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.
Subtitles. I wish I could have suuttiles for halo, the early games. It’s getting better these days, and should be a setting accessible before starting the game (not after the intro movie, I’m looking at you vanilla wow).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Colorblind options that let me specifically choose the color of each HUD/UI element. I don’t want an overlay for the whole game, I just want to be able to distinguish icons in the UI that might have color-coding too similar for my eyes to perceive at a glance
Ohh, that type of setting.
One option I really appreciated in Uncharted 4 was the ability to restart cutscenes, and I wish it was in every game with cutscenes.
Let me choose my own resolution.
I dunno… Depends on the game. If you make a window wide enough you’d start seeing what’s behind you, and that might not be very fair in certain games lol. It might not be very easy to aim but that can be learned. 😅
Well…
I could also set my own resolution with the config files (rocket league at last at the time allowed it) or I also could set my own resolution in my gpu driver.So what’s the issue then?
For example, I can’t choose an ultrawide 1080p resolution in Cyberpunk2077.
Any game usually let’s me set the usual values (like 1920x1080, 1280x720, 4:3 resolutions, 16:10 resolutions, etc etc). So why not let me choose the custom resolution of 2560x1080p ???I’m just saying in certain games setting your custom resolution could be considered cheating.
For example in competitive first person shooters, if you play on a 16:9 monitor, and you set the resolution to be a ratio much, much wider than your monitor, you will see all the way around the player in 360°. This is how graphics projection math works. Or it did when I last dabbled in writing a graphics engine.
So I can understand some games not allowing certain odd ratios and FOVs in combination.
Otherwise I agree, of course we should be able to set a resolution that matches our monitors that we have. 😊👍
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.
also, a standard to mouse sens values, a value of 10 should be same across everything, games made in the same engine usually handle the values the same which is great, I for example have the same sens across all source games, but this usually doesnt carry to diferent engines let alone random one off games with custom engines
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…
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!
This would be killer!
Local server
Edit: or any server
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.”
That’s what it’s being used for? I thought it was for horror games. It does look spooky.
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.
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.
