It’s halfway through 2019 and we’re about to step into a completely new decade. We’ve come a very long way since Pong came out roughly forty years ago in 1972. Graphics is more true to life than ever, gameplay immersive, and world so big most of us today even had troubles imagining how it could fit into our computers or consoles.
Yet in spite of all of these massive advancements, there are a couple of features that should have become standard on all video games now that some developers still stubbornly refuse to acknowledge. In total, we count about five of them, and you might even be familiar with the the annoyance and frustration that the lack of these features cause.
Skippable Cutscenes
Cutscenes. I enjoy cutscenes in a good video game. I don’t think there are any mechanisms in video games that can crank the knob of immersion to the fullest like a well done and choreographed cutscene.
But still, sometimes, you just want to do away with it entirely. In this case, you can quickly become victimised by it if the developers demand that you just have to watch the entire thing from A to Z.
For example, you have a tough boss battle that you’ve been struggling to do for the last few hours. But after it has beaten you into a pulp and you come back for more, the game forces you into watching a cutscene of the boss revealing itself or whatever before you could dive straight into the action.
Every single time.
This can raise your blood pressure even more than the boss fight itself. I know, because I have been there. All of us gamers understand that cutscenes can be crucial to the game itself, since many cutscenes serve as a loading screen in disguise to aid the game in loading the boss fight. Or that the developers may think that it’s important to the plot line of the game for the players to know what’s going on in the world.
But still, there should be an option for those who are not interested to skip the entire thing. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt did this well and many other games did this well. But for some other, like Far Cry 5, for example, while you can skip dialogues and some in-game cutscenes. But somehow, it doesn’t let you skip the pre-rendered cutscenes at all.
I understand that some players care for the cutscenes. But for the rest of us who don’t … give us a handy button to press to go straight into the thick of the battle.
Text Size Options
I don’t think that this is a detail that we ought to mention, it should be an essential game design philosophy. But alas, it’s so troubling a problem for some games that it has a special place on this list.
There are some games, like the new God of War, that have huge issues with their text size: They’re way, way too small. In fact, if I don’t stand one or two feet - sometimes even press my face right up against the screen, I wouldn’t be able to read the texts at all.
The menus of God of War is chaotic already, filled with equipment, stats, and all kind of information. You can just imagine how headache-inducing it is that everything seems to be written in size 5 font.
Fortunately, SIE Santa Monica Studio eventually released an update that added a text size option into the game’s settings. But this should have been something back at day one, you don’t need players clamouring for such an essential change.
I don’t have 20/20 vision and need eyeglasses to properly see, and not a lot of people in all of us have perfect vision, either. So I can’t think of any scenario where having small text size a good thing. Make it big. Don’t be shy.
We don’t have hundred-inch televisions or monitors, either. Most have about 30-inch screen, so do try to cater to the majority of us.
Mappable Control
If you’re a console player, you probably would know the pain of having to spend at least an hour to adapt to the new control scheme. For one game on the PS4, the circle (O) button might mean dodging, but for another - surprise, surprise - it’s to crouch. You can just imagine just how disastrous this might be. You spend about a month with the first game, so used to the control, and now when you go to another game amidst the heat of battle, you clamp down on the O button expecting the character to leap out of harm’s way.
Nope, he/she just … sat down. And died brainlessly while at it.
The unfortunate thing for now is that most games currently don’t have any settings to change the button mapping, though. But just try and imagine how more convenient everything could be if we were allowed to.
Auto-Saving
Auto saving, I think, is like an auto insulin pump made specifically for gamers: It saves life. In extension, it also saves a lot of time and frustration.
Auto-saving tends to be a missing feature on very long games such as JRPG. But I can’t think of any reason why it should be omitted: The game is very long doesn’t mean having to play it again makes it anymore enjoyable. In fact, we have all been there when we played about an hour into the game, forgot to save, and realised we have to do it again: Most probably got fed up and not bothered with playing again altogether.
A lot of JRPG fans would probably advance on my house with pitchforks and torches, but I’ll be completely honest. If games like Persona 5 can auto-save my progress, I probably would have completed the game much faster. Just like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, if I don’t have to be anxious every time I face a boss because dying means doing everything again, there would be more JRPGs in my game’s library.
And for the games that allow you to save the game manually, but somehow l lack an auto-save feature. Shame on you, really. We’re humans, we forget things all the time. And seriously, you don’t have to be all over our cases of painstakingly pausing the game, navigate to the save option, and press down on it every few minutes.
Extra Save Files
Demanding that the player only creates one single save profile should be a crime if it doesn’t serve the gameplay mechanics at all. Back when I was obsessed with my DS and Pokemon, we were unable to have multiple save files, either. For example, if I wanted to start the game with another starter Pokemon, I would have no other choices but to start a completely new game altogether.
Today, though, most games allow the player to create multiple save profiles that the player can switch back and forth with ease. However, there are some games that still refuse to do this. I can make some leeway for some games, such as Detroit: Become Human, since allowing multiple save files more or less destroy the purpose of the game. And the time-line mechanic of the game serves well enough for experimentation.
As for some other games that pointlessly not allow us to have several different play-through … well, catch on with the time and fix it.
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