Things that should be be standard by now.

[suitepee7]

The thing I wish was standard, fully re-mappable controls. It's 2013 and only a very small minority of console games, and only most PC games have controls that you can completely reconfigure. Why is that? It can't possibly be that difficult to allow people to change their controls in whatever ways they see fit, and it would allow the games to be more accessible for more people (especially people with handicaps). This should have been an industry standard decades ago.

totally agree with this one. The biggest offenders i notice (being a PC gamer now) are usually lazy ports over to PC, that require external tweaking before they work the way you want. this becomes a bigger issue when you plug in a controller and it doesn't recognize it as standard 360 layout, so it's completely fucked (looking at you darksiders)

my personal gripe is saving. i like autosaves at convenient checkpoints, but i hate that being the only saves in the game. same goes for save games that aren't exactly where you leave them, giving you the illusion of saving in a particular place when actually it's just at the checkpoint.

 

[oversoon]

I've been wondering about this one for years now now. When I look down in real life, I see my chest. This view is clearly doable, but industry standard for first person is floating weapon, or occasionally you can see your legs.

The reason for this is that when I look down, I generally want to see what is on the ground. My body would just get in the way if it were visible. In real life I can stoop so my body does not obstruct my view, and I can shift my legs, but this would unnecessarily complicate the control scheme in a game.

If you need to look at your armour, there is normally an inventory screen for that.

Playability > immersion.

This would only impact playability if you had the neck move horizontally, separately from body. As long as it's set to turn where you look, everything functions exactly the same; only when you look down you can see MORE. It's not like it gets between you and objects at your feet. You can just see them represented as feet with objects near them instead of objects near nothing.

 

[bobbywasabi99]

Good camera control! We nearly perfected that back in Super Mario 64 and I still see potentially good games today ruined by absolutely poor camera angles and camera control.

 

[Qvar]

I wonder how many boys would roll female characters at look down all the time. If ya know what I mean.

There's a reason that female Night Elves were so popular in WoW, and I doubt it's because people really like the colour purple.

Because the males were the weirdest elves ever created?

 

[aozgolo]

Background loading or "seamless loading". I can forgive a game taking a bit to first load a game from a save, but after that I don't want to see anymore loading screens except for a few minor exceptions (like interior/exterior cell loading in Skyrim)


also... the ability to freaking swim! It's 2013, the whole "water kills you" trope should be long dead by now, and similarly when they use it as an impassable wall (like in MOST JRPGs). If you don't want me to swim too far out in one direction just put some terrifying monster that leaps up and eats your face if you get x distance from shore.

 

[TheMadDoctorsCat]

Absolutely agree with the FOV sliders thing. I love "Skyrim" but being indoors with the narrow FoV does sometimes make me feel a little seasick. I also know that it's got hugely complex visuals and that increasing the FoV would increase the graphical processing power needed as well... but I have a MONSTER of a gaming system and this wouldn't be a problem for me.

This is a personal / subjective thing, but I'd absolutely kill for a first-person viewpoint option in games like "Batman: Arkham Asylum" or "The Witcher 2". I could understand why you wouldn't have one for melee combat, but that's a very small part of both games. When you're running around, examining things, or trying to spot something in the distance, you want to see what your character is seeing. And going back to "Skyrim", I USE the third-person view for melee combat - but I appreciate that it's optional.

And I know I've ragged on "Bioshock Infinite" a bit recently (with good reason, it's Ken Levine's worst game by a country mile) but one of the many things that bothered me about it was that, not only was it lacking quicksave, but there was no way to tell when the game WAS "saving". Apparently there's supposed to be an icon that appears on the screen when it's saving, but with all the detail on the screen, I don't think I ever spotted it. If you're going to do checkpoints, DO checkpoints - don't just have a thing appear on the screen for a second and then disappear before the player has a chance to even see it! Have an actual physical place that the player can go to to "save" their game. Like the telephone boxes that the bad guys used in "The Matrix".

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

I'm going to throw a random unique not tried question of: Good PC to console ports?, ports that actually work really well and not just half assed because there have been some in the past.

I'm also going to call an inb4 to what I can expect is going to happen within this thread.

 

[Angelblaze]

In games in which your character is gender locked (which should never be), at least one female warrior class and one female magic/ranged class.

TMQFEL, I'm looking at you.

 

[INVALIDUSERNAME]

Gonna toss my hat into the "real first-person mode" race.

Sitting right now, looking at my monitor, I can see my hands, my forearms, and even bits of my biceps.

The fact that the industry standard is basically your wrist, a hand, and a gun sucks pretty bad. I'm hoping we see things gravitate away from that as gaming continues to age.

 

[Brian Tams]

Games with character creation. If they don't have the insane levels of customization that Saints Row II had, then they are officially doing it wrong.

 

[Gormech]

Putting the camera in the head, not the torso. That is all. Well ... that and bullet travel rather than hitscan.

 

[D.j. Wellborn]

No region specific pricing for games. Call of Duty Ghosts is $90USD on Steam for me, thats $110NZD, that is completely ridiculous.

Same with region coding/blocking on basically anything. There is no excuse.

um... you do realize that they're actually the same price, right? $110 in NZD is $90 in USD...

 

[putowtin]

Hoverboards.....

Oh wait in gaming....

Unskippable cutscenes, seriously I like to watch them but if I get killed straight after and I've got to sit through the thing again, gah!

 

[Malevolentcafe]

1) A solid and steady framerate(30, 60 as long as it maintains), I was playing the PC port of Dark Souls and I STILL cannot believe Fromsoftware didn't bother fixing the framerate issues. Although this applies mostly to consoles where you can't adjust graphical settings.

2) Quick loading times. If your game/console requires 20 seconds to load, then maybe you should try to fix it *coughlaunchwiiuloadtimeswhichwereabismalcough*.

3) Competent voice actors. If your going to invest in voice acting don't hire Joe Schmoe off the street. Looking at you Arc Rise Fantasia.

 

[Weaver]

I wish Borderless Window mode was available in all the games I play. I honestly goof off in my other monitor while gaming and it's aggravating to have to minimize and have the system adjust resolution every time I do.

Totally! I love to play grindy MMOs or ARPGs (like PoE) and just watch youtube for hours. But youtube and games like to fight for their "full screenness" even though they're both on separate screens. Borderless Window makes it all way better.

 

[Unsilenced]

No region specific pricing for games. Call of Duty Ghosts is $90USD on Steam for me, thats $110NZD, that is completely ridiculous.

Same with region coding/blocking on basically anything. There is no excuse.

um... you do realize that they're actually the same price, right? $110 in NZD is $90 in USD...

$90 is more than what CoD ghosts would cost in the states I think is the point.

 

[Some_weirdGuy]

I remember being so impressed with left 4 dead for having the first person body. It was literally a 'whoa, THIS is the future, THIS is where it's at'... i mean it was a real wow factor for such a small touch. Was pretty damn disappointed when they actually got rid of it for l4d2... who cares if it lets you get 7 extra common infected on screen(on console) or whatever the number was... just give it to me as a menu option or something, have it off by default even.

 

[D.j. Wellborn]

No region specific pricing for games. Call of Duty Ghosts is $90USD on Steam for me, thats $110NZD, that is completely ridiculous.

Same with region coding/blocking on basically anything. There is no excuse.

um... you do realize that they're actually the same price, right? $110 in NZD is $90 in USD...

$90 is more than what CoD ghosts would cost in the states I think is the point.

Oh! oh ya that's complete bull. There's no reason for them to be different especially for that much.

 

[ShinyCharizard]

As has been mentioned already there is absolutely no excuse not to have re-bindable controls.

 

[Someone Depressing]

..(ahem), cleavage, of course. Look down, there you go, well rendered, sweaty boobs, with a convenient, highly inneficient opening in your character's amour to boot!

It's a good idea, but it's usually not important for games without platforming. And even then, 1st person is not a good perspective for platformers, which is why Portal was so good (it has the Portal gun, and kept platforming to a minimum) and why Mirror's Edge sucked balls.

There should also be re=bindable controls in most games, and FOV slide, player-custom stat allocation for more strategical games (at least for the Protagonist), less sexualisation in what is supposed to be battle armour (So, I'm supposed to believe that a tiny, short, huge-boobed chick with a sword with a huge window for her cleave and hips so I can see her thong, is nearly as strong or well-defended as the 6-foot, musclebound, rough guy with biceps the width of a pizza?), the first female character to join you should not always be the healer, female party members should not focus on magic because that's implying women are weak (most women can kick my ass. Then again, that's probalby a fault of my own) and that the men are idiots who can't tie their shoelaces.

/half-minded rant