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What game features are essential for you


DaveMcDamage

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Manual saves and save anywhere option. 

I'm a working adult like many of you on here, even students and kids have hectic home time these days. So if we only get to play for even a few minutes, just let us save and save where we want without  causing us to revert to a much earlier point where we have to repeat the same thing over and over until we have enough social time to invest properly in the game. And make the saves manual, games are so buggy and broken to crap these days that I've lost a few saves due to these auto-only-saves getting corrupted because it will trigger as I'm switching off or something. 

 

In-game maps for collectibles.

I always appreciate massively what the gamer guide writers do for this community and others sites, but man do I love it when I can just check the in-game map for collectibles without having to go to the PC in the other room to check the net, go back, get some collectibles, repeat. Bully and Batman Arkham were brilliant for this. You can just enjoy gaming sessions without leaving the couch for an hour or two and make great progress. 

 

Skippable cutscenes.

My first playthrough is all about the story experience and everything being new, but when it comes to trophy clean-ups or whatnot, please let us skip the scenes the next time around... Gah! 

 

 

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Good controls

The vast majority are reasonable, but the number of games that have erratic or unusable controls is astonishing. Games that are ported from PCs that used mice as controllers are mostly directly ported and it becomes a piece of crap.

I read a few years ago (quite few...) that Shigeru Miyamoto would start to create games by the main character and their movement. Only when it was fluid and responsive they would progress to everything else. These days it's the opposite.

 

 

 

 

The collectibles thing is of course essential. It takes a idiot to publish a game with collectibles and no way to track them except taking notes in a paper or some digital device. This is plainly dumb. But most "game designers" forget the basics.

 

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Weapon ‘feel’ is a big one for me.

 

If I’m firing a shotgun, I should be able to feel the thump and crack of it. 
A sword should have weight, and sound heavy when it hits things.

A whips should have a whoosh and a satisfying crack when it hits.

A revolver should feel like it’s more powerful than a .22 calibre.

 

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Having difficulties unlocked from the start. I know how good or bad am I in a particular genre, if I feel like I can manage to beat the game on the hardest difficulty from the start, the game should allow me to do so. I have it when you have to beat a game once on Hard for example, just to unlock Very Hard that's like 5% more challenging. Complete waste of time imo.

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  • The option to invert Y-axis
  • Deep inventory management
  • Shoulder-swap feature in shooters
  • Some type of waypoint system
  • Progression trackers for in-game quests (and trophies)
  • A complete experience without the need for DLC or sEaSoN PaSsEs
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5 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

Weapon ‘feel’ is a big one for me.

 

If I’m firing a shotgun, I should be able to feel the thump and crack of it. 
A sword should have weight, and sound heavy when it hits things.

A whips should have a whoosh and a satisfying crack when it hits.

A revolver should feel like it’s more powerful than a .22 calibre.

 

Yeah I get ya. I think the last game I played where the weapons sounds were spot on and hits from you actually felt like you hit something was with God of War. I'm on Final Fantasy 7 Remake and with all these cool attacks the game has, none of them feel like they have any power to them due to a lack of joypad kickback or anything. 

4 hours ago, HaserPL said:

Having difficulties unlocked from the start. I know how good or bad am I in a particular genre, if I feel like I can manage to beat the game on the hardest difficulty from the start, the game should allow me to do so. I have it when you have to beat a game once on Hard for example, just to unlock Very Hard that's like 5% more challenging. Complete waste of time imo.

Yes, yes and ****ing yes!

 

I would rather take double the time to complete the game on hard from the start, than to have to fly through it on normal way too easily and then have learned nothing on how to play the hardmode. Again with Final Fantasy 7 remake, my first playthrough took me 44 hours to get almost everything I could do within normal mode. Hard mode has taken me 30 hours so far just because it plays so much different but I'm also skipping all cutscenes so its like a tacked on horde mode and the experience is just crap. If I had hard unlocked from the start this would have been an amazing experience all around, instead its just a chore for the most part. 

5 hours ago, cris3f said:

Good controls

The vast majority are reasonable, but the number of games that have erratic or unusable controls is astonishing. Games that are ported from PCs that used mice as controllers are mostly directly ported and it becomes a piece of crap.

I read a few years ago (quite few...) that Shigeru Miyamoto would start to create games by the main character and their movement. Only when it was fluid and responsive they would progress to everything else. These days it's the opposite.

 

 

 

Yeah I have played games in the past which had neither a great story or visuals, but the controls were built so well that I loved to play it anyway. But then the flip is that there have been great games wrecked by poor controls and camera work. 

Edited by DaveMcDamage
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I'm with you in the manual save.  Of I can't save manually, save when I quit to title screen.  I hate that, "Are you sure?  You'll lose all data before your last save." message.

 

Lock the map north.  It confuses me when the map is moving around.

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Re-watchable cutscenes

Sometimes I miss huge parts of lore about the world, characters and history due to me not being focused enough, and I can't see the scene again later on.

Sometimes I forget essential information as playtime passes, and I have to exit game and search on some wiki just to remember it.

 

What I mean is, I want to being able to re-watch any of the cutscenes I already saw on-game without the necessity of seach it up out-game (on YouTube/wikis) or by re-playing the game just to see a certain scene. A simple menu with all scenes in chronological order works for me.

Edited by SaAlLoAg
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Manual and auto-saves especially if it's for a game that is known to crash.

 

Like mentioned above, keeping the map locked north. It's not only more convenient to look at but it also makes reading a guide easier in case they have to use directions since there have been plenty of cases where I try to go off directions from what a guide says only for it to be a confusing mess because they are describing East or West from a different perspective.

 

Collectible trackers and exploration/collection percentages for individual areas. I consider this a must if you are going to have a game with an open world and pretty much anything involving exploring. While typing this I am playing Ys: Memories of Celceta which has a bunch of collectible related things however there's no real way to track them and you are only told a percentage of how much you have in total. Granted it is a remaster of a Vita game from I think 7 or so years ago but damn I really wish they included some kind of thing showing you how many things you have in a specific area instead of just an overall percentage. It's this kind of "needle in a haystack" collectible system that make games like inFamous a pain in the ass to complete since if you are going to make people look through every nook, cranny, and pixel just to find one last thing at least give an idea on where it could even be at.

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10 hours ago, DaveMcDamage said:

Skippable cutscenes.

My first playthrough is all about the story experience and everything being new, but when it comes to trophy clean-ups or whatnot, please let us skip the scenes the next time around... Gah! 

Oh Lord, yes. I don't mind seeing the cutscene once, but on a 2nd playthrough or later, I want the option to get right to the game.

 

Games with checkpoints should have an interim save if you need to quit for whatever reason. When you resume from one, you'd be right back exactly where you left off... but if you die during the new session you would go back to the last CP.

 

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12 hours ago, DaveMcDamage said:

 

Skippable cutscenes.

My first playthrough is all about the story experience and everything being new, but when it comes to trophy clean-ups or whatnot, please let us skip the scenes the next time around... Gah! 

 

 

This.☝️

 

Nothing devalues your time in a game more than that. Add in a game with crappy writing, then you have a double whammy of frustration.

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Collectables/pickups list. I freaking hate it when the game doesn't provide me at least a simple courtesy list of things it wants me to find. Doesn't even need to be detailed, just a general "here's all the crap you've found so far" page would be fine. Tracking or showing "x out of x" left is gravy.

 

That's the only super essential thing for me, the rest of the stuff others have noted above would be really great to have, but I can live without if left with no choice. Having to find a lot of pick-ups with no accompanying list actively makes me yearn for death.

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The game making backup autosaves.  It doesn't matter how good the dev is at making games, games can freeze or crash and also players can lose progress from things like a power outage or someone in the household accidentally unplugging the console while they are playing.  There's really no reason why games shouldn't make autosaves as backups periodically.  Every game at minimum should be autosaving at important story points along with keeping a running one when it moves to a different location.  With this I don't care if the game lacks manual saving anywhere, I just want to know that if the game crashes or the power goes out that I'm not going to lose more than a few minutes of progress.

 

In game options for things like sound, controls, etc.  There's no reason why a game shouldn't allow a player to customize their controls to some degree. 

 

On top of skippable cutscenes, options to control the amount of encounters you get and skip weak ones in RPGs.  I love it when games give you an item to summon an enemy encounter since those can be handy for farming materials but I also love it when games let me skip easy battles once I'm powerful enough.  There's no excuse for a game to pull the shit Akiba's Beat did at requiring the player to backtrack multiple times through easy areas and require them to use a consumable item that didn't last long to skip encounters that were pointless.  Those monsters should have been running away from my powerful party or I should have skipped right to the results screen and not have to deal with a boring battle that was a guaranteed win just because the devs couldn't be bothered to do what every other RPG now does.

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Strongly agree on cutscenes; unskippable cinematics utterly ruin replayability for me. This includes Half-Life-esque story segments where I'm forced to stand around in a locked room, listening to characters yakking, or waiting for an NPC to shut up and open the door for me. One of many reasons why I don't really like the Metro series.

 

Fairness is an important one, particularly in action-heavy titles. Unavoidable attacks/damage is a surefire way to make me dislike your game.

 

Edited by ScarecrowsFate
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Manual saving is a basic need, even better if you can just pop open the menu to save anywhere rather than having to look for a stupid save point. I don't care about autosave as much. I remember Life is Strange did not have manual save and I hated that. Only autosave just doesn't cut it, especially if you like to do save-reload tactics for certain parts of the game to 

 

Game records for enemies, items, weapons etc. especially if there are trophies for collecting all items or defeating every type of enemy (like the Kingdom Hearts Jiminy journals and Tales games collectors and monster books). Records for enemies defeated and chests opened would be useful as well, and again KH games do this all to perfection, including how many of each enemy you defeated.  

 

Skip scene function- games without this are WTF to me. I don't understand not having this, and so many great games seem to lack it like Detroit become human, Tales of Symphonia, FFX...

 

An area map and being able to open the whole map up to have a birds eye view of the whole area. I remember KH3 did not have this and it was annoying. Tales do this well. 

 

Being able to invert controls. 

 

For JRPGs and open world games, fast travel. 

 

Not essential but desirable are chapter select and being able to replay bits of the game (FF13-2, FF7R, The David Cage games), voice acting, sound controls to increase or decrease the bgm, character voice volumes etc (VNs and otome games have this), and needing one, max two playthroughs to see all the events and scenes. Games that need multiple runs to see everything (like Nier Replicant) are tedious. The developers clearly do not understand the concept of the gaming backlog and the fact that we need to move on. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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On 5/14/2021 at 1:02 PM, RumRunnerIX said:

Open world and a character creator.

 

I want to play as a character I create from scratch, not some boring ass character someone else created for me.  

Yeah I get that. I mean when you watch a movie its a case of 'you watch this, this is someone else's story and you have no involvement or control' which is why movies died out for me when gaming got so good. But I also understand when a creator has a specific vision in mind, but if they're gonna do that then the character has to be very charming or relatable to want to enjoy a massive game with. 

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Cut scenes should always be skippable. I can’t say that it’s a dealbreaker for me (I don’t usually check for the skip option before starting a game), but if I can’t skip them, I think much worse of the game.

 

In the same vein, I like subtitles and skippable voice during the game. I read faster than they speak, and I don’t want to wait for some (probably awful) voice dub to finish speaking.

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9 hours ago, starcrunch061 said:

 

 

In the same vein, I like subtitles and skippable voice during the game. I read faster than they speak, and I don’t want to wait for some (probably awful) voice dub to finish speaking.

Yeah I'm the same. This is what I liked about the Yakuza franchise. I couldn't tell if they were good or bad at the voice acting and could enjoy the subs at my own pace. 

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