An option to choose what controller glyphs I want to use (Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo, directional) and a option to always use those glyphs even when mouse input is detected, so I can use Gyro without the glyphs constantly flickering ☺️
Motion blur - OFF Screenshake - OFF
Hey now... Don't forget camera bob, "lens dirt," chromatic aberration, and vignette!
AKA - the video game graphics equivalent of "beer goggles."
I'm okay with a little chromatic aberration and vignette. Camera bob can go straight to hell.
Internet Connection - On/Off
And by OFF, we mean actually off. The last thing I want is the game to push out a minor update 5 years after its last update, and all of the mods I have are now broken.
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...)
Allow me to turn off the stupid pre-launch splash titles.
I can guarantee that those splash titles are included because of contractual obligations. The same way a movie lists the publishing companies in the intro. Including a “skip after first launch” option would violate their contract. If it were up to a game’s director, they would almost universally prefer to drop you straight at the title screen. But they legally aren’t allowed to do so.
Oh, you want us to publish your game? We can require the game designer to show our logo for {x} seconds when the game launches. Oh, you want your game to be G-Sync compatible? Nvidia can require that you show their logo for at least {x} seconds when the game launches. Oh, you want to use our game engine to build your game? Unreal can require that you show their logo for {x} seconds when the game launches. Et cetera…
Quite famously, Unity had a reputational problem because of this. Free users were required to show the splash screen, but companies with larger war chests could pay the higher rate to skip it. It led to Unity being associated with low-budget and amateurish games, while higher quality games running on the same engine, which would be better advertising for Unity, tended to not show the logo.
Not quite a setting, but every game should be required to tell you how long ago the last save was when you quit the game. I absolutely don't understand why it's only a tiny minority of games that does this, it is such an obvious thing to do
System clock in the top right corner.
The ability to pause should be a requirement for single player games. Not being able to pause long cut scenes, combats, etc. is so frustrating when nobody else is impacted.
Any game completely opposed to pausing for whatever design reason should instead be required to have a minimum of 30 seconds between pauses to allow for interruptions while playing without it allowing for rapid pauses to impact game play. 30 seconds minimum is because of how many interruptions are immediately followed by another interruption by kids/spouses/parents/pets.
Cutscenes especially. The pause button should pause cutscenes, with an option to skip the cutscene on the pause menu. The pause button should never just outright skip the cutscene. It should always pause the cutscene.
So many times as a kid that my mom would walk in and start talking right as a cutscene started. And when I’d go to pause it, it would just skip the entire fucking cutscene instead.
Yeah, pause and skip should be separate things. I have some games pm PC where the ESC key pauses and brings up the menu but to skip the scene you have to be watching it and then hold some specific button like mouse 1 for a couple of seconds to skip. Those are my favorites because I have time to reconsider skipping!
Watch Dogs 2 had an “invasion” system like Dark Souls, but it also allowed pausing in the world anytime you weren’t being invaded. It’s been a nice thing to point to anytime Souls fans make that excuse.
Chromatic aberration and film grain. If your game has either of those and no way to turn them off, I wish you a slow, painful death and I will probably refund it.
pausing during cutscenes - it's weird that this isn't always an option even in AAA
Enterable values for mouse sensitivity.
No sliders.
I'm talking, down to at least the thousandths place decimal, and up as high as I fucking want. This allows your mouse sensitivity to not only account for how you play, but also how everybody else plays.
And if you're one of those devs that has the aiming be different than mouse cursor, or even MULTIPLE mouse cursor speed settings, HAVE ENTERABLE VALUES FOR THOSE TOO!!
Sometimes I'm at 1% and it's too high still.
Sometimes I'm at 1% and it's too low and 2% is too high.
This is totally unrealistic but it would be sweet if there was a button for showing you a compilation of recent cutscenes or something for when you havnt played a story heavy game in a while and forgot what’s going on.
Like in the main menu give me a memory button or whatever that basically brings me up to speed to where I left off. Could be replaying cutscenes or showing me text of recent events, who knows 🤷♀️
But there are too many times i have to put a deep rpg down and then life gets in the way and picking it up again becomes impossible when it doesn’t feel like I’m there anymore
The first time I boot up the game, immediately show me the settings menu. Whether its window settings, sound volume, subtitles, or graphics settings, please do not make me sit through a long cutscene or (god forbid) make me play the game without being able to adjust settings first. Sometimes the window is screwed up, the graphics are pushing my system too hard, or any number of other issues on first boot.
I can think of 1 or 2 games that booted to settings or booted to a truncated settings menu with common settings, but I would love if this became standard for all PC games.
When I want to quit your game, I mean it.
I do not want to be prompted several times as attempts to keep me in the game when I just want to leave.
Relatedly, I've noticed ports of console games, particularly by Japanese devs, and especially Sqeenix, not actually having an option to quit to desktop. Sometimes hitting Esc will pop a plain system theme window with an option to close the program, but I've seen ones that didn't even have that and had to be killed externally. It's not as bad as it used to be, but even exiting DragonQuest 11 is a pain.
This is also hella common in a lot of online or multiplayer live service games recently. Forces you to alt-F4 if on PC. Especially bad with Sony's playstation ports; they treat it like you're on the PS5 and can just switch games to automatically close the running one.
I just want to let you know that when I was director of production at a multimedia studio, one of the rules in my ux design "bible" was that an interface must never present an "are you sure" prompt to a Quit action. Yes there were fights over it.
Historically, it was conventional to have a "you have unsaved work" in a typical GUI application if you chose to quit, since otherwise, quit was a destructive action without confirmation.
Unless video games save on exit, you typically always have "unsaved work" in a video game, so I sort of understand where many video game devs are coming from if they're trying to implement analogous behavior.
might sharing that, i had kinda started my own recently but curious if i missed anything obvious
Please let me invert y-axis for games where I control the field of view. Nothing takes me out of a game like suddenly staring at my feet when I try to look up.
And x-axis, just to be thorough. Especially for third person games since they still can't all agree on what the default should be.
If I'm going to put 100+ hours into a game, there better be a setting to mute BGM, because no matter how good the OST is I will eventually tire of it and want to listen to something else.
Similarly, granular audio options that separate dialogue from ambient from music from system sounds. Definitely don’t need my ears blown out just to hear dialogue.
I like having the background music very low, but not off, system sounds a bit above that, sound effects higher than system but lower than dialogue, which is maxed. And of course ambient sound levels really depend on the game and what kind of ambiance it has.
Same thing with granular contrast/gamma/etc. Don’t just provide a few preset options, especially if they can only be set before you start the game (also they should never only be set from the main menu, never). Let the player choose whatever they want on the fly. I love playing with everything bright so I can see wtf I’m doing, I don’t give half a shit if the devs think it should be so dark it’s not navigable. I disagree.
Subtitles for the hearing impaired. Like when a switch flicks it writes click on the screen.
I'm not impaired, but I like to have the sound down for stealth gaming.
Take it a step further, and require optional direction indicators. Not only do you get click on screen. You also have an option to get a little arrow pointing to which direction it came from. I have several friends with a bad ear. They can hear fine out of one ear, but not the other. That direction indicator allows them to track sound cues that would otherwise be useless to them.
The newer God of War games were pretty good about this, for instance. There were collectable ravens, which were usually found via sound cues; they would loudly caw for you to be able to track them down before you saw them. But if you only have one good ear, you can’t tell which direction the sound is coming from. The direction indicator bridges that gap, by adding a little arrow next to the raven cawing sound alert. For a more straightforward example, if an NPC says something, you get an arrow pointing to the NPC. Handy for when random NPCs have off-screen chatter.
Not a setting, but a "here's what you did last time/here's where you need to go now". If it's been a little while since I played the game, I shouldn't be lost trying to figure out where I am or where I'm going.
I'm playing Pokemon Moon right now and as annoying as the rotom can be I find the recap useful if maybe a little bit hand holdy.
Adjustable HUD offset for widescreen.
I have a 32:9 display and it SUCKS when HUD elements are anchored to the sides. I have to turn my head to see it!
A way to start a fresh save. Or better yet, allow multiple saves/profiles. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to search online for where save files are located and delete them myself.
And if it's a Steam game, you also have to worry about cloud saves undoing whatever you did. Please, just make it simple for players to do this.
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