Between this and Star Trek: Infinite seems like Paradox’s new MO is to set unreasonable deadlines and rush games to release. You should basically consider all their games early access at this point, except they’ll charge you for updates. They’ve learned that a buggy half-baked release wont effect their sales, and they can just patch the game and crank out new features as dlc.
Find me a performance patch in any Paradox game that requires you to buy a fucking DLC to apply.
Or maybe just quit bullshitting.
FFS, we're talking about a relatively small developer/publisher that continually supports and develops most of their games for the better part of a decade (or more, like EU IV). I thought this shit is what people wanted but what it seems most gamers want is just any excuse to fucking whine.
Way to completely misread my post there bud. Its not about the dlc, its about Pdox (who isn’t exactly a small indie publisher anymore) rushing buggy, feature-bare games to release with the intent of abusing their dlc-centric business model. FFS I guess wanting a game that’s complete and works on release is whining.
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.
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.
that should actually crank everything to the highest possible setting.
While I can understand where you’re coming from, one thing I wonder about – I think that a lot of people want to use the max setting and expect it to work. It’s not unreasonable for a developer to choose ranges such that a max setting doesn’t run reasonably on any current hardware, as doing that may provide for scalability on future hardware. Like, it’s easy for me to make a game that can scale up to future hardware – e.g. try to keep more textures loaded in VRAM than exists on any hardware today, or have shadow resolutions that simply cannot be computed by existing hardware in a reasonable amount of time. But maybe in five years, the hardware can handle it.
If a game developer has the highest-quality across-the-board quality setting not work on any existing system, then I think that you’re going to wind up with people who buy a fancy PC, choose the “max” setting, and then complain “this game isn’t optimized, as I bought expensive hardware and it runs poorly on Ultra/Max/whatever mode”.
But if the game developer doesn’t let the settings go higher, then they’re hamstringing people who might be using the software five or ten years down the line.
I think that one might need a “maximum reasonable on existing hardware” setting or something like that.
I’ve occasionally seen “Insane” with a recommendation that effectively means something like that, “this doesn’t run on any existing hardware well, but down the line, it might”. But I suspect that there are people who are still going to choose that setting and be unhappy if it doesn’t perform well.
Maybe they should come up with better names because people aren’t going to get better about this. Instead of high graphics, call it “16vram mode” or something.
Here’s a pre-release video from City Planner Plays that discusses the new roadway options. I believe even C:S1 added in snap-to-angle options eventually, which made it very easy to build roads at right angles. Unless you mean parallel roads? This is something that vanilla C:S1 did not have, but it looks like C:S2 has that on launch. The new road-building tools are one of the features that had me most hyped.
I had such a pain in the ass trying to make highway on ramp and off ramps look good while also being perpendicular to the highway and each other. Ruined the game for me because I couldn’t get past the first offramp to even start building 😓 bugged me way too much
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.
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.
I was mostly thinking about action (or generally keyboard walking) games but that's good to know, I never got to play those titles honestly.
It's not like customizable difficulty would be mandatory - you have your default presets and an option to customize. You could even add a disclaimer about how "modifying difficulty can break the experience" or whatever.
I'd rather have a choice and not use it than be stuck with options that never feel "right".
I realize that games (and software in general) today are about simplifying things and removing any possibility of user messing up but it can make the end product way less engaging in my opinion.
To be fair, the speed options in those Sierra games actually adjusted the speed of the entire game, not just the walking; but I understand what you’re getting at.
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.
That's not what I mean though. Back in Splinter Cell you could use mouse wheel to increase or decrease your character walking speed - similar to how you can do it with an analog stick. It's about giving player more gradual control on how fast/slow you move.
That said, customizable game time scale (not game speed) is also another thing I'd like to see in games.
Oh, I get what you mean. So you want something like analog input for movement.
Hmm. I think that a lot of FPSes use the mousewheel for “cycle weapon”. I guess you could have some kind of chording support, but I think that the problem is mostly that there isn’t a free analog input on keyboard+mouse for it.
The other thing would be that you only get one analog axis then, and a lot of games will need two analog axes for analog movement.
I was just reading the other day about some keyboard that apparently had keys with pressure-sensitive switches. I have no idea how many games actually support it, and bet that it’s obscenely expensive, but that’d provide necessary analog inputs, assuming that games add support.
googles
Ah, apparently it’s a thing with “gaming” PC keyboards right now.
You know, honestly, I think that this is at least partly a special case of what a lot of the other comments have asked for, which is basically a more-powerful input layer on the PC sitting between my devices and the game. Like, if I have a bunch of keyboards and joysticks and mice or whatever, let me attach axes and buttons however I want to functions in the game, do macros, whatever.
I had a comment complaining that I had a controller with two extra buttons than a standard XBox controller, but that most games can’t take advantage of that, even though they provide extensive support for rebinding keys on keyboards.
Someone else wanted to be able to bind any input to any game function, wanted macros and stuff.
You’re wanting the ability to link an analog input to existing code in the game that can take an analog value.
Several people have asked for the ability to rebind controller keys.
I also recall seeing, in a past discussion, a handicapped user talk about how the ability to rebind was important to them for accessibility reasons.
I think you're making this a little bit more complicated than necessary. Those gadgets are cool but that would probably require more support by the devs than a simple keybinds and considering how niche this stuff is... I think the latter is a more probable option.
Those two axis you mentioned would be modified together anyway since we'd want the speed modifier to be the same no matter the direction. Alternatively one could make it into a separate variable included in speed calculations - this way you can keep the direct input value provided by the controller (whether it's a gamepad or a keyboard) and have one more piece that can sit unchanged when playing with analog controls.
Mouse scroll was an example since that's how it worked in Splinter Cell back in the day (it's also how Star Citizen does it today). You could just as well use any other key to increase/decrease the this muliplier (or make it mouse scroll + modifier key).
Overall, I do agree that more flexibility in input mapping would be a good thing. Can't go wrong with giving people more choice.
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Aktywne