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.
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.
I don’t know if it is a console feature or what, but I can “pause” some cutscenes with my PS4 for all the games I tried, and it worked with many games too on my PS3… It annoyed me when it didn’t though.
Hmm. That works for games with static cutscenes. But some games don’t have fixed cutscenes. Like, okay, take Starfield. A bunch of your actions can affect what people say in a given cutscene. So what you’ll see in a given cutscene may change.
If you can store player decisions long enough to assemble a cut scene once, you can store them long enough do it again. The decision tree is already there. It’s not difficult or expensive.
Hmm. I guess that’d work if you have a per-save-game list of cinematics. I was thinking of this more in the sense of games that have cinematics that are unlocked and accessible from the main menu.
Never thought about this but this would help a lot. If you stop paying attention for a short time or something happens, like your drink falling over, where you have to take your attention away, you’ll miss part of the cutscene and rewinding or watching it again would allow you to just watch what you missed again.
Yes, exactly. Or if a loud noise outside keeps you from hearing something important. Or if the voice actor mumbles. Or any number of other things that happen in real life.
Or if a loud noise outside keeps you from hearing something important.
At one point in my life, during the pre-Tivo era, I lived directly beneath the approach route for an airport. It wasn’t the highest-traffic airport out there, and you learn to just tune the airplanes out for most things – but the one thing that there wasn’t a great workaround for was the occasional snippet of television shows getting drowned out when they decided to have a critical bit of plot right when the 8:00 PM flight was coming in.
Modern video games with voice-acting do tend to mitigate this by having subtitles and turning them on by default, though. And video games usually do let you roll back to an earlier save, maybe lose a few minutes of play, but if you want badly enough to hear the thing, you can. So it’s not quite as bad as the television show, where missing the critical bit of a plot could be really irritating.
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.
I tried both and I feel like Wildlands is better. The world is very alive and expansive, plus the movement feels better. Something feels very clunky about breakpoint’s movement. Oh, and I enjoyed Wildlands’ primary enemies quite a bit more than Breakpoint. Wildlands does a good job of letting you SEE just how depraved the Sicarios are and their effects on the world.
As someone who really enjoys PeerTube, I also feel like the technical barriers to it being as popular as other platforms are a bit tougher to overcome.
I would love for it to be more popular. I also know it's really hard to convince content creators and live streamers to embrace it.
I love PeerTube. I have been trying to help the projects however I can. I also know that the economics of moving to PeerTube is quite different. Very few people make money microblogging (Twitter). Very few people make money posting to Reddit.
Streaming on Twitch or YouTube, or making content for YouTube can and for many people does bring in money, though. Creating an ecosystem where viewers are willing to pay, while increasing viewer counts of content so that sponsorships can be more common, all while trying to slowly convince people that we should be supporting things financially that up to now has been "free(not really, but experientially it 'feels' free)" is a lot of work.
I plan on supporting PeerTube as much as I can in the future. I want it to grow. Maybe someday, it will get there. I can hope.
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