have added in-software fixes for to remove them. Like - if you’re simulating an old JVC vidicon tube camera and wanting to make something specifically look like an image capture device from a specific time, I get it, but otherwise, it just seems like a way to hide the fact that your graphics aren’t quite hitting the realism mark and you think if you obscure it a bit, players will think it looks more “real.”
That’s what it’s being used for? I thought it was for horror games. It does look spooky.
I’m very aware, I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the years removing them from photography projects.
For vignette, it accomplishes a lot of the same thing in games as it does in photography in general: it is a subtle focus shifter. For some games - like some photos - I enjoy that little bit of extra emphasis on the center of the screen.
For chromatic abberation, i generally avoid it in photography, but it can be used for effect. I feel like that’s also true to a point in games. Over the top CA feels like trying to watch something without 3d glasses. A little bit on the fringes can give a smidge of retro (and, oddly, futuristic) style for effectively no compute cost. It’s definitely overused though, and I tend to turn it off more often than not.
Agreed on the “shifting focus” part for vignetting specifically - but everything else… outside of specifically tailoring to fit a particular “aesthetic” I think are crutches that are generally used to obscure an overall graphical presentation in order to work in a similar way to how squinting your eyes works.
I agree that highly stylized games like “Bodycam…”
…use things like a specific kind of grain, noise, distortion, aberration, etc. to create a highly appealing visual aesthetic designed to match an actual low-fidelity police body camera, but Battlefield and CoD have much less excuse in my book.
The camera aesthetic stuff only makes sense on things like the AC-130 killstreak in CoD where you’re emulating the on-aircraft cameras actually used in the real deal.
I’m glowering hard at No Man’s Sky’s permanent chromatic aberration effect applied to the top 20% of your viewport at all times, here.
Those two features frequently make me nauseous! Being able to turn them off or at least down is a necessity for me.
my friends always want to ‘ppay the game the way it was intended’… cool, I’m still disabling all the crap that makes me not see the game properly.
Also fuck Bloom to hell
Maybe the amount can go to hell, but bloom itself is more realistic in regards to how light and our eyes work.
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 ☺️
I prefer the 4 circles glyphs that shows the appropriate face button highlighted. It’s device agnostic and helpful when I’m switching between playing on my Switch and playing on my PC with an Xbox controller.
That’s what I meant by directional, I wish more games had it!
This would be killer!
Internet Connection - On/Off
And by OFF, we mean actually off. The last thing I want is the game to push out a minor update 5 years after its last update, and all of the mods I have are now broken.
Yeah, you should be able to pick a specific version number for single player games. I’m fine with it defaulting to “latest”, but at least give me the option to stick to a specific version.
Also, fuck the “Would you like to share all data with the publisher, or only limited data” bullshit. It’s a single player game with no multiplayer whatsoever. I shouldn’t need to share any data with the publisher. If I see this shit, the game immediately gets blacklisted in my firewall.
That is a reason why offline installers are so important. At the very least we should be able to disable auto updates and still launch the (outdated) game.
Reminds me of one of my biggest pet peeves - a bunch of games will pop up a warning “Oh no, you’re not on the Internet! Some stuff won’t work!” on start up, always. Hate it, unless I’m trying to connect to a multiplayer mode of some sort.
A setting like this should ideally prevent those.
The most frustrating for me was Immortals: Fenix Rising on the Switch. I refused to create an Ubisoft account and actually had to put my system on airplane mode so it would stop trying to force one on me.
If there is something better than opensnitch for this on Linux someone tell me. It‘s so annoying to block applications from accessing the internet on it. I‘ve tried like 4 different methods.
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Colorblind options that let me specifically choose the color of each HUD/UI element. I don’t want an overlay for the whole game, I just want to be able to distinguish icons in the UI that might have color-coding too similar for my eyes to perceive at a glance
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.
Cutscenes especially. The pause button should pause cutscenes, with an option to skip the cutscene on the pause menu. The pause button should never just outright skip the cutscene. It should always pause the cutscene.
So many times as a kid that my mom would walk in and start talking right as a cutscene started. And when I’d go to pause it, it would just skip the entire fucking cutscene instead.
Yeah, pause and skip should be separate things. I have some games pm PC where the ESC key pauses and brings up the menu but to skip the scene you have to be watching it and then hold some specific button like mouse 1 for a couple of seconds to skip. Those are my favorites because I have time to reconsider skipping!
Oh yeah that was the worst. Game devs really shooting themselves in the foot with that design.
Once paused, should it just be a single button? Maybe a menu with an “are you sure? Y/n”, or maybe a hold down one or two buttons together for a couple seconds like on consoles?
Watch Dogs 2 had an “invasion” system like Dark Souls, but it also allowed pausing in the world anytime you weren’t being invaded. It’s been a nice thing to point to anytime Souls fans make that excuse.
Yeah no-pause feature was cool for one or two games as a gimmick, but Jesus h christ I’m an adult now and sometimes you need to freeze everything RIGHT NOW and single player games that you can’t pause are stupid as hell. Like I get maybe not pausing for accessing gear menu. But then at least give us a separate pause in case I have to run to the post office or take a business call or something
I’m sure I have seen it before, but I can’t think of a single game that lets you pause during a cutscene. It really sucks for turn-based games where you need to watch whats happening when it’s not your turn in order to respond correctly.
I remember a game I used to play years ago that had no ability to pause, so what i would do is alt+tab to the task manager and suspend the process, and then resume it later. Obviously that’s way more clunky than just hitting a pause button.
Conversely I can’t remember a game in recent memory that didn’t let me pause in cutscenes.
Just off of my head: Ubisoft games, Control, Shadow of Mordor, Crysis, Witchers, Borderlands 2, Devil May Cry, Celeste had it.
I have played a lot of games where pausing the game to get to game menus pauses cutscenes, generally ones where they use in game assets to do the cut scene. I would have to check to confirm, but I think BG3 let you pause by going to the menu and there was also a separate option to skip the cuts scene.
Definitely played a lot with unskippable cut scenes too. Mostly avoid those games now.
It’s been a very common feature for the last few years and has been very rare before that so it really depends on when you started playing new releases. I’m in my mid-30s and pausing mid-cutscene definitely happended after I stopped being excited about my birthday.
Yeah, I’m probably what you’d call a patient gamer. Usually not playing anything more recent than 5 years old, and often way older.
Ghosts of Yotei lets you pause during cut scenes. It doesn’t let you skip most cut scenes, though.
started Red Dead Redemption 1 last night, seems like just hitting esc during cutscene pauses it.
Admittedly I was wanting to go to settings and drop some settings, but that’s only allowed during gameplay, not cutscenes x)
I recently started another play through of RDR2, while figuring out the settings on my old Linux gaming PC. I’d forgotten how long it is between save points during that oh-so-long first segment up in the mountains. Christ. Having to play for half an hour just to get to a point where I could save up.
Local server
Edit: or any server
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
I like this, and I think it should be complemented with a “Save and Quit to OS” button.
Like a timestamp on the save?
I’m thinking specifically when you exit the game, and it says “Are you sure? All progress since you last saved will be lost”, it should just have an additional “(last saved 2 minutes ago)” line in there. I think the recent Spiderman games did that, iirc
Ah yeah, then absolutely. Warning you that you may be fucking up and then having you quit on faith is an insane move by a dev.
Yeah exactly, but more often than not that’s exactly what happens, it’s infuriating
Well yes and no. Stellar Blade for example. When you click exit to desktop it pops up the usual unsaved data will be lost stuff but also has a timer below it showing when the last save was made
