Collectible tracker after getting to a certain threshold. I get that people don't like maps cluttered with stuff, but if someone gets to a point they got over 60% of a thing, it's likely they want to go for all of them, so the option to give them at least a general searching area should be provided.
I agree with everything in the OP and most of the other comments. But something for me that I don’t think I’ve seen options for in any games.
Eyes and teeth. I’m a bit squimish around things happening to them. If your game shows them being injured in some way, just let me turn that off and skip it or something.
I know it sounds like a small thing, but I know at least four games which have this issue…
My biggest one is robust modding support. I understand it’s something that potentially needs a lot of extra effort to implement from the developers, but when I look at my collection of games that I love, almost all of them let me mod like crazy. Let me download 90 bugfixes and 40 QoL tweaks for a game from 2003.
One issue is that this can be a vector for malware. I kind of wish that game engines came standard with something like the Javascript engine in browsers, with some sort of sandbox for mods. I’m not saying that that’d solve everything – the game code that the mods invoke probably isn’t hardened – but it’d be better then just having arbitrary modifications go in. Especially with mod systems that auto-download new versions – even if the mod author is on the up-and-up, if someone compromises his account or computer, they’ve compromised all the computers using the mod.
EDIT: This isn’t just a problem specific to mods, either. A lot of online software library systems that provide auto-updates (pip for Python, rvm for Ruby, etc) can be a vector into systems. Providing auto-updates where many, many people have rights to push updates to computers is convenient in terms of getting software working, but unless the resulting code is running sandboxed, it’s creating an awful lot of vectors to attack someone’s system. This isn’t to impugn any one author – the vast bulk of people writing mods and open-source software are upstanding people. But it only takes one bad egg or one author who themselves has their system compromised to compromise a lot of other systems, and in practice, if you’re saying “subscribe to this mod”, you’re doing something that may have a lot of security implications for your system.
Consoles and phones already do a decent job of sandboxing games (well, as far as I know; I haven’t been working on security for either of them, but from what I’ve seen of the systems, they at least aim to achieve that). So maybe someone can compromise an app, but there’s a limited amount they can do aside from that. Maybe dump your name and location and such, but they can’t get control of your other software. However, Linux, Windows, and MacOS don’t have that kind of app sandboxing generally in place. I know that Linux has been working towards it – that’s one major reason for shifting to Wayland, among other things – but it’s definitely not there today.
For servers, I think that part of the way that sysadmins have been trying to deal with this is running containers or VMs on a per-service basis. Looking at !homelab, I see a lot of people talking about containers or VMs. But that’s not really an option today for desktop users who want to run games in a sandbox; it’s not set up automatically, and 3D card support spanning containers is not great today, or at least wasn’t last time I looked at it. I can run Ren’Py games in a firejail today successfully on Linux, but that’s not out-of-box behavior, Steam definitely doesn’t have it in place by default, I have no idea whether it’s possible for WINE (which is important for a lot of Windows games that run on Linux) and at least some if not all of the mechanisms firejail uses for graphics won’t permit for access to the 3D hardware.
I play a lot of logistics games, so crafting time and speed and such. There’s always an effective input rate and a maximum output rate. Item takes 12 seconds and crafting machine has a speed of 3.14… So what’s the items per second? Sure it’s 12/3.14 but nowhere does the game show that. Not all games make this sin, but those that do drive me mad.
A number of games would benefit from also showing a DPS number on weapons. Same idea. Yeah, I can do it in my head, but you’re running on a computer that can flawlessly do billions of calculations a second. Why not do the extra step for me?
I think this might be a thing in modern games, but I don’t play enough new releases to be sure: Changing the accessibility settings before anything else in the game. The first time I encountered this was on The Division 2, a Ubisoft game of all things, and being able to tune my subtitles, visual cues, sound options, among others before even the Press Start to begin the game is an incredibly comfortable feeling.
A minor feature that is unfortunately underused is having an archive/library/compendium of characters, plot events and the like. The Yakuza series has entries for its major characters, which is a bliss in games that are essentially soap operas introducing new families and plot twists every with every new installment, and being able to catch up after a few days/weeks without playing is a relief.
It’s a thing… here and there. Far Cry 6 by default has voice reader accessibility feature turned on, which is nice. Say what you will about Ubisoft, they’re good with accessibility stuff.
Final Fantasy XVI’s Active Time Lore. Being able to pause the game and have a list of relevant characters, places, and concepts for the scene you’re in is so helpful for my ADHD, for when I take a break from a game and come back not knowing what’s going on. I want to see this in every story heavy game.
For survival/crafting/whatever games - let me adjust drop rates and toggle things on and off individually, rather than just choosing a difficulty.
What I mean by this is looking at something like Ark versus Subnautica. Ark gives a super fine grained level of customization around spawn rates and other settings. You don’t even need to strictly enable or disable hunger but can set the decay rate, for example.
I’ve stopped playing Subnautica because it’s too grindy/stingy. Sometimes games get better about this further in, but I don’t wanna have to play 10 hours of garbage to get to the good stuff. (side note, I use Skip First Hour mod in factorio for this. Love it.)
Bit of an older game, but Don't Starve was great at this. At the beginning of a game you could set and customize the entire world/map that you were going to be dropped into, including how little or lot of each and every resource individually (eg, you could have a lot of trees, but few rocks, some carrots, but no berries, etc). IIRC you could also pick the world size, how much the land branched out into 'islands', weather patterns, the day length, stuff like that. It's essentially creating your own difficulty.
For coop games with dialog I really loved how Baldur’s Gate 3 let everyone see the dialog choices and click on them to vote for what they would want. The player in the dialog didn’t have to choose it, but they could see and it let every player feel like they were a part of every conversation instead of just watching.
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Aktywne