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

Parent mode, haven't played in a while? Here is a recap of the story so far and here is what you did last time you played.

It's mental to me that most console games still don't let you change the controller bindings like you can on PC.

Final Fantasy XVI's Active Time Lore. Being able to pause the game and have a list of relevant characters, places, and concepts for the scene you're in is so helpful for my ADHD, for when I take a break from a game and come back not knowing what's going on. I want to see this in every story heavy game.

Keep a rotating history of 20 or so autosaves/checkpoints, not 1, in case the last autosave was at a bad spot. Storage space is cheap. Yeah, I can do that myself with manual saves, but why make me do that? Maintaining that isn't a fun part of the game for me, and it's easy for the developer to do.

Cut-scenes that can be paused, skipped and replayed later.

I would be nice if the game detects that it's been quite some time since I last played, and give a quick refresher of the keybinds as well as brief rundown of recent missions completed / story-so-far.

Phobia-friendly settings/modes. There are so many games that I can't play or have to find a mod for because the fantasy genre is obsessed with giant spiders. The only way I could ever play Skyrim was with the Arachnophobia mod that replaced all spiders with bears. I haven't played Grounded, but I know it has an arachnophobia setting that can simplify/cartoonify the spiders or replaces them with floating orbs. I'd love to see these types of settings in more games, and ideally similar settings available for other common phobias/triggers besides spiders and blood.

I wish I could choose size of font, so many games have a font that only works on certain TVs or played in handheld mode.

Also I wish we could all align in settings menu at some point, so I'm not hunting down these weird unexpected settings.

Gyroscope controls. Especially for first-person shooters and other first-person games. I used to be a diehard mouse and keyboard player when it came to FPSes until I played Quake 1 on the Switch with gyro controls turned on. Now I'm trying to find ways to be able to play every FPS in my collection on a TV with gyro aim because it just feels so much better.

Story mode / Infinite lives / invincibility modes.

Difficulty should not be a barrier for entry. I like how Insomniac games like Ratchet and Clank, and to a lesser extent Spiderman, offer a really easy mode for those who just want to blast away or swing around New York.

More split screen games, there are gamers that have a SO gamer you know? Or brothers, cousins, neighbors etc.

Only Nintendo keeps this thing alive in a wider scheme.

With games taking more and more drive space i would like to be able to choose if i want to download those 4k textures or this new map that i don't want to play

• Make the story automatically skippable. Every time. Many games explain the mission/objective in a short sentence or in the minimap anyway. Don't make me watch a long cutscene or press/hold a button to skip the dialog. I'm never going to care.
• Always have a tutorial or practice area to remind me how to play the game after I put it down for a month or so. Bad enough that the controller map is hidden in the menus (if there even is one). It don't help much to just say what all 16 +/- buttons do, depending on what mode I'm in. I have to actually use them to get back into the swing of things, and I'd rather not jump right into the action (and potentially lose progress) right away.

I like how in Breath of the Wild, when it tells you to a button like ‘A’ or ‘Y’ for example, it shows you where that button is relative to the others. This way, if you aren’t super familiar with the controller, you don’t need to take your eyes off the screen.

default game master volume starting at 50%

Here's a really small and easy to fix pet peeve of mine: graphics options that cycle through the levels of fidelity with inconsistent scales. I like to set my graphics to max, try it out, and then adjust down where needed. It's very annoying if a game doesn't stop where the max option is, so if it's currently at "High" I have no idea if the next option to the right is going to be "Very High" or "Low" again. So I often end up overshooting the highest setting and having to go back one, or purposefully going to the lowest setting and then one further.

Unless it's an online multiplayer game, let me pause whenever! Playing Starfield now and it's so annoying that you can't pause during dialogue or ship fight by hitting ESC.

Make 4K textures a separate download, via a free DLC. That way if people only ever play in 1080p, they don't need to waste disk space on files that will never get used.

• Dual subtitles, aka polyglot mode. Doubt that it'd ever happen, probably I'm the only one who wants it. Sometimes I'd just merge 2 subtitles with python script and upload it to my Plex.

• Fast forward and save states especially for classic remaster. Some have this, some don't

• Bigger subtitle fonts

For any RPG (especially one with multiple characters):

Highly flexible keyboard controls to manage inventory.

I want text-editor levels of search, move, drop, swap, open, and close. Give me regexes, custom filters, and macros. Give me unlimited tags for items, and simple interfaces to manage them (eg: sell all that have a tag, move all items tagged with a characters's name to their equipment slots).

It doesn't need emacs keybindings, but that would be a big plus.

Conversation logs (for the games where they make sense). I loved having this available in Dragon Age: Origins and it helped me remember my rationale for doing specific things. Also was just fun to read back through.

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

Call me a madman but I'd love to see the feature of games that work on launch day without a patch.

Resizable UI/text everywhere. Not every gamer plays at a desk.

Don't do unskippable cutscenes. Even if you're using them to cover up for a loading screen or something, at least give me the option to not watch them. Let me tap a button to skip the scene.

No Denuvo
DRM-free versions (fuck every AAA client, give me the setup files and piss off)
Linux-friendly anti-cheat
If your game has an online component, release the server files so the community can self-host!

Basically, anything that preserves a game well beyond its prime.

Some things were already mentioned so here my other pet peeves:

• customizable difficulty - no default preset will be as good as one that can be modified to your liking. Sometimes the issue lies with difficulty making things more of a chore than a challenge, sometimes they tune things too much where you get stuck in a weird middle ground where one difficulty is way too easy and the other bashes your teeth in.
• 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? This isn't hard to implement either - there are already multiple speed states when playing with a gamepad, all that's required is an option to control it with a keybind.
• visible body in first person games - I always try to immerse myself as much as possible and having a physical body helps sell the idea that I'm a character in this world rather than just a floating camera.

I have cognitive impairments and it does my head in that it's still hit or miss whether games have rewindable text and voiceovers. Definitely my favourite thing in a game is eing ale to open a dialogue log and even replay voiced lines. Should be in every game, it's such a small accessibility thing.

@Plume Oh yeah and this: Start the game in a neutral area or room where you can test the controls and sound are working properly and ensure the performance is right BEFORE the intro cutscene plays.

Maybe not everywhere, because then it wouldn't be nearly as special, but I absolutely adored the "asynchronous multiplayer" aspects of Death Stranding.

Viewing the "strand contracts" tab and looking at how many other actual humans used and "liked" the infrastructure you created, or helped to create. Creating contracts with players who seem to appreciate your work, so that you see more of their structures, and they see more of yours. Only a couple examples. Trying to find the most optimal place for a bridge, or watchtower so that other players will appreciate it and give you "likes." That nice feeling of warmth you get when you finish building a road that others had started...

Just the whole freaking thing fits so well into the "we're all in this together, even if we're (forcibly) isolated" message the game is conveying. Working together with real people that you will never directly see or speak to, in order to make an incredibly arduous journey a bit easier for all. Amazing.

At least I think that was one of the messages, Kojima can be cryptic at times lol.

Again, I wouldn't want it to become the next "climb the tower to reveal part of the map" mechanic, and get ruined. You can't just shoe-horn it in, it has to make sense in context.

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I'd like to see leaning around corners for strategic shooters. I think rainbow six used to have this, I know the original system shock had it.

Stopping rendering / game logic / music if you alt tab. And resource management overall. It grinds my gears when games use resources even when there's nothing happening. (Civ6 for instance constantly uses absurd amounts of cpu just for idling in game and doesn't use any more when calculating so turns.)

I've been playing a bunch of CRPGs the last couple of months (BG3, BG1 Enhanced, Pillars 1, Divinity 2, Pathfinder Kingmaker currently) and games like this need keywords highlighted in texts and tooltips. Some of the newer ones do this a bit already, but it's pretty inconsistent and not enough in my experience.

BG3 could use some lore popups, so you can learn more about the world, the gods, races, etc. Also, even some really basic mechanics could use it, if you just have very little experience. What does Save or Saving Throw mean exactly, which stat matters for specific spells, etc.

Pathfinder does the lore popups already and some stats get an explanation, but not nearly enough for me as a complete newcomer to the system.

I'd rather not have loading screens at all, but if you need them, I'd kind of like a progress bar, rather then just watching some animated doohicky telling me that hopefully the game hasn't frozen.

I would imagine that it's probably possible to, if the game emits checkpoints ("loading terrain", "loading textures"), etc, to record the timestamps for each of those and then, when it emits the same checkpoints next time through, to be able to estimate how far it is through the process.

• LET ME TURN OFF THE CLAUSTROPHOBIC VIGNETTE, PLEEEAAASSEEEE. Even games like Cyberpunk 2077 that have gained countless features over the years and have individual HUD on/off switches still ignore this.
• UGC as a whole. I grew up on Half-Life mods, custom Counter-Strike: Source maps, and LittleBigPlanet. The fact that we've pretty much abandoned that outside of Halo, Counter-Strike (just barely, mind you), and more recently Fortnite with proper Unreal Engine support is a terrible thing. It makes more sense than ever in an era of live service where you want players to never stop playing.

I like how Sony PS5 lets me have subtitles on for all games. I think that's part of the accessibility features you were talking about.

For survival/crafting/whatever games - let me adjust drop rates and toggle things on and off individually, rather than just choosing a difficulty.

What I mean by this is looking at something like Ark versus Subnautica. Ark gives a super fine grained level of customization around spawn rates and other settings. You don't even need to strictly enable or disable hunger but can set the decay rate, for example.

My biggest one is robust modding support. I understand it's something that potentially needs a lot of extra effort to implement from the developers, but when I look at my collection of games that I love, almost all of them let me mod like crazy. Let me download 90 bugfixes and 40 QoL tweaks for a game from 2003.

Left handed mode. I didn't realise how much I liked it until no man's sky. It moves the body of the character to the right hand side of the screen. So you can see the character holding the items in the left hand.

Most games just mirror the item into the other hand and that's it.

Transmog

Also being able to adjust subtitles size is nice

I think this might be a thing in modern games, but I don't play enough new releases to be sure: Changing the accessibility settings before anything else in the game. The first time I encountered this was on The Division 2, a Ubisoft game of all things, and being able to tune my subtitles, visual cues, sound options, among others before even the Press Start to begin the game is an incredibly comfortable feeling.

A minor feature that is unfortunately underused is having an archive/library/compendium of characters, plot events and the like. The Yakuza series has entries for its major characters, which is a bliss in games that are essentially soap operas introducing new families and plot twists every with every new installment, and being able to catch up after a few days/weeks without playing is a relief.

• The option to skip puzzles and not get punished for it.
• Independent difficulty options for things like exploration, combat, crafting, etc. Whatever the game has.

Subtitles forced as on.

Or at the very least, the option to choose subtitles right away at the very start of the game.

I fucking hate when games have intro scenes or full chapters where you can't pause or bring up the menu and you cannot turn on subtitles and I just don't play games without subtitles (when the game has dialogue).

Less a design choice and more a technical feat, but I'm hoping that we start to see the phase-out of loading screens and more of a push toward seamless gameplay. I was watching a video from the newest Spiderman and it was pretty damn cool. Practical for all games? Maybe not for a while. But I certaintly would like to see more investment in leveraging improvements in disk and memory capabilities going forward.

The option to hide helmets. I like to spend a lot of time making my character, I don't want to hide it under some doofy looking helmet.

Maybe go one step further and let us hide any and all pieces of armor.

The ability to turn off various typical live service features. Hiding the store and annoying announcements would be awesome.

I love a game with a good large settings menu that lets me change as much as possible. If you don't lock me out of changing all the keybindings then you're already ahead of the game. I hate when a game has a really badly implemented feature and no way to change it or disable it.

I want decent AA back gdi

Ray tracing isn't worth how horrible TAA can make some games look, imo. We're getting close, but it's been years of this and I'm so tired of choosing between ghosting and jaggies. Or worse, some games that just force the ghosting TAA onto you anyway (cyberpunk you fuck)

Holding down MMB for callouts in online games. Apex and Risk of Rain 2 both do it and it's super useful.

I love books, mail or notes. Honestly all those lovely small lore parts.

But I would like an option to have them read to me. I don’t need a fancy actor, it could be simple as text to speak.

But I struggle to keep concentration on a paper. Instead I would love to hear it read to me while I go back to my looting.

@Plume The Witness has no menu and no savegames. When you boot it up, you're instantly exactly where you left off.

This doesn't work for all games, but I wish more games would do it like that.

I 100% agree with accessibility features. This includes some of the newer considerations.

• no-strobe mode
• normalized volume mode (makes it so sound doesn't spike up suddenly, sudden loud noises are not nice)
• greater setting for subtitles, size, color, descriptive vs transcription. And keep ui elements out of the caption zones!
• documentation written in simple language for ease of readability.
• read back for all written content. Not just the first damn word of a text box. (Seriouly a lot of games do this now its this is just annoying!)

I once saw a thing where a DM (D&D) had an anonymous survey of common sensitive topics. He'd gage what his players where comfortable with prior to starting a campaign and adjust the story accordingly. Games just need this.

As I travel a lot, I would love to see a true eco mode for my laptop. Something that would keep my fans quiet (2500rpm max).

Some games allow for FPS capping and lower settings, but it's not always the case. Sometimes tweaking the settings doesn't seem to make any difference to power consumption. Sometimes your only way to cap FPS is to rely on VSync, which doesn't make much when you play on 120Hz screen.

Metro Exodus is a good example of an almost impossible to tweak game.

I think it would be nice to have a dedicated travelling mode. It would effectively help people with lower specs and entice developers to produce a more efficient code, rather than pushing for costly gears.

As a developer myself I know very well it costs money. But if I had a wish to make I'll go for this one

Proper benchmarking tools in the main menu. Even better if there's a demo for this.

3D audio or HTRF or whatever the right term is. Being able to hear what direction a sound comes from makes the game sound so much better. It also kind of sounds clearer imo because you can actually discern the individual sounds and they don't get "mushed" together.

I always appreciate when the game allows you to choose how far the camera is from your character, and when they let you pick if you want to play first of third person.

@Plume the nemesis system from shadow of mordor. Too bad they copyrighted it. The pricks...

Lefty mode would be nice. I'm tired of rebinding movement keys in every game.

Borderless Windowed mode. Seriously, there is 0 excuse for PC games to not support it, it's 2023.

Probably difficult for technical reasons, but it would be cool if I could rewind the game arbitrarily in games where you can quicksave/load. Like I can save and try the thing and reload if I don't like the results, but it'd be neat if I could just rewind.

LAN, direct IP connections, private servers, and when it makes sense, same-screen multiplayer. Several of these used to be standard. Games as a service are creating a dark age in video game history where lots of these works will arbitrarily disappear, and they don't have to.

Man, I just want inverted mouse to be the default

Give me a cheat menu or something after beating the game. Let me run around as God causing chaos and break the game. Easy extra hours.

For coop games with dialog I really loved how Baldur's Gate 3 let everyone see the dialog choices and click on them to vote for what they would want. The player in the dialog didn't have to choose it, but they could see and it let every player feel like they were a part of every conversation instead of just watching.

I just want proper Nvidia Surround/AMD Eyefinity/ultrawide screen resolution options. About 50% of games have them, 50% don't, and it's really frustrating to play a game where my playing experience would be so much better if I could use Surround, but the game just has no support for any resolution that isn't 16:9.

Games that don't need patches.

A way to rapidly exit a game a la The Binding Of Isaac: Afterbirth. It has saved that game from being rage-deleted off my machine plenty of times.

The first time I run a game, before anything else, before a developer logo, a splash screen, ANYTHING: I want a screen with volume sliders. This setting needs to be saved upon completion and then ask if you want to see this screen on every launch, or just this one.

I know I am not alone. I am tired of having my eardrums blasted to hell every time I launch a newly installed game. Some games even go back to eardrum-destruction every launch until it loads the user settings.

This shit needs to be standardized. A lot of us wear headphones and are on voice chat or listening to music or whatever when we launch a game, and the deafening EA logo or whatever it may be is NOT welcome.

So this is my own post, but I'm still gonna comment on it because I have something else.

AI Bots support for multiplayer games.

It's become quite a rarity but it used to be... I wouldn't say standard, but common in older games and I really miss it.

Sometimes I really enjoy the gameplay loop of a multiplayer game but I just don't want to play it in multiplayer. There is too much pressure. Counter-Strike is a good example of that. I like the gameplay loop. I like the game but I spent a ton of my time playing it offline against bots on custom maps.

It's not exactly the same as playing with real players. I know they don't behave the same. But speaking of not behaving the same, at least I don't have to be worried of being insulted or anything if I make a mistake. There is much less pressure to succeed in games like this which I find fun. It's often hard to play online because it's all pressure and no fun for me.

Programming decent AI bots is complicated I know that which is why it's probably as rare as it is nowadays but I still miss it there has been too many games that I loved that simply died and I can't play anymore because there is no bot supports on it. I would love to be able to play my favorite game like for example, a Battlefield 1 game with 63 other bots that can pilot vehicles and do all of the things that real players would do.

That's why I love Ravenfield. But yeah, how many games have died and how many gameplay loop do we miss and can never play again because it would require actual players and there was never any proper bot support implemented?

I can think of a few and actually one of them is Star Wars Battlefront 2015 which had some sort of AI bot implemented but it used a very different kind of AI. They don't move like actual players. They have completely different animations and behaviors and what's worse is that they have a really nasty tendency to focus on the player. Which means that on some maps and some difficulty you come out of a hallway, out on the outside part of the map, and all of a sudden every bottom of the map, every starship is firing at you. Because you're the priority target.

Battlefront 2 2017 eventually implemented instant action and did it much better. Sadly I prefer the gameplay loop of the 2015 game by a lot. Oh well.

If you like me, buy Ravenfield on Steam. It's not a game that happens to have bot support. It's actually a game that is completely built around this. It's not just a feature, it's the point of the game, and I love it for it.

Those loading screens that recapped the story in Arkham City.

Give me Disco Elysium-tier choices in story development and dialogue.

I agree with everything in the OP and most of the other comments. But something for me that I don't think I've seen options for in any games.

Eyes and teeth. I'm a bit squimish around things happening to them. If your game shows them being injured in some way, just let me turn that off and skip it or something.

I know it sounds like a small thing, but I know at least four games which have this issue...

I want to be able to adjust the volume of the rain apart from everything else. Yes, I know a lot of games have an “ambient sounds” slider, but it usually includes other sounds too like Thunder, wind, animal sounds, and other stuff. I just want to make the rain louder. Rain is almost always too quiet in games, and it’s a tragedy.

By simply having all PC games mod able and with accessible console commands, most issues will eventually have workarounds.

I want there to be systems that have absolutely no game design in them. Stuff that literally is just there to add random possibilities to the experience. Extremely basic and consistent rules which are extremely easy to grasp but result in all sorts of crazy shit. Stuff like redstone from minecraft or fairy dust in Stardew Valley. I want to completely forget about the game for a bit and just get completely lost in the intricacies.

A perfect example of this: Adding a joker (wildcard) to poker. It's just one basic card, you know what it does, but the amount that one card can completely break the game leads to far more interest than the base game could ever provide.

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Collectible tracker after getting to a certain threshold. I get that people don't like maps cluttered with stuff, but if someone gets to a point they got over 60% of a thing, it's likely they want to go for all of them, so the option to give them at least a general searching area should be provided.

I play a lot of logistics games, so crafting time and speed and such. There's always an effective input rate and a maximum output rate. Item takes 12 seconds and crafting machine has a speed of 3.14... So what's the items per second? Sure it's 12/3.14 but nowhere does the game show that. Not all games make this sin, but those that do drive me mad.

FOV slider and option to disable head bob if present. Games with a too narrow FOV and/or head bob are unplayable for tons of people who suffer from motion sickness, and it's such a shame to have so many good games ruined by it.