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What kind of gaming details do you guys like to see?
For me, I love seeing parts of missions occur before and after we (the playable character) are involved. Like how after a cut scene a character will contribute out that action.
It really helps with the immersion and continuity.
Share what you like to see!
I like it if there's something in that cave. A painting, an item, a random NPC with some dialog, etc. That little bit makes my exploration feel rewarding.
The way I see it, video games are, in a strange way, a conversation between the game developer and the player. It's the player asking, "What happens if I deviate from the intended path?" or "How does this game handle things if I attack the mayor of the friendly town?", and the game developers answering with, "This is what happens!".
I agree with rewarding curiosity and exploration, and to me, if I find nothing behind every waterfall I try, I usually play through the rest of the game assuming the developer didn't hide secrets. You don't have to hide some unbelievably valuable item in there... just give me something that says, "Yes, I thought about this. This is a game with hidden spaces."
I like finding caves behind waterfalls (and I, too, check EVERY waterfall I encounter). In the developer/player conversation that is a game, a cave behind a waterfall is the developer saying, "I know you're going to be looking for little secrets around the world, and I have placed secrets for you to discover." If I find even one cave behind a waterfall, to me, that's an indicator that it is worth my time to scour for secrets in that game. And I find scouring for secrets to be fun.
If there is something behind a waterfall, that's just good level design there./s
I agree with that letting the players explore the world they are interacting with is a big plus for me also. Part of the reason the Fallout series is one of my favorites. Because it feels that if you take your time to explore, you can find more things to do or you find things that you had missed on your previous play throughs. Like on my first play through of New Vegas, I had missed the vault that had the remaining part of the Powder Gangers. So, it felt really nice to find them in my second play through.
Apparently if you have a dog in the game it's incredibly important for players to be able to pet the dog.
See Hades vs TotK
At least you can feed the dogs in TotK and they love you.
I wondered why they chose not to make that animation. Surely Nintendo saw that we all wanted to pet the dog, right? If you're going to make a whole new game, why not do that?
Then it dawned on me that maybe Link just doesn't like dogs. If that's actually the case, that would be an interesting quirk. He saves the kingdom... but he doesn't like dogs. Interesting.
My head cannon is that Link doesn't have permission from the owner to pet the dog. Since he doesn't speak much, he just doesn't ever ask.
Canonically he does speak though, he has conversations with characters in TOTK for example, we just can't hear/read what he says, but characters definitely react to what he tells them.
I would kill for a Zelda game starring 90s cartoon "Well excuuuuuuuuussseeeee me, princess" Link.
My grandma had a vhs with one or two episodes on. I loved it as a kid! Sometimes she'd hide it when I visited cause the voices were so annoying haha
I know he speaks, but it seems like he only speaks when spoken to. He never strikes up the conversation. He's just waiting for someone to ask him if he wants to pet their dog so he can answer and do it!
Maybe the developers live in an area with lots of street dogs that always beg for food and get shooshed away.
It could be bad manners to pet random dogs. I mean, it kind of is unless you asked the owner for an okay first.
Between you and user Biscuit, this might be my new canon... thanks yall!
I believe the justification is that they designed the game based on generalised "systems", and they tried to avoid context based prompting and animations as much as possible. Petting a dog would have required a discrete animation and script that would not be used anywhere else in the game, so it did not fit within their philosophy.
As a dog owner, I’m all for randos not thinking they can just approach and pet my dogs.. I can imagine Nintendo considering something like that.
While it's not an important part of a game, I am a sucker for random little details. Stuff like playing an open world game and going into a seemingly random shack in the woods and uncovering a story about the building from context clues. Sometimes fun or creepy, but not relevant to the actual plot of the game. It's just a fun addition left by the devs.
Also, I've been chasing that feeling of playing Fallout 3 for the first time, having picked up the game out of the grab bin at gamestop, and coming out of vault 101 for the first time seeing how big the game really is. I know the game is pretty aged now but I will never forget how much my mind was blown by that.
Omg totally agree. One of my favorite moments in RDR2 is coming across a random cabin and then being attacked by a bear. But as you go in you can see how the bear got there and etc.
Bethesda is a master at filling their game worlds with stuff like this, almost every single location has some kind of a small story you can piece together through either the environment or journals laying around.
Bethesda was kind of who I had in mind, Rockstar also does a great job with this.
I wish I could go back in time and recommend to you to do tale of two wastelands if you aren't already doing that. It essentially combined both fallout 3 and new Vegas. In new vegas' engine. And a decent amount of quality of life updates.
World building is incredibly important and often more than just a little fun addition. It's actually what provides the immersion, or the favourite word of these days: verisimilitude.
Worlds that operate almost entirely without player input. Great example is the hitman games, the characters would go about their routines and activities as a real person would.
The game doesn't wait for you to initiate the F1 race in the Miami level, it happens by itself and it finishes by itself. Afterwards the racers exit their vehicles and do what you would expect a racer to do after a race.
Events happen over time regardless of what the player does. Sure it can be disappointing to miss an opportunity and have to reload a save, but it is awesome to be able to eliminate one target and find that the other has completely changed their routine in the time it took you to do that.
It annoyed me how in Skyrim the main quest is treated by the game as the most important thing in the world, but if you just decided to fight mudcrabs for multiple ingame years you could return to the main quest any everything would be exactly how you left it.
The STALKER games are famous for this, and modern mods like Anomaly use it to its fullest extent.
Question about the mod Anomaly, should play the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games with it for the first time or do a vanilla run first?
So Anomaly is completely standalone, but does have a main quest that references the original games. You can play it completely separately, since it's mostly a freeplay mod, but having the story of the previous games in the back of your head does unlock a bunch of extra lore and atmosphere, plus you get to seethe differences between the old and new redesigned locations!
Ok thanks.
I like those details, but it's tough. One of the easiest ways to intimidate a player is to make aj event, or even entire game loop, time limited. It's what discouraged a lot of potential Majora's mask players despite MM having the ability to reset the timer at any time. With the advent of mobile games, such terms may even signal a dark pattern in many minds these days.
But of you get over that fear, it's amazing what kinds of design decisions open up. The same area can become completely different hubs depending on when and how the player arrives.
Little details I get an irrational joy from noticing:
In-game HUDs, as they help increase immersion. Stuff like the pipboys from Fallout and the Dead Space system.
Being able to fully explore an open world environment. If I see a giant mountain, you bet your ass I'm gonna try and climb that mountain. Invisible barriers are just obnoxious when not consistent with what the environment looks like.
Solid world building, like the other commenter mentioned. It's absolutely delightful to piece together what happened at a location just by seeing little clues around the place. The fact that it's not spoon fed to you makes it all more interesting. The Hitman series were phenomenal at this, for example.
Idling animations. Occasionally I'll leave a game unpaused while I go off to grab a drink or use the restroom. It's cool to come back and see my character fiddling around.
Lastly, a killer soundtrack.
Well that's cool! Thanks for teaching me something new!
Theres also "diegetic sound' (more of a film term) that describes sounds and music a character can hear vs soundtracks that are just for the audience.
I don't know if this counts as a detail, but I really enjoy in RPG games when the protagonist leaves their starting point to go on their adventure, get locked out of the starting point location, then return to the first spot at the ending of the game. I won't name any to not spoil games but it just gives a nice feeling of reaching full circle when you complete the story like that.
One of the earliest examples I encountered was the gym in Viridian city. I was so intrigued that it was locked, but eventually it faded from my mind as I kept playing. So it was a pretty neat surprise that it ended up being the final gym, despite being the first one you come across.
I love when there's narrative elements in how you create your character, no matter how simple it is.
Choosing your background in Mass Effect gives you a pretty cool mission for each background. I love that it's brought up multiple times throughout the trilogy too.
Cyberpunk 2077 did it even better if you ask me. Not only was your chosen background a major influence in the plot, but you get different dialogue options based on how you level your character. It was great making an engineer and getting the option to geek out over tech as a way of building rapport with another character.
Biggest letdown of this was Hogwarts Legacy. House choice just gave you access to the house dorm, one extra mission, and most of the clothing options being about your specific house. That's about it.
Dragon Age: Origins has completely different opening sequences and basically the first 10% of the game is different based on your class.
Especially with the dwarfs starting paths. One for being a noble and another being a low born dwarf. To which I found really fun, especially if you get together with a human for the noble origin.
I've tried multiple times to get into Dragon Age since I like fantasy settings and love Mass Effect. For some reason, I get bored with it before leaving the first or second area after the starting areas. Tried origins and inquisition. Does it get better gameplay-wise? I feel like I'm missing something.
I mean, I had fun with the first one, I played it when it came out. I never played the follow-ups though, they all started coming out right around the time I was beginning to run short on free-time for long, story-driven games.
Totally agree with 2077. A lot of my fun has been from the different choices through the life paths
Arkane's entire design philosophy in gaming, Redfall notwithstanding, is peak gameplay and I won't hear an argument against it.
They strive to give the player agency. They don't want to give you a linear path to do almost anything - they design the game around enabling you to play it the way that comes naturally to you.
Part of that is a wide range of abilities and equipment to give you a ton of options and combinations. Part of that is level design that is open, expansive, and detailed. I'm still finding stuff in Dishonored a full decade later even though I've literally played the game more than a hundred times. And the final part is giving you a multitude of ways to handle the 'objective' of any given mission.
If you can play either Dishonored game and not feel the love, care, and attention that went into every single bit of it, I don't know what to tell you. It's the result of what happens when a studio of passionate, talented people are given the money and time to put out the best work they possibly can. I don't think a game has topped Dishonored 2 since it released.
In FF16 there will be characters throughout your home base that actively speak to you and each other about the events taking place in the game. Nearly the entire cast of 15-30 background characters are updated between missions to be saying and doing different things, with differing levels of detail and interactivity. This incentivizes me to run around and hear everyone's conversations to get a better sense of the world. It is a little thing, by no means mandatory, but it adds a lot to the world. Mass Effect did a great job with this as well.
I want at least SOME side quests to matter. Add/remove a structure in my base, add an NPC, change my outfit, etc. There needs to be some lasting effect so that anything other than the main content doesn't feel like an anime filler arc where nothing changes whether it happened or not. A good example of side quests done well is The Division 2. Doing side missions for communities alters their structures and NPCs to be more prosperous in specific ways. An audio log will play telling you how your acts have bettered people's lives and surroundings.
Option to generate fun random names for your worlds/settlements/characters/pets/etc. It's just a fun UX detail! As a gamedev I also enjoy incorporating this in my own games :>
I really enjoy idle animations more than I really should.
I also really like systems that show progress towards completion. It’s not that I’m even all that much of a completions, i just like seeing the progress quantified and getting a general sense of wether I’m exploring enough or too much.
Cryptic mysterious stuff that never gets an official answer, like L is Real from Mario 64. The zonai thing was pretty close to that in botw, and then tears answered all of the questions.
I also like a game that believes that I can figure things out on my own.
I love when I'm playing crafting or management games and think to myself "this game really needs a button to do X" and then I look in the corner of the window or I lookup the hotkeys and I find the option already exists. It means the developer didn't just create a system they also played it a lot and really thought about the experience and how players would interact with the interface.
Shout-out to Factorio and 7 Days to Die for completely nailing interface stuff like this.
I know it’s an inconsequential detail, but I absolutely love when changes to equipment reflect in the game world. In a first person game, if my character puts on a pair of gloves, I need to see the hands change. If it’s a third player game and I equip a new weapon, I love seeing the weapon’s model change.
God of War 2018 and Ragnarok surprisingly did a fantastic job of this, even down to the details like when you meet
spoiler
Mimir and his headMy absolute dream game would be an action RPG where every equipment change, from armor to weapons to boots, even rings and accessories, are reflected in game.
I can’t think of any examples other than Mass Effect but I loved the ability to import my save game into the next game. A decision you make in Mass Effect 1 can come back to haunt you two games and over 100 hours later. It does a lot in terms of making it feel like your own personal story.
I appreciate seeing lots of characters inhabiting towns and cities, even if there's not a lot of depth to them. It immediately gives me a sense of immersion. GTA V, the Assassin's Creed series, Watch Dogs... Sometimes you feel almost claustrophobic because of the crowds.
It's also quite nice when you're traversing the spaces between these communities and find other people traveling about, doing the same things that you're doing. Other adventurers and merchants in fantasy games for instance.
I really enjoy when you can see items in in-game shops. Not necessarily in an Elder Scrolls way where you can literally knock over or loot the items, but just seeing potions and books and food as you would in a real (magical) shop. FFXII is the first one I remember with this and it's still a standout: you start off in a big city full of heavily stocked shops, every one with fruit, weapons, books or fabric piled up so invitingly. A sample from Google Images. Hopefully the magic is still visible through the PS2-era graphics!
Specific to simulation-type games with people involved, like Rimworld or Cities: Skylines -- I really like being able to click on an individual person and see what they're up to. One of my favorite things to do in Rollercoaster Tycoon back in the day was to follow a random person as they wandered all over my amusement park. Rimworld especially scratches this itch since you can really get into the motivations and personalities of each individual pawn. I don't get the same enjoyment out of sim/tycoon games where the "people" are just unclickable animations.
I like it when a character remembers what you did back then and comments on it in the future. Feels like you really made a difference.
I always really like it when a game dev accounts for a really strange player behaviour and acknowledges it. The Stanley Parable is a game built entirely around this idea, but some other random examples: