Given I’ve never seen that actually become the case even in games with engines I had to apply configuration hacks to increase the FOV, I find all of that highly unlikely.
That might be fine for consoles which have known performance limitations built in. But if I’m on my PC, let me make that decision. Don’t try to make it for me.
One of the latter Final Fantasies did this. I think it was 13? Despite that game’s many other rather glaring shortcomings, that part was pretty neat. I agree it should definitely be standard for most RPG and heavily story driven games.
All controls should be remappable. All means all. Not most, not some, and certainly none of this bullshit where all you can do is toggle between “XBox 360 controller layout A/XBox 360 controller layout B.” This is especially true for titles on consoles, many of which still to this very day don’t allow you to remap their controls at all.
For 3D games, field of view. Far too many developers of FPS titles in particular have Console Disease, and feel it’s somehow acceptable to lock the FOV to 70° or some absurd number. If they allow you to adjust it at all they may be feeling “generous” enough to let you go as high as 90°. That’s completely unacceptable. On my 4K monitor that’s 25" from my face, I need at least 120°. Honestly, I want to see that slider go up to 180°. That’s right, I want to be able to look at your game world like a goddamned pigeon. On that note I really have to wonder what those people with those 3840x1080 überwide monitors do most of the time, other than spending their days in never ending torment.
Allow me to turn off the stupid pre-launch splash titles. Certainly at least after the first startup. I certainly don’t need to be told that nVidia is the way it’s meant to be played, or that your company licensed Havok, or who your publisher is, or who your publisher’s owner is, or who your publisher’s owner’s owner is, etc. Nobody cares. Usually instead you have to resort to replacing the .mkv or .bik files in the game folder with zero-byte text files or something. It’s dumb.
While we’re griping, and speaking of Console-Itis, does every PC game now need to have an unskippable message telling me that this game has auto save and urging me not to turn off my PC when the icon is being displayed? Really? Nobody’s going to do that. Tell me your game is a shitty console port without telling me your game is a shitty console port. To keep this on topic, let’s have a setting to turn that off, too, because it’s stupid. Off by default would be nice. Should there be an Idiot Mode toggle?
Granularity in subtitles. It seems too many games only have two settings: All subtitles off, or they assume you’re completely deaf. Typically I want to be able to read what characters are saying in their voice lines, but instead the developers also think I need to see the bottom third of my screen filled with [BOOM] [GUNFIRE] [JUKEBOX MUSIC] [FOOTSTEPS] [BOOM] [GUNFIRE] [BOOM] [BOOM] and so on and so forth, all the time. They should either categorize sounds and make their subtitling things individually selectable, or at least if they insist on making it a slider give it three or four levels: Off, cutscene/conversation dialog only, all spoken lines (“Cover me!” “Reloading!” “Never should have come here!” etc.), and then only the top level resulting in every single cricket and rustle of grass being captioned. Some games do manage to accomplish this. Many do not.
Oh, I thought of a good one to add to my wish list. I want every game to bring back the sound test menu. But they won’t, because every studio on Earth now wants you to spend an extra $15 for their game’s soundtrack. (As if it’s not all going to be on Youtube about twelve seconds after release anyway…)
You can deflect leaping headcrabs this way (or block them with a held object, although this causes you to automatically drop it afterwards) but as far as I know it deals no damage to enemies.
Apparently Valve experimented with melee weapons early in development, but intentionally decided to cut them because of the perceived lack of impact and weightlessness of held items, but the main thing was that playtesters kept getting their long melee weapons snagged on stuff. Alyx notably does not allow your hands or held items to intersect with other objects, nor does it let your hands get too far away from your body’s position to prevent shenanigans. If you unexpectedly hook your crowbar on a door frame or a table or something you’ll find yourself inexplicably leashed to it after walking a couple of feet and then not be able to find your hands.
This article goes into some detail. Apparently the crowbar specifically was removed to prevent players from assuming they were Gordon Freeman, despite the constant stream of evidence to the contrary. But it doesn’t seem like too much of a leap to replace that with Alyx grabbing a random length of pipe or chunk of rebar or something from the multitudes of trashed urban environments she traverses throughout the game.
Anyway, as soon as modding support was opened up for HL:A the first things that inevitably appeared were about 4,987 mods that added the crowbar back in. So it’s an easy enough wish to fulfill, if that’s what you want.
It could be either given that Alyx ended on a cliffhanger that ties it back to the original series. They’d better come up with something, or else they’re going to have another riot on their hands.
It was pretty janky. I received a download code for Half Life 2 in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro several months before the game was actually released. I didn’t have a lot of use for Steam before then, but I installed it anyway and my account is so old that back when the account IDs were still numeric and sequential, mine was four digits.
I still have my boxed copy of the Orange Box on a shelf. It still sees use because every once in a while I get embroiled in a Kids These Days type of conversation and I need a prop to wave around.
I’d happily put an orange Gabecube right next to it.
Apparently there is third party support in Linux under Mondao but it still seems pretty developmental and I haven’t had the time to mess with it yet. I’m still clinging to mine as well, because at least for now it still works and I’ve blocked Windows from rug-pulling my WMR app. I’m sure that’ll only last until the next time I need to reformat and reinstall in a couple of years.
Kirby’s Adventure is the largest NES game ever officially released in terms of ROM size, and has a frankly absurd amount of graphics tiles. Just consider all of those required for the copy abilities thumbnails alone and you’ll see what I mean. It pulled basically every trick the MMC3 mapper is capable of, and was definitely a masterpiece of the system in the original sense, i.e. it displays astonishing mastery of the mechanics of the Famicom/NES.
What I find more amazing is that the MMC3 isn’t one of the mappers that confers any additional sound channels and the American NES didn’t support that capability anyway. So the entirety of the game’s iconic soundtrack fits within the confines of the NES’ two square waves, one triangle wave, one noise channel, and singular PCM channel.
I think ultimately it ran into memory constraints, even with the additional 8 KB provided by the mapper. If you sit back and look at them as a whole, its levels are all quite short. It’s still my favorite NES game bar none, though.