Things games should have, but don't

[ThePortalGuru]

I'll start this off:

1. For Japanese games, and option to switch out of the dubbed version to the original language.

2. More focus on gameplay than story.

[Kesha]

i prefer more story based games since i'm bad at games anyway

[Chutzpar]

I'd like to see more games that aren't the equivalent of action movies. In the vast majority of games you are basically KILLING DUDES (or monsters) all the time and the plot is almost filler for the fighting.
That can be fun and all, but it'd be like if the only movies you could ever buy were Steven Seagal films.

We also need some female characters that aren't either: damsels, 'action girl' fetish shit masquerading as empowerment, or just hilarious stereotypes.
I don't care if these characters still exist, but when the vast majority of women in videogames are clearly designed with a straight male player in mind it gets pretty fucking alienating. Just a few more games Beyond Good & Evil or Portal, pls.

Also story-based games need to have consistent, well-thought-out stories. I'm looking at you, Heavy Rain, and your ridiculous gaping plotholes.

Things we don't need any more:
save points for fuck's sake stop telling me where I can and can't save. I'm disinclined to believe there are ANY games where this is necessary due to hardware. Some games get away with this if they're shorter puzzle type levels, but most- no. >:I

---

OH. And all games with significant dialogue or important sound effects should have a subtitle function.

[PatientZero]

Things we don't need any more:
save points for fuck's sake stop telling me where I can and can't save. I'm disinclined to believe there are ANY games where this is necessary due to hardware. Some games get away with this if they're shorter puzzle type levels, but most- no. >:I

Actually, often it's down to either engine limitations, as in, the game will break if you can save outside of designated areas, a lot of the time it's just not made to save all the possible variables in play, this is why a lot of RPG's heal you at save points, it means they don't need to store any of that data because the game knows what it is by default, or as a pure gameplay mechanic, being able to save and load whenever you want takes a HUGE chunk of the risk or tension out of any game.
Imagine if Silent Hill let you save wherever you want, suddenly there's ZERO risk and it stops being scary.
Also, from a designer perspective, it's a good way to keep people playing, the whole "I'll just get to the next save point" thing, and ultimately the whole idea is that you want people to play the game as often and for as long as possible.

CLASS DISMISSED.

[X Gamer 66]

these should all be standard:

-all cutscenes are both pausable and skippable
-all dialog should come with subtitles that can be toggled on/off
-the tutorial sequences are skippable
-customizable control schemes
-if the game is particularly long, "Hard" mode should be available from the start
-if you're going to have Trophies / Achievements / Skill Points /etc, make them things that are actual accomplishments, not "Turn on the Game! - 100G" or "Silver Trophy - Complete Story Mode!"


Things I'd personally like to see more of:

-concept art galleries as rewards for beating certain game modes
-sound tests
-bring back fun cheat codes

[Vipershark]

these should all be standard:

-all cutscenes are both pausable and skippable
-all dialog should come with subtitles that can be toggled on/off
-the tutorial sequences are skippable
-customizable control schemes
-if the game is particularly long, "Hard" mode should be available from the start
-if you're going to have Trophies / Achievements / Skill Points /etc, make them things that are actual accomplishments, not "Turn on the Game! - 100G" or "Silver Trophy - Complete Story Mode!"


Things I'd personally like to see more of:

-concept art galleries as rewards for beating certain game modes
-sound tests
-bring back fun cheat codes

Everything in this post.
Especially cheats/passwords.

One thing to note: The "turn on the game" achievements are done from a pure business standpoint. It's to reel in the completionists and achievement whores who, if a game is on their gamercard, must complete said game.

The 360 allows you to remove achievement-less games from your gamercard (though some developers have found a way around this) but say you're an achievement whore who is renting a game and get the power on achievement. It's on your gamercard. Forever. That game now MUST be completed. Which in effect leads many of them to buy the game.

It's stupid, but it works.

Oh, and another thing: gamerscore should be usable for things such as buying avatar clothes and rewards and stuff like that. You have to be a special kind of retarded to actually use real money on that shit.

[Asther]

or as a pure gameplay mechanic, being able to save and load whenever you want takes a HUGE chunk of the risk or tension out of any game.
Imagine if Silent Hill let you save wherever you want, suddenly there's ZERO risk and it stops being scary.

Games can still keep this if they have a quicksave like in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, where you could save to turn off the game (but not start over from there in-game), because sometimes you just have to quit playing immediately.

[Kitsu]

Also, according to some studies (I don't remember which ones, so I can't link), players are more likely to try to get achievements if they already have some. It's one of those psychological things: if you already have some of these achievements, then you're more likely to try to get 100% than if you didn't already have some. That's part of the reason why some achievement lists will include some really piss-easy tasks.

As for me, I'd like to see more games that have a really good balance of gameplay and story. I mean, if it has great story but not so good gameplay, I might as well read a book.

Traditional cutscenes (that is, cutscenes that remove control from the player while story stuff happens) should be kept to a minimum, while cutscenes like in Half Life 2 (you can still do some stuff) should occur more often. Though really, if it's possible, I think cutscenes should be reduced as much as possible; give the player more control while also trying to tell the story.

[PatientZero]

or as a pure gameplay mechanic, being able to save and load whenever you want takes a HUGE chunk of the risk or tension out of any game.
Imagine if Silent Hill let you save wherever you want, suddenly there's ZERO risk and it stops being scary.

Games can still keep this if they have a quicksave like in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, where you could save to turn off the game (but not start over from there in-game), because sometimes you just have to quit playing immediately.

As a feature that works, but again you're assuming that it's even possible to do with the engine being used, there are simply cases where the only option is to use hardcoded saves.
It's also worth noting that in some cases a quicksave actually isn't a real save at all, it's basically just a memory dump to a file, similar to how save states work on emulators, which is a really bad practice a lot of devs still use.
(I won't bother boring you with the technical details, they're honestly not that interesting.)

What I'd like to see more of in games myself, is people willing to push the boundaries, experiment with new ideas, new concepts, even just new scenarios.
I always enjoy finding a game that doesn't assume from the start that you're an American white heterosexual male teenager.
(I'm looking at you almost every FPS ever.)

[X Gamer 66]

What I'd like to see more of in games myself, is people willing to push the boundaries, experiment with new ideas, new concepts, even just new scenarios.

I miss the 90's.

[Rosencrantz]

Things we don't need any more:
save points for fuck's sake stop telling me where I can and can't save. I'm disinclined to believe there are ANY games where this is necessary due to hardware. Some games get away with this if they're shorter puzzle type levels, but most- no. >:I

Actually, often it's down to either engine limitations, as in, the game will break if you can save outside of designated areas, a lot of the time it's just not made to save all the possible variables in play, this is why a lot of RPG's heal you at save points, it means they don't need to store any of that data because the game knows what it is by default, or as a pure gameplay mechanic, being able to save and load whenever you want takes a HUGE chunk of the risk or tension out of any game.
Imagine if Silent Hill let you save wherever you want, suddenly there's ZERO risk and it stops being scary.
Also, from a designer perspective, it's a good way to keep people playing, the whole "I'll just get to the next save point" thing, and ultimately the whole idea is that you want people to play the game as often and for as long as possible.

CLASS DISMISSED.

This is what killed Phoenix Wright for me :C

Sure, it's fun when you try to figure out all the puzzles on your own, but when I got to a point where the question was literal bullcrap, I saved right before I did it and then just trudged through all the logical answers until something worked.

I didn't figure this out until I played the third game (which was my second PW game), but still.

[Shadowth117]

This may sound silly, but it needs to be said. Playtesting. Playtesting, playtesting, playtesting. Some games do it well, some do not. And some don't seem to do it all. To use an example of something that could have been seriously improved from playtesting, lets look at Modern Warfare 2 since it was and is rather popular.

The One Man Army perk. Now this was a good idea, but god damn is it stupid in practice. What it does is sacrifice the player's secondary weapon slot for a backpack. With this backpack, a player can switch to any of his classes at any time. It sounds cool being able to do that when you decide you want to snipe the guy standing in the open on the other side of the map, or you want to switch to an riot shield to provide a distraction for your teammates to exploit by flanking the enemy or a number of other cool things. Sadly, its ruined by not only allowing you to switch to the same class an unlimited number of times, effectively providing infinite ammo, but it also replenishes explosives. This breaks the perk completely by allowing people to either camp retardedly well with a wall of infinite claymores mines between them and their camping spot without penalty, repeatedly launch their grenade launchers like mortars all over the map, or even do both at the same time. Combined with the Danger Close perk, while it is counterable it becomes one of the most overpowered techniques in the game while requiring little skill or even effort to use.

For a more recent example, I'll mention Halo Reach and its Armor Lock armor ability. Once again there's no reason this ability had to be overpowered. The concept is basically that when shit's going down, you can use this ability to become invincible for up to 6 seconds to protect from a rocket, a vehicle, or whatever. By all means there should be nothing wrong with this. But because of a combination of minor issues, it becomes a real gamebreaker. First of all, you can use it to bounce off sticky grenades. Now obviously this makes sense if its still in the air, but when its melted onto your armor and you're at the point where in any other game in the series you would be seriously screwed, the game allows you to use Armor Lock and suddenly the grenade just bounces off harmlessly. Sure I can live with that, however annoying it may be when you do get the rare stick on another player, but whatever. However its also an ace in the hole in melee combat. With melee combat being a huge part of the multiplayer since Halo 3, this is a large issue. A few silly things make this a problem.

The first is that after Armor Locking a player is shifted to third person view and is able to look around 360 degrees. Now the issue with this is that not only can the Armor Locked player instantaneously turn in the direction he is facing in third person, but he can also melee without any recovery time as soon as he releases the armor ability button. So both players could melee, one could Armor Lock, the other could try to back up while circling around, but because the Armor Locked player can instantly turn and melee by deactivating the Armor Lock whenever he choose, this becomes a problem. Not only that, but he can also pull a feint and deactivate the ability before instantly reactivating it. This usually causes the other player to melee the invincible player and then get killed because his melee was unable to recover before the other player could cancel his ability and melee him in return. Now some of the problem is most certainly to do with latency issues, but it could easily been modified to avoid these and the more obvious issues because of the way it was designed.

Now I realize both my examples are from shooters since those are the games I usually play, but I highly doubt that none of you have experienced other gamebreaking things that have occured in your games that could have easily been fixed if the the developers took two seconds to see how idiotic these things were and modified a variable or two to fix them.

[tsr moderation staff]

a degree of customization

i'm not saying every game needs to have a fully customizable main character or whatever, but even small things, like being able to change your chips and techniques around in the megaman zero games, give you so much more control over your character. It allows you to play as a character which probably wont be exactly like your friend's character and can fit your playstyle better.

on a similar note, in games with customizable equipment, there should be a bit more strategy in weapon picking than "buy the better one". i especially hate it when there's a definitive "best weapon" and "best armour" as it pretty much takes all of the customization aspects and renders them superfluous.

[Rökkan]

There's still something that bothers me about fighting games.

You should be able to, whenever you're at the Command Lists in-game, be able to toggle between "action sequence" and "button sequence"

Like, on "button sequence", instead of displaying that a Hadouken is performed by pressing Down, Right + Fierce Punch, it should display that it is performed by pressing Down, Right + the button that you assigned the Fierce Punch command to, like B or Square, or whatever. I don't think it's hard to program a command list that substitutes the command symbol to the symbol of whatever button you assign that command to.

[Vipershark]

There's still something that bothers me about fighting games.

You should be able to, whenever you're at the Command Lists in-game, be able to toggle between "action sequence" and "button sequence"

Like, on "button sequence", instead of displaying that a Hadouken is performed by pressing Down, Right + Fierce Punch, it should display that it is performed by pressing Down, Right + the button that you assigned the Fierce Punch command to, like B or Square, or whatever. I don't think it's hard to program a command list that substitutes the command symbol to the symbol of whatever button you assign that command to.

quoted and thanked forever
it's the most annoying thing when it just says HP > F or something like that
WHAT BUTTONS?!?!!?!?