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.
I think if you played multiplayer you kept a copy of their character, so you could get another account to join? Maybe get someone to make your characters for you
First person shooter or third person game where aim is important, has to be keyboard and mouse. Pretty much anything involvong driving a vehicle, gamepad is better. In games like GTA I often use both, switching as necessary. Mostly I play FPS games though so KB+M is my most used input method. Some console-focused FPS games such as Halo I’ll play on controller if it’s all that is available, such as with the Steam Deck.
Baldur’s Gate 3 - It’s my second run. Part of what I love about these games is that you’ll find new things and different approaches with every play-through. And with every run you get a little more daring and in-character with how you react to situations.
First time round I can’t help but play little miss goody two-shoes, just staying true to my own nature. Second time I feel a bit more daring and actually try to act like the self-centered anti-hero I had in mind for this character. Who knows, maybe some day I’ll even dare to play a villain :)
Playing coop with my friend. It’s so much fun. It’s kinda hard not to mention spoilers, choices or things we’ve done in our main games though hahah. There’s so many choices and branches…
imo it’s worth it to play the megaten spinoffs in general, just like what helix said in another comment here. In particular I would like to recommend Devil Survivor because of a lot of things: has a skill steal (skill crack) system so you progressively get better skills for yourself and your demons, makes you think about how you make your team, the first game has the best alignment ending choices in the whole megaten series, the demon auction system, and more. Also: Octopath traveler and its sequel are good
I would be the lone human in Deep Rock Galactic. Hopefully I would be transported into the Rig and drink some beers because if I ended up on Hoxxes I’m pretty sure I would be glyphid food.
For games where you need to drive some sort of vehicle I do prefer a controller for the joystick and analog triggers, but anywhere you need to aim at something I prefer a KB+M.
I’d like to try some kind of hybrid setup to have the best of both. I stumbled upon the Hex Evo some time ago, but it’s still in preorder phase and I don’t want to buy into something cheap or that’s going to get abandoned, and maybe the final product will look more polished but the footage I could find of it, it looked like a cheaply 3D-printed device which doesn’t look that great, but it’s probably just a prototype.
bin.pol.social
Ważne