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.
The spin-off Strikers has the absolutely brain-infecting Love te Wonderland
However, I’ve recently finished Cassette Beasts, and it’s a really really strong contender. Imagine creating an OST piece as amazing as Same Old Story, then going back and adding lyrics for it for when you are fused. And then there’s the even more phenomenal Shot in the Dark (only linking the lyrics version here).
Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex both come to mind. Alexander Brandon was involved in both and his work is absolutely amazing.
If we talk specific singles, though, it’s Morrowind (Nerevar Rising), Control (Take Control), and, recently, Baldur’s Gate 3 (Raphael’s Final Act). Morrowind’s tune is so ingrained in my mind that it’s my to-go whenever I get my hands on a keyboard.
Great choices there! the Unreal Tournament and Morrowind soundtracks have been stuck in my head for a long time now. UT in particular -- I listen to the full album about once a week while I'm working.
I never played Deus Ex when it came out, so I don't have the nostalgic attachment for that one, but I just discovered this a few days ago: https://alexanderbrandon.bandcamp.com/album/conspiravision-deus-ex-remixed. I bought it and am giving it a full listen today. Highly recommended; probably that much better if you're a fan of the game.
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
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:
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.
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 that a better way to do it is probably in the OS, rather than in-game, on a per-game basis
Low power mode on macOS gives that kind of feature. It works well because the computer never goes beyond a certain threshold of power. I guess it’s a simple downclock of some sort, but the caveat is that it won’t adapt to more demanding zones of the game.
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.
I used to do exactly that with macros in World Of Warcraft. I had 3 different kind of setup for Efficiency, Balanced and Quality gaming. That game was the first that I know of to introduce built-in FPS capping during WOTLK extension, and 10 different settings mode plus the ability to make even more custom tweaks. My only wish is that every game developer to do the same.
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.
Speaking of WoW, there is a target FPS setting that will make the game lower the compute demand, but it wouldn’t help in my case since it’s meant to use as much compute power as possible to reach an FPS goal. It could do the trick if it could be coupled to a Don’t use more than 50% of the compute power, but I’m not sure a game can understand how much a computer has without reaching its limit first. Maybe some kind of benchmarking could help though.
Speaking as a player, though, I don’t much care about power consumption if a system has wall power.
Me neither. But I do enjoy a silent machine !
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.
That would be very useful indeed! And another incentive for developers to write better code.
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.
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!
I agree that it’s a valid insight that a lot of basic input things are not explained and that it’s not obvious to a first time user.
But on the other hand, I think that the vast majority of players have, at this point, learned.
I remember way back when the personal computer was getting going, the first (or maybe second) Macintosh came out with an audio tape that one could play in conjunction with an automated demo showing how to click on things and drag and so forth. What icons and menus were. Today, we just kind of assume that people know that, because they’ve picked them up on the way, so it’s not like individual software packages have a tutorial telling someone what a window is and how to use it.
And I remember being at a library where there was some “computer training for senior citizens” thing going on near me, and some elderly lady was having trouble figuring out double-clicking and the instructor there said “don’t worry, double-clicking is one of the hardest things”. I mentally kind of rolled my eyeballs, but then I thought about that. I mean, I’d been double-clicking for years, and I bet that the first time I started out, I probably dicked it up too.
But I don’t know if the way to do that is to have every game incorporate a tutorial on the console’s hardware doing things like teaching players that the console sticks are clickable. Like, maybe the real answer is that the console should have a short tutorial. Most consoles these days seem to have an intrinsic concept of user accounts. When creating one, maybe run through the hardware tutorial.
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.
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.
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).
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?
@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.
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.
A benchmark for tweaking graphics settings is also something I think every game should have. Just let me run a benchmark and tweak the settings before starting the game.
I really dug the music in CP2077 (and, especially, Phantom Liberty). The use of leitmotifs lifted the score. More so than in a similar game (GTA5), I really enjoyed the radio stations, too.
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