My favorites are ffxiv, because the music is very closely woven into the story with motifs and stuff, so it brings me back to it. Its also just pretty as fuck, they do a lot of weaving other songs and musical themes into other songs, so a lot of the time you'll be in a boss fight and recognize a theme from earlier, mixed in with the boss music. Some context is spoilers, so I won't go into it, but the Endwalker final boss has the music shifting from each previous expansions themes, morphing and shifting to fit the overarching boss theme, and its fucking glorious.
Also, the ace combat games have the most insane music, its basically a meme that "everyone's a badass until the sky starts singing latin at you" Its this really cool mix of operatic vocals and rock/synth music and its so fucking good.
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’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.
Always enjoyed Skyrim’s soundtrack, but while I love it, I still enjoy and prefer Oblivions soundtrack more.
Oblivion was my introduction to the Elder Scrolls universe and the music from that game has kinda become embedded in my mind. Just my general go to music for fantasy environments including for DND or Pathfinder sessions.
I love Morrowinds music too, but if I had played Morrowind back when it first came out, I would have ranked it’s soundtrack higher than Oblivions.
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 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.
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.
Any kind of pause or completion of loading should have a brief moment where you can see the action and get your bearings before it hands control to you. Like how Forza or Euro/American Truck Sim handle loading saves, its paused for a second or so with the player getting full view of the screen then continues so you have a moment to figure out what you need to do
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.
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.
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.
I’ve only seen that a couple times, but yeah, the fact that NPCs can be off doing their own thing – the engine is a pretty open sandbox – can mean that they’re talking during a cutscene, and the way Starfield works, whichever character started talking first gets priority for the caption – the other caption only comes up after the first one finishes.
I kind of wish that they’d just stack the captions onscreen.
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.
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.
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.
This is less of an issue in multiplayer games, as they rarely have very narrow FOVs by default. The worst offenders are often console ports and slower first-person games.
FWIW while it's a competitive advantage with high FOV, if there is a slider, it's still fair since everybody can use a higher FOV if they want to.
It's not all advantage though, aiming gets harder (aside from the distortions).
I don't see why it matters at all in single-player. So what if it makes the game easier? Who cares?
The fact that I don't have to stop due to almost vomiting also makes it easier in a way, but I really don't mind.
The fact that the optimal FOV differs on a per-player basis is of course exactly why I want a FOV slider everywhere. I usually prefer about 105 degrees horizontal (in 16:9), while some modern games default in the range 75-85.
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