Here’s a really small and easy to fix pet peeve of mine: graphics options that cycle through the levels of fidelity with inconsistent scales. I like to set my graphics to max, try it out, and then adjust down where needed. It’s very annoying if a game doesn’t stop where the max option is, so if it’s currently at “High” I have no idea if the next option to the right is going to be “Very High” or “Low” again. So I often end up overshooting the highest setting and having to go back one, or purposefully going to the lowest setting and then one further.
Yup. Ideally there should always some kind of indicator, like a bar, that lets you easily see how many steps there are and which one is selected.
Also: If there are graphics presets available, if there’s one that’s called “highest” or “max” then that should actually crank everything to the highest possible setting.
that should actually crank everything to the highest possible setting.
While I can understand where you’re coming from, one thing I wonder about – I think that a lot of people want to use the max setting and expect it to work. It’s not unreasonable for a developer to choose ranges such that a max setting doesn’t run reasonably on any current hardware, as doing that may provide for scalability on future hardware. Like, it’s easy for me to make a game that can scale up to future hardware – e.g. try to keep more textures loaded in VRAM than exists on any hardware today, or have shadow resolutions that simply cannot be computed by existing hardware in a reasonable amount of time. But maybe in five years, the hardware can handle it.
If a game developer has the highest-quality across-the-board quality setting not work on any existing system, then I think that you’re going to wind up with people who buy a fancy PC, choose the “max” setting, and then complain “this game isn’t optimized, as I bought expensive hardware and it runs poorly on Ultra/Max/whatever mode”.
But if the game developer doesn’t let the settings go higher, then they’re hamstringing people who might be using the software five or ten years down the line.
I think that one might need a “maximum reasonable on existing hardware” setting or something like that.
I’ve occasionally seen “Insane” with a recommendation that effectively means something like that, “this doesn’t run on any existing hardware well, but down the line, it might”. But I suspect that there are people who are still going to choose that setting and be unhappy if it doesn’t perform well.
Maybe they should come up with better names because people aren’t going to get better about this. Instead of high graphics, call it “16vram mode” or something.
Here’s a pre-release video from City Planner Plays that discusses the new roadway options. I believe even C:S1 added in snap-to-angle options eventually, which made it very easy to build roads at right angles. Unless you mean parallel roads? This is something that vanilla C:S1 did not have, but it looks like C:S2 has that on launch. The new road-building tools are one of the features that had me most hyped.
I had such a pain in the ass trying to make highway on ramp and off ramps look good while also being perpendicular to the highway and each other. Ruined the game for me because I couldn’t get past the first offramp to even start building 😓 bugged me way too much
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.
As a teen, I used to fall asleep listening to Might and Magic VI. You could literally put the disc in a player because the soundtrack was saved as wav files.
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.
LET ME TURN OFF THE CLAUSTROPHOBIC VIGNETTE, PLEEEAAASSEEEE. Even games like Cyberpunk 2077 that have gained countless features over the years and have individual HUD on/off switches still ignore this.
UGC as a whole. I grew up on Half-Life mods, custom Counter-Strike: Source maps, and LittleBigPlanet. The fact that we’ve pretty much abandoned that outside of Halo, Counter-Strike (just barely, mind you), and more recently Fortnite with proper Unreal Engine support is a terrible thing. It makes more sense than ever in an era of live service where you want players to never stop playing.
Vignetting is the darkening in a circle pattern at the edge of a photograph/movie caused by the fact that the lens is round and the film/sensor are square.
My guess is that he's referring to games using a similar effect (some do it with blur, too) extremely heavily on a large portion of the edge of the screen to create a tunnel vision effect in some contexts. I couldn't name which games do it, but I've seen it on sprint, stamina depletion, and low health in different games.
I always thought that it was intended to either simulate an old television or to make a scene look scarier, but looking at the wiki page I’ve linked to, it looks like there are a number of stylistic uses.
I think companies are more hesitant about ugc these days because of all the extra moderation required.
For instance someone made a sexual assault simulator as a custom overwatch map, and it made headlines, which is extra harmful for a company that is trying to recover from all the SA accusations.
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Aktywne