Hear me out. A few games have shader installations that will usually apply any new settings you put down AFTER you restart the game, and a lot of other games have graphics settings that will only apply after you’ve rebooted the game.
I don’t think it would cost developers ANY amount of money or any significant development time to add a “Reboot game” button (or toggle) every time the player presses the quit button, or give the player a prompt every time they change a setting that requires a game restart (like in both PC versions of GTA V).
I also think ANY game should have a “full potato” mode capable of running in older computers with NONE of the fancy graphics stuff that we have access to today, despite having a decent computer now.
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.”
Post Processing - Low usually does the trick 😅
But then it sometimes turns ambient occlusion off too… 😞
I’m okay with a little chromatic aberration and vignette. Camera bob can go straight to hell.
I’m okay with a little chromatic aberration and vignette.
Why? It’s literally something that pro camera tools have added in-software fixes for to remove them. Like - if you’re simulating an old JVC vidicon tube camera and wanting to make something specifically look like an image capture device from a specific time, I get it, but otherwise, it just seems like a way to hide the fact that your graphics aren’t quite hitting the realism mark and you think if you obscure it a bit, players will think it looks more “real.”
I’m very aware, I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the years removing them from photography projects.
For vignette, it accomplishes a lot of the same thing in games as it does in photography in general: it is a subtle focus shifter. For some games - like some photos - I enjoy that little bit of extra emphasis on the center of the screen.
For chromatic abberation, i generally avoid it in photography, but it can be used for effect. I feel like that’s also true to a point in games. Over the top CA feels like trying to watch something without 3d glasses. A little bit on the fringes can give a smidge of retro (and, oddly, futuristic) style for effectively no compute cost. It’s definitely overused though, and I tend to turn it off more often than not.
Agreed on the “shifting focus” part for vignetting specifically - but everything else… outside of specifically tailoring to fit a particular “aesthetic” I think are crutches that are generally used to obscure an overall graphical presentation in order to work in a similar way to how squinting your eyes works.
I agree that highly stylized games like “Bodycam…”
…use things like a specific kind of grain, noise, distortion, aberration, etc. to create a highly appealing visual aesthetic designed to match an actual low-fidelity police body camera, but Battlefield and CoD have much less excuse in my book.
The camera aesthetic stuff only makes sense on things like the AC-130 killstreak in CoD where you’re emulating the on-aircraft cameras actually used in the real deal.
That’s what it’s being used for? I thought it was for horror games. It does look spooky.
I’m glowering hard at No Man’s Sky’s permanent chromatic aberration effect applied to the top 20% of your viewport at all times, here.
Those two features frequently make me nauseous! Being able to turn them off or at least down is a necessity for me.
my friends always want to ‘ppay the game the way it was intended’… cool, I’m still disabling all the crap that makes me not see the game properly.
Also fuck Bloom to hell
Maybe the amount can go to hell, but bloom itself is more realistic in regards to how light and our eyes work.
Pause and save during cutscenes.
I cannot name the amount of times I’ve tried to press escape and skipped a cut scene when all I’m trying to do is bring up the menu to pause. I’ll add to this ‘cinema mode’ which some games have. Let’s you go in and view cutscenes again. Should be standardized.
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.
Yeah, you should be able to pick a specific version number for single player games. I’m fine with it defaulting to “latest”, but at least give me the option to stick to a specific version.
Also, fuck the “Would you like to share all data with the publisher, or only limited data” bullshit. It’s a single player game with no multiplayer whatsoever. I shouldn’t need to share any data with the publisher. If I see this shit, the game immediately gets blacklisted in my firewall.
That is a reason why offline installers are so important. At the very least we should be able to disable auto updates and still launch the (outdated) game.
Reminds me of one of my biggest pet peeves - a bunch of games will pop up a warning “Oh no, you’re not on the Internet! Some stuff won’t work!” on start up, always. Hate it, unless I’m trying to connect to a multiplayer mode of some sort.
A setting like this should ideally prevent those.
The most frustrating for me was Immortals: Fenix Rising on the Switch. I refused to create an Ubisoft account and actually had to put my system on airplane mode so it would stop trying to force one on me.
If there is something better than opensnitch for this on Linux someone tell me. It‘s so annoying to block applications from accessing the internet on it. I‘ve tried like 4 different methods.
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.
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.
I recently started another play through of RDR2, while figuring out the settings on my old Linux gaming PC. I’d forgotten how long it is between save points during that oh-so-long first segment up in the mountains. Christ. Having to play for half an hour just to get to a point where I could save up.
If your game supports controller give me the option to change the button faces to whatever I prefer. Some people like Nintendo button layout, others PlayStation, other Xbox. Whatever it is, don’t hard code one set - they’re just some pngs, support them all.
Save&quit at any time
So I can just boot up the game, play for 15 minutes and go do other stuff
Yeah, the steam deck does this, it’s a great feature.
Every game should have the option to toggle motion blur off, toggle frame gen and upscaling off.
I don’t think I can name one game without a motion blur slider, or toggle.
I’m pretty sure just cause 3 didnt have an option to disable it and it was horrible. They fixed it later I believe.
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.
Every time I see a slider for any damn setting that ends up going from, say, 3.48 to 3.51 unless I go REALLY SLOWLY, in which case maybe it goes 3.48 3.49, 3.51, or whatever nonsense where I can’t just get my nice round number. Let me type the stupid number.
Fucks sake this for me. Why the fuck there isn’t standardization between games on this is beyond me. I have to go through fucking with mouse sensitivity on every damn game. This is part of the reason I died out of multiplayer tbh.
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 ☺️
I prefer the 4 circles glyphs that shows the appropriate face button highlighted. It’s device agnostic and helpful when I’m switching between playing on my Switch and playing on my PC with an Xbox controller.
That’s what I meant by directional, I wish more games had it!
Windowed borderless mode
I should probably know this, but what’s the deal with full screen vs windowed full screen? What’s the difference?
Also why do people wanna play windowed? Maybe depends on the type of game…?
Alt tab out to other apps without the game freaking out due to display settings
Oh I see this makes sense. And theoretically better performance in full screen?
I never saw a major performance difference, but being able to switch windows without the game possibly crashing is great. Especially in single player games, sometimes you just need to pause and check laundry, or check email. Alt tab and good to go.
That’s the benefit I use it for. Some games force minimize when you tab off and they can crash when you try to tab back to them.
There used to be a noticeable graphics performance boost to an app when in full screen mode, but that was back in Windows 7 days and may not be true any more.
Game in one window, other things open in other windows. Game and do other things at the same time.
I never understood why people prefer it over full screen.
It enables quick window switching with no flickering. This may be a strictly Windows issue.
No issues on linux
Yeah you’re probably right. On Linux I just Ctrl Alt right arrow to my next virtual desktop and it’s instant and seamless.
Genuine question: what issue does this address? Are there graphics driver issues with regular full screen in some cases?
Some games minimize and try to lock your mouse to the game if you alt tab out. Windowed mode makes it pretty much seamless, pain free. No difference I ever found, just easier to alt tab out and check a map, take notes, pause and watch a video.
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.
Verified.
A couple years ago I made a game and used Wwise and was required to have a splash screen at startup
Sliders are the problem.
They encourage a maximum and a minimum.
Just let people enter values.
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.
This one, along with “press any button to start”, annoy me so much. There is absolutely no reason to have to press a button before even entering the main menu. If you need it to determine the type of input device, that can be the first press on the menu.
Treat PC games as PC games, even if you make them cross platform.
Fully remappable controls is my biggest wish. I hate WASD and swear by EDSF, but some games like Fallout 4 hardcode some controls. E is hardcoded to “interact” or “open door” or something, but the game DOES let you map “move forward” to E. So I can run around like normal, but every time I run past a door it auto opens to a zombie hiding behind it.
To be fair to devs, increasing the FOV has a lot of performance implications on how much less they’re culling from the scene as you rotate the camera. In this era of open world games, I suspect it scales very poorly as that FOV increases. Temporarily increasing the FOV is also one of their handy tricks for giving you a sense of speed when you hit a boost button and whatnot, so whatever your FOV is, they need to make it more than that.
Sound test menus are a remnant of arcade design, and when arcades starting dying, this feature made less sense. The OST sale is usually more of a revenue stream for the game’s composer, as I understand it.
performance implications
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.
I understand the desire, but then that might have implications on support tickets, advertised system requirements, separate maintenance and optimizations for only one platform, etc. It might be that turning up the FOV even a smidge over their maximum requires a super computer that doesn’t even exist yet, depending on what it has to render and how it works under the hood.
Please stop making excuses for lazy and disrespectful devs
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.
I also think ANY game should have a “full potato” mode capable of running in older computers with NONE of the fancy graphics stuff that we have access to today, despite having a decent computer now.
Problem is that the fancy graphics stuff isn’t just additive.
For example, raytracing is actually relatively simple to implement, since you just make light behave like it does in real-world physics, according to a couple relatively straightforward rules and material properties.
Lighting without raytracing involves tons ofsmokes and mirrorshacks and workarounds. For example, mirrors were often faked by building the same room behind the wall, with everything inverted, including the player character’s animations.
So, making a game with potato graphics typically requires building a second version of the game.Of course, there can be a mode that does just turn off the additive stuff, so only that which does not require changing the game implementation. But that can just be one of the graphics presets…
Local server
Edit: or any server
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.
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.
That’s a save changes? prompt, not an are you sure? prompt.
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.
Hopefully you never accidentally click the Quit button when you didnt mean to, lol
Games that honor alt-f4 INSTANTLY are amazing
There’s a roguelike I play, which combats save-scumming by only giving one save slot per character. And so the only reason to save the game, is when you’re done playing. So, you hit Ctrl+S to save, and it instantly quits as well. 🙃
Which is interesting, because at least for me, the main reason I try to save often like that is because of games like bethesda games or other games that don’t autosave and will crash, losing you HUGE amounts of progress.
Ah yeah, it does auto-save regularly, too. But I don’t think, I’ve ever seen it crash without me doing some out-of-game fuckery. 🙃
Well, and of course, losing progress is baked into the gameplay of a roguelike, so whether your savegame corrupts or you die yet another stupid death, you just start another run and you’re right back into the action.
You just reminded me of a funny feature I found in Elite Dangerous (space MMO) to prevent combat logging (quitting suddenly during combat like a little b***h): if you press Alt+F4, the game doesn’t immediately exit, but shows you a Quit dialog (to main menu or desktop), and there’s a lengthy countdown if you’re near hostile ships. :)
Doesn’t prevent it entirely, but I thought it was pretty crafty.
