Stopping rendering / game logic / music if you alt tab. And resource management overall. It grinds my gears when games use resources even when there’s nothing happening. (Civ6 for instance constantly uses absurd amounts of cpu just for idling in game and doesn’t use any more when calculating so turns.)
The question of pause-a-game-when-not-focused is a big question for me. I don’t know if there’s a perfect answer, though I’d at least like a toggle.
I run a Linux environment, with multiple workspaces. I can switch between workspaces by whacking a key combination. So I really, really frequently am swapping between them, even when playing games.
I totally understand how some people might want a game to auto-pause when they switch away from it. I remember once seeing a video recording of some guy who was handling support calls. He was playing video games in between calls, and every time a call came in, he would switch over to his support software and do work. Now, setting aside the question of whether his manager was okay with that, that’s a very legitimate use case where you’d want a game to auto-pause on switch. Otherwise, you have to manually pause and then switch.
On the other hand, I often want to switch away when the game is doing something time-consuming. Starfield can take a while to do a rest, and I’ll often be looking at something on another workspace while resting. I definitely don’t want the game to pause then, else I just have to sit there staring at a screen with a progress bar moving. Same thing with turn-based games that have an AI phase, where the AI is computing something. If a game has any moments with downtime, I’d like to be able to run it in the background without it pausing. It’s really annoying when a game developer tries to “helpfully” auto-pause the game, when I don’t want that. I’d be fine with that as a default, but if there’s no toggle, it’s really irritating (Starfield does have a toggle, albeit one hidden in a config file and without a UI widget for it).
On idles, I agree. Especially for turn-based games like Civilization, it’d be nice to at least have the option to forego idle animations, which would be a big battery usage saver for laptops. The only thing it should need to do, even in the foreground, if you’re not pushing buttons, is be playing music.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Unciv, but it’s a full open-source reimplementation of Civilization 5 for Android and desktop OSes, using simple graphics. It really does drive home how much graphical fluff there is in the series – not that that’s necessarily bad, but it really is not necessary to play the game. And for a lot of people, it’d be nice to have battery-friendly games.
there is no such thing as “idling” in a game, when viewed through the lens of software engineering. Even if you aren’t giving the game any new inputs, the game is still doing the work of rendering the screen. Calculating a turn is actually only a small part of the process.
Calculating a turn is the most intensive part of the process. I don’t expect it to use no cpu. But Civ6 has no right to use similar cpu power to stelarris running at max speed while just rendering grass. And considering that it continues to use that even if its paused and minimized, I think it’s pretty clear that they just don’t care about power consumption.
I generally want the opposite. If I alt tab while waiting for a long operation I want it to keep going while I’m tabbed out, and I especially want the music to continue so I don’t forget I have the game running
That is one of the biggest disadvantages of the PC IMHO…
I remember what a pain in the ass is to achieve split screen in the Left 4 Dead game… Is that annoying that I actually got the Xbox 360 version to play with my gf lol.
I just want proper Nvidia Surround/AMD Eyefinity/ultrawide screen resolution options. About 50% of games have them, 50% don’t, and it’s really frustrating to play a game where my playing experience would be so much better if I could use Surround, but the game just has no support for any resolution that isn’t 16:9.
I’ve had a couple of games I’ve encountered that are literally unplayable at 21:9. You’re either stuck with textures stretched to oblivion or it cuts off a significant chunk of the screen. Admittedly this is mostly with older games that predate 21:9 displays but holy crap is it annoying when I can’t play a game because it can’t handle my display and stretches instead of displaying at the configured resolution
I’m more forgiving of that kind of thing with older games that predate ultrawide resolutions, and consider it a pleasant surprise when I find an older game that works fine with it. But since I’m running a Surround setup, I have the ability to just turn off a couple of monitors and run in 16:9 if I have to - which I do for most older games. It really sucks there isn’t a good workaround for you, and others with 21:9 screens.
But it’s bloody annoying when it’s a new game that doesn’t support anything but 16:9, or only supports it badly. The only argument I can see against supporting wider resolutions is that in competitive games, apparently the wider field of view offered by screen resolutions wider than 16:9 offers an unfair competitive advantage to the players that have them. (Like one person having a better CPU or GPU, or more RAM than someone else doesn’t?!) With single player or cooperative games, where there is no competitive element that gives an advantage to whoever has the best hardware, I really can’t see any justification for not supporting non-16:9 resolutions.
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.
I’m a lefty, but there was no way in hell I was moving the mouse to the other side every time I used the family computer, so I just learned how to use my right hand.
As a kid I had my own PC early and my dad set it up left handed for me. Now I’ve played games left handed in general for 23 years, and shooters in particular for 15 years already, it’s too late to relearn :-)
Dear God, yes, font size options, PLEASE! I cannot express just how depressing it is to finally get a game I’ve been wanting to play so badly for years only to immediately realize I can’t play the damn thing because I can’t see the text to read it and figure out what the hell is going on or what I’m supposed to do. :(
No Denuvo
DRM-free versions (fuck every AAA client, give me the setup files and piss off)
Linux-friendly anti-cheat
If your game has an online component, release the server files so the community can self-host!
Basically, anything that preserves a game well beyond its prime.
Anti-cheat systems in general tend to be fragile to changes in the game environment.
Honestly, I used to want that, and I’ll believe that game devs could do better than they do today, but honestly, I think that the problem is, end of the day, fundamentally not a technically-solvable one. The only way you’re going to reasonably-reliably do anti-cheat stuff is going to be to have a trusted system, where the player can’t do anything to their system.
I’d say that it’s one of the stronger arguments for consoles in general versus PC gaming. On a console, the playing field is pretty much level. Everyone has the same software running on their system, the same number of frames on their screen. Maybe there might be limited differences to the controller or better latency to a server, but that’s it. It’s hard to modify the system to get that edge. A console is pretty close to the ideal system for competitive multiplayer stuff. On a PC, in a (real-time) competitive multiplayer game, someone is always going to have some level of an edge. Like, the ability to get higher resolution or more frames per second, the ability of games to scale up to use better hardware, is fundamentally something of a pay-to-win baked into the system.
There will always be a place for competitive multiplayer games, but I honestly think that a better route forward for many games is to improve game AI from where it is today and then use computer opponents more heavily. While humans make for a very smart enemy “AI” in a lot of ways, and using them may be a technically-easier problem than doing comparable enemy AI, there are also all kinds of baggage that fundamentally come with competitive multiplayer play:
Limited lifespan for the game. At some point, nobody (or not many) people will be playing the game any more, even if it doesn’t depend on the game publisher to operate online servers. At that point, the game will head into the dustbin of history – it’ll be hard to meet the threshold to get enough people together at any one time to play a game. Multiplayer games are mortal, and single-player games are immortal.
You can’t pause. Or, well, you can, but then that doesn’t scale up to many players and can create its own set of problems. A lot of people need to change an infant’s diaper or get the door or take a call. They can play against computers, but they can’t (reasonably) play against other players.
Cheating.
Griefing.
Sometimes optimal human strategy isn’t…all that much fun to actually play against. Like, I remember playing the original Team Fortress, and that a strategy was to have classes that could set up static defenses (pipe bombs, lasers, turrets, etc) set them up right atop spawn points. That may well be a good strategy in the game, but it’s also not a lot of fun for the other players.
Immersion. Doesn’t matter for all games, but for some it does. I don’t expect humans to role-play, to stay in character, because I know that it’s work and i don’t want to hassle with it myself. But, end of the day, playing against xxPussySlayer69xx is kind of immersion-breaking.
Latency is always going to be an issue. You can mitigate it a bit with prediction and engine improvements or more telecom infrastructure, but the laws of physics still place constraints on the speed of light. There are ways you can minimize it – LAN parties, if you can get enough people. Regional servers, though that guy who lives in Hawaii is always gonna just have a hard time of it. But it’s always going to be there; you’re never going to truly have a level playing field.
The game is intrinsically mandatory-online. If you have a spotty or no connection, the game doesn’t work.
Another issue is the advance of technology. If it isn’t there now, I can imagine a generic AI engine, something like Havok is for physics, becoming widespread. And as that improves, one can get more-and-more compelling AI. Plus, hardware is getting better. But humans are, well, human. Humanity isn’t getting better at being a game opponent over the years. So my long-run bet is gonna be on game AI tending to edge in on humans as an opponent for human players.
Okay so I fully agree on the use of better AI in games as competitors. The AI in games, though sometimes complex, is lacking in a lot of major games and the difficulty setting just basically amps up their damage and health instead of causing them to outplay you.
I think there are two solutions to better competitive games that reduces cheating and they’re already somewhat at work.
The first solution is implementing AI to detect cheating which has been done but very limited in scope. This will require more data collection for the user, but I fully support that if you’re being competitive and not playing casually. Why? Because in person sports also collect plenty of data on you, often even more invasive, to make sure you aren’t cheating. This can be done in collaboration with Microsoft actually because they have the ability to lock down their OS in certain ways while playing competitive games. They just haven’t bothered because no one asks. Same with Linux potentially if someone wanted to make that.
The second important improvement is to raise the stakes for someone who plays any sort of Esport game. I’m reminded of Valve requiring a phone number for CSGO because it’s easy to validate but raises the difficulty and price of cheating and bans. Having a higher price for competitive games is also entirely possible and also raises the stakes to cheat. The less accounts cheaters can buy, the better. Should it ask for a social security card? No. But I think that system bans based on hardware and IP are also important. You can also improve the value/time put into each account to make it more trustworthy. If a person plays CS for thousands of hours, make their account worth something.
And a minor third improvement would be: match people with more matches/xp/hours with other people of similar dedication at similar skill levels. That means cheaters will decrease the more you play and a cheater would have to play for far longer with cheats undetected to get to that point.
There’s plenty that can be done, companies are just doing almost nothing about the problem because cheaters make them money.
. The only way you’re going to reasonably-reliably do anti-cheat stuff is going to be to have a trusted system, where the player can’t do anything to their system.
Even then there are possible options. (hdmi splitter etc)
Gyroscope controls. Especially for first-person shooters and other first-person games. I used to be a diehard mouse and keyboard player when it came to FPSes until I played Quake 1 on the Switch with gyro controls turned on. Now I’m trying to find ways to be able to play every FPS in my collection on a TV with gyro aim because it just feels so much better.
Everyone I know that’s gotten good with it swears up and down about it but 10 or so hours with Splatoon 2 and I felt like I didn’t get ANY better with it
This is from someone who’s pretty damn good at fps games, usually top 3 on the scoreboard no matter what game it is, so I’m not just bad at the games themselves
Splatoon doesn't give you as much control over it as a Steam controller does. It's only the Y axis, and it's always on. It's much better when you can hold a grip button to toggle it. Then you can use the right track pad or analog stick for big movements and the gyro for fine tuned precision while holding a grip button.
That sounds like exactly what my issue was with learning: it always being on, any teeny hand movement ever would fuck with the camera, the steam controller sounds much closer to what my mind expected from gyro
With that in mind I just might have to try it out, though now I’m scared of getting good with it and needing to hack gyro into games to play, much like getting good with MKB killed me playing FPS on controller lol
I'll tell you that my friend sat me in front of Returnal on PS5, and that game felt unplayable without either M+KB or gyro, even though plenty of people managed just fine. There's even a gryo feature in the PS5 pad! They just didn't enable it for the game. On PC, you can use it on Steam controller whether the dev enabled it or not.
Hell yeah. I didn’t put this in my post because I didn’t want it to turn into a debate about the validity and viability of gyro controls (it is, if you don’t think so, you’re just wrong). So thanks for putting it.
One of my favorite steam deck features is being able to use gyro controls for any game. It’s not always as smooth as the Switch, but it works pretty well to add a bit of additional fine-grained control to the course-grained control of the R-stick.
Doom on the switch was amazing for this. I tried to play Doom eternal on the ps4, afterwards, and it was just such a disappointment because it didn’t have gyro.
My problem with analog sticks in FPSes isn’t fine-grained control – most games have zoom, and auto-aim has done a lot to mitigate lack of acuracy. My problem is coarse-grained control – that is, it takes ages in an FPS to turn around at maximum turn speed, whereas a mouse player can rapidly snap around if they are, say, attacked from the side or behind.
I’ve seen some people talk about hacking together some mechanism to try to deal with this using the Steam Controller and Steam Input – I think that it might have been something like a double-tap-to-rapidly-turn, but my impression is that whatever was going on there was more-elaborate than just the combination of an analog stick and a gyro for fine movement.
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