34
votes
You can change ONE thing about a game. What do you change?
Fix an annoyance.
Take out a level.
Revamp a system.
Expand a world.
Etc.
Pick a game, any game, and tell us what ONE thing about it you would change, and why. It doesn’t have to be feasible or reasonable or whatnot. You’ve got a magic wand with one charge left.
Also, your goal CAN be to make the game better, but it doesn’t have to be! Maybe you want to make the game more challenging. More chaotic. More hilarious. More broken.
Entirely up to you!
Also, you only get one change per game, but it’s fine to talk about what you would do for more than one game.
I’ll be honest it really detracted from Zelda BotW for me. I just used low quality weapons all the time as I didn’t want to lose my good stuff!
I hated it in BotW because you never knew when you’d find a new cool replacement weapon again. In TotK on the other hand I feel like it made the fuse system more fun for me because it encouraged me to actually experiment with other things rather than just finding something that worked and never changing off it.
It was fine in TOTK because the majority of the attack power came from the fuse. So you could change any crappy stick info a powerful weapon making the weapon degradation largely meaningless.
I read a justification for weapon degradation in BotW on reddit somewhere that made a lot of sense. Paraphrasing:
I did it the same! And at the end I had sooo much good stuff that I had to throw away good weapons to pickup even better ones.
I also ended up doing this
What do you think about weapon degradation when there is the ability to maintain your weapon indefinitely using readily available resources? I like survival games and equipment maintenance (clothing, blades, guns) is usually a key part. Without maintenance the pace could get too fast for games designed to be slow.
Not the GP, but personally, I hated the weapon degradation in BotW and TotK where it basically turned all weapons into consumables, and where it often felt like a weapon would barely last through a few encounters.
On the other hand, I didn't really mind the the gear durability in WoW, where it was pretty much a gold sink. It was also slow enough that topping it off was just something I did whenever I was in town rather than having to worry about in the middle of a dungeon.
I know a lot of people despise durability, but i think it can work if it reinforces the themes of the intended experience. For example, im a true freak and love Far Cry 2, which is a game with almost absurd rates of weapon degradation. It works for me though because the game's themes of decay and meaningless conflict are reinforced through this mechanic. Its meant to make you feel like you are under equipped and in a hostile environment, where nearly everything is working against you, including your equipment. I think they could tune it down just a smidge, but even still i think the game is better for having this mechanic. I also didnt mind it in breath of the wild (outside of the master sword, that should have been infinite), because the games setting is a post apocalypse, and a major theme is rebuilding in a destroyed world, it makes sense that most of the equipment you use is old and not durable. Again, i think they could have dialed back the rate at which things degrade. I find that usually its not the mechanic itself thats a problem,nthey are just tuned to to break too fast, and extending the durability a bit can go a long way. That said most implementations do not meet these thresholds, and it often feels tacked on because its a current trend.
I remember talking about Lies of P with a friend of mine when it was just released and I told him:
"This mechanic to sharpen your weapon is super well done.
pause
But it would be even better if it wasn't there."
It's just terrible in any form really, and he agreed immediately. Whether items break and get lost (Zelda) or get worse over time (Monster Hunter), it's just never actually something fun. Just another lever to pull. And a frustrating one at that.
ok, also hear me out for MH specifically!
I do not hate resharpening (I will assume y'all are talking about sharpening, not sharpness itself). Choosing to sharpen mid-fight is just an additional decision you make that isn't just "dodge monster, hit monster". Factors like whether you bounce off certain parts at your current sharpness, or whether it's around time for the monster to change areas, or how the loss in damage from the sharpness modifier compares to the loss in damage from sharpening and not hitting monster... Maybe that's all tedium, but it's just a small extra little bit of flavoring to a hunt IMO. It also lets certain skills like Razor Sharp exist, that aren't simple straightforward growths in stat and will yield different mileage based on your weapon type and whether you are skilled enough to stick to the monster enough for the slower sharpness degradation to matter.
I don't even think the ability to mount out of danger and running in circles is necessarily making sharpness less relevant. That shit takes time and MH eventually gets more about killing something more efficiently, not just getting a single clear. It gives an option to make sharpening mid-combat easier, but doesn't fully kill that tradeoff of mid-combat sharpening.
Incredibly unlikely indeed even when it's sort of understandable from a gameplay perspective. It makes sense to force a player to change up their play style and be defensive for a spell. If we're talking about how it fits in the bigger picture of overall game flow, MH may have the most relevant durability mechanic of them all... but it still sucks.
Sharpness didn't just force a player to sharpen their weapon, it's also a relevant weapon stat. If they're going to keep it they'd need to reward sharpness for it to remain interesting, and stop penalizing degradation.
Thing is, every argument I can think of for any game that does this I will always conclude that it's better without it entirely.
I didn't mind the system in Lies of P. It gives a justification to the mechanic of breaking enemy weapons, which is huge in some encounters.
Some degradation mechanics, which don't really balance well (looking at you STALKER 2, where my guns break and jam, but enemy guns never seem to do so, even though when you defeat the enemies and loot them their guns are all at 0%), but if there's a player advantage that can be exercised as a result, then I think it's a cool idea.
I didn't mind either, it's one of the lesser offenders overall, but I don't think it made the game better. Disarming enemies could be done without having to sharpen my axe every couple of hits.
I actually like the mechanic in Valheim as it lets me know it's time to go home, get food, rest, arrows and upgrades. Otherwise I'm tempted to stay out a bit longer than I should and get stomped by the next 2 star critter that I don't have the stamina to run from.
Hmm, that's actually a pretty good point and I agree. I do think that's very specific to the genre however. It's part of the survival mechanic to run out of resources, whatever those resources may be. I'm still convinced that it tends to break game flow for any other genre.
It's necessary in survival to manage scarce resources, it's not necessary for me to break my flow while dodging and beating up a beast for fifteen minutes in Monster Hunter.
I guess I get your point, but, in, for example, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, I quite liked that you could (re)sharpen your bladed weapons yourself at free-to-use grindstones. On top of that, you gained some skill or XP for doing so, and you got a slight combat bonus for using a self-sharpened weapon. You could even sharpen blades attained from loot, then sell them for more than if you didn't sharpen them. Even if you didn't want to go through the process of sharpening, you could just use a kit, and insta-sharpen them. Once you got to a certain level of financial freedom, it was easy to get kits, and they lasted for a decent number of repairs.
KCD was going to be my counterexample because I think it works well with its brands of realism.
Dark Cloud would be a much better game with that mechanic removed.
I'm going to do a fun one -
Time scale options in Stardew Valley. I want to be able to set the time scale ALLLLL the way to real time.
Let me spend a real couple of hours cleaning out my farm. It would make food have much more of a real need. It would mean I could play with my non-gamer friends and family without having to micromanage them.
This is what prevents me from enjoying that game. I can't play it at my own pace, I'm always scrambling to adhere to a schedule.
I read guides and comments and it looks like you just can't lose or miss something. Even grandpa evaluation can be repeated, thats allows me to play game in my own pace.
It's true that you can't miss out on things forever (though IIRC there's one cutscene that can only trigger in year 1). This is different from the feeling of actually playing the game for some people, though. The individual days feel like they tick by quite fast. Every day, there are daily tasks you need to keep on top of, depending how you've set up your farm. You might feel like you never have time or health/stamina to do the extra exploring or fishing or NPC interactions or mining or farm maintenance or whatever it is that you want to do, after taking care of those tasks. And if you miss something this spring, you'll have to wait until next spring to get the chance for it again.
Some people can adjust to the mindset of slowing down and realizing you can only do so much in one day, and can be ok with leaving other things for future days/seasons. But some people find it more stressful to manage these pretty severe limits on the otherwise open-endedness of the whole game. (And the limits just keep getting more difficult as more content's been added to the game, too.) Not everyone clicks with it, and I understand peoples' disappointment when they just wanted a cozy and relaxing game.
Mods that freeze time with a key press good alternative?
I mean, that works for the PC and GOG copies I have but what about when I'm playing on the Switch?
Coming from playing older Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons games it still feels odd to me that time doesn't pause indoors when I play. If I played SDV on my computer I'd definitely install a mod to do that.
It's been so long since I played Harvest Moon 64, I completely forgot it did that.
It's a worth a replay in my opinion! The gameplay is missing some modern conveniences but every time I play I find myself drawn in and all I want to do is just keep playing. One of these days I'll go for a complete photo album run!
There's a modder who is adding some quality of life features in a ROM hack which I'm excited to play when it is released.
There's also an excellent strategy guide that was made by a fan of the game which he released for free as a PDF. There's also a printed version he makes which is very high quality. My wife got me a copy a few years ago and I love it!
If you were ever curious what was displayed on the 4th channel on the television there is a fan translation project that is translating all of those episodes and providing great background information/context that would be needed to understand the shows. Here's a link to their project named Lost in Localization!
Completely eliminate sections where my character is forced to move slowly without any other gameplay elements. Drives me insane.
Also last night I was playing Metroid Prime Remastered and had to skip an optional section where I was trying to launch up a halfpipe in the ball form and it made me nauseous/my skin crawl. I don't know why. But I'd get rid of whatever that was.
Yes.
And no more forced stealth missions in non-stealth games.
Nobody is buying Spider-Man to play as MJ...
I might be misunderstanding the concept of gameplay elements but the one location where I might keep this intact is the microwave hall section in MGS IV. You're firmly in Old Snakes boots by that point and the long crawl through the hallway is symbolic of your perceived imminent death. You're eventually forced out of your protective suit and into a labored crawl to the goal. You barely make it (or you died trying)
I hate artificial limits like you've mentioned but this part of the plot immediately jumped to my mind as a valid example
I'd rather just watch something like that in a cutscene. I haven't played any of the MSG games, but if all I'm doing is holding down the walks keys or the joystick, just let me watch it in a cutscene.
Eh, there's an entire boss in MGS 3 that involves walking down a hallway essentially but MGS always feels like it earns these moments somehow and makes them still enjoyable on a replay...
Oh, MGS 3 also has a ladder you climb for about two minutes and damn if my chest doesn't swell with emotion thinking about it.
But, by and large, I agree with you. Only thing worse than long 'interactive' cutscenes is cutscenes where the character does a ton of cool stuff that you can't do.
The theme song as you climb the ladder compliments the scene perfectly. If I'm not mistaken, that long climb is actually a hidden loading screen and the game is switching out the jungle/cave textures from the previous world to the soviet base textures used for most of the remainder
Nobody is asking for more cutscenes in a Metal Gear Solid game, trust me. And I love the things.
These slow sections are often there to hide loading, would you have preferred a loading screen instead? Because I think that would be the alternative.
I think you're misunderstanding me. I mean things like where your character gets injured and you have to limp across town. Or the infamous desert sequence in Uncharted 3 where the player has to wander through the desert for several minutes as Drake is slowly dying from exhaustion. It's tedious and could easily just be a cutscene.
The one in Assassin's Creed 3 is probably my least favorite example of all time. You get injured during this really annoying chase sequence in the final minutes, you're then forced to limp after your opponent and I swear it takes forever -- there's a loading screen and a new setting, and you're still forced to limp, and when you finally reach him, the game switches to a cutscene and you kill him during that. So the game made you wander tediously across the map just to rip away the only part of the experience that would've had any catharsis. And then there's like 10 minutes of unskippable credits.
Ah, yes then i misunderstood, i thought you were taking about e.g. Lara Croft squeezing through a tight section, moving very slowly. I see what you mean, those sections are rarely fun. I think what they are trying to accomplish is to give you a little bit of that frustration limping home, but more often than not it's just boring. Or at the very best frustrating for very different reasons than what the character you're playing as is frustrated about.
The point of doing things in gameplay is to tie the player to the experience, not just the character. Like in CoD4 when the nuke goes off and you slowly die, having it be part of the game is meant to give it more impact. The Uncharted scene is done foe the same reason: you feel the struggle and inevitability more when you have input (even, or especially, when it's futile) Done well I find it effective and memorable. Done poorly, like your AssCreed example, it's frustrating.
No big missables (in as much as possible)!
When playing a game, I like to do everything in one big play through then move on to the next game. I prefer to play blind, but I'll use a guide if it become clear I might miss things that way. I appreciate games where I don't need that - where the reward for playing "perfectly" is more about resource efficiency via free items, time efficiency for not having to run back through an area to scoop them up, or early access to things that become more available later.
As an example, I played through Horizon Zero Dawn last summer. I really appreciated the devs' foresight in that, for certain sections that became locked off once I've finished them, all of the collectables were moved to an accessible spot outside afterward. It may not be strictly "realistic", but it alleviates the FOMO and lets me relax when playing through.
Metroidvanias have a genre convention where they give you a percent complete stat. You usually unlock powers and whatnot to return to sections of the map you were in previously to get collectibles and things you initially couldn’t. There’s an understood handshake between the game designer(s) and the players that you’ll be able to 100% a game because you’re (eventually) not locked out of anything.
In the original release of Ori and the Blind Forest, however, they put collectibles in one-time escape sequences that, once completed, cannot be done again.
I cannot stress how much of a sin this is!
Thankfully, they fixed it for the Definitive Edition of the game.
If a game does have missable stuff, a nice QoL would be adding a different way to get them later. In Final Fantasy VII, there’s a late game dig site where you can unearth random items, including some that you missed earlier in the game. I think this sort of thing is a good compromise when returning to specific areas wouldn’t make sense for story reasons.
That's called a "rage quit".
World of Warcraft: remove cosmetics of all kinds.
I'm very opinionated about this.. but people are running around in murloc onesies and a full set of pink valentine's day armor. The mounts are ridiculous. They are adding cars in the next patch ffs.. scale all this flashy nonsense way back. Yes you will look a bit dumb in your mismatched armour, but that's the point! That way you know who to look up to when you see them in the high level content loot. In vanilla when you saw someone with Grand Marshal's Claymore in Stormwind, you were kind of in awe - and playing a vanilla WoW server currently that also has transmog, it's become even more apparent how big of a mistake it is.
Very much looking forward to when the official (near no changes) server gets to TBC in a year's time, and everyone look like clowns in Outland again! And then when you get to max level, you start to run dungeons, get sets of gear.. and it's just such an awesome feeling! Standing there in some blues and maybe a few PvP purples, barely setting foot in the first raid while looking at someone in the full set of gear from the hardest raid.. so cool! Someone to look up to. Something to strive towards.
Honestly, removing cosmetics would improve every game probably.
I find that in-game cosmetics (for real world money) follows a cycle:
a) I can have shiny plate armor that looks really cool!
b) Oh, okay, those armors aren't my style, but some people would like them... I guess...
c) Oh no, they've learned the ridiculous cosmetics sell, and greed has overcome all decorum. WHY is this guy in my group dressed like a cross between Deadmau5 and a stripper from an orc bachelor party?
I kind of get it in games like Fortnite where it really is all about the silly stuff. But other games.. I remember Saints Row 3 (I think?) being so over the top parodying at the time but most other games that are otherwise kind of serious in tone have now taken it even further than that.
It's fine that people enjoy their cosmetics and how they look. For me though, I die a tiny bit inside when I'm doing my thing in the world and then I see someone in a clown costume. Little by little it ruins some parts of the game. WoW is not and has never been that serious, but I just miss what it was I guess - and I don't think it's just nostalgia.
For me, it's when I'm playing The Division 2 and I see an agent dressed like they're going to a rave... it just destroys the atmosphere they're trying to create.
World of Tanks just added 3D attachment accessories to their game, so now people can drive around with guitar amps and drum sets and cymbal monkeys on their vehicles. It's hideous and ridiculous looking, and if immersion mattered on such a high-intensity game it would be most unfortunate.
this is what i see when i look at them
That sounds ridiculous lol - I don't know much about that game but it's supposed to have a more serious vibe right?
It's a game where you're playing a special agent-type person after a viral contagion wipes out a large portion of humanity and the government falls apart. You're trying to bring everything back from the brink.
Which is what makes it so damn weird to see people running around with goggles with flashing LED light on them, or masks that look like a baby doll face has been strapped to them, or a suit made out of trash bags.
Agree with this a lot. To add to this, I feel RPGs in that sense should cater to the experience of the playable character, not the player playing the game. This invokes a sense of immersion that becomes lost in translation as soon as you introduce mechanics used to bring the player directly joy instead of enriching your playable character and through that, you. That is the roleplaying aspect in a nutshell. Do I want this? Or does my character want this?
To me, the UI is where the player ends and the character begins.
The UI is another thing I'd like to change. In old times, before ~2010, the UI was to the side and you barely had any flash in the middle of the screen. Nowadays it looks like Fortnite's UI which always has flashing numbers and animations towards the middle of the screen. Can't be bothered to find it right now but there was a study (or something) done which proved that players get more dopamine etc. when all that stuff is in your face. Constant little sparks of sensory impressions that takes away from the bigger goals. When even the tiniest things are rewarded with good brain chemicals and hormones and whatnot, you get this Tiktok effect of a certain amount of addiction. Instead of getting that satisfaction from killing a big dungeon boss, you get it constantly from killing the easiest of monsters. I think I'm going to play more classic servers actually. I've been really enjoying it!
In a big fan of the way OSRS generally handles cosmetics. None of them can really be bought with out of game money (excluding spending bonds for in game money to then but off the grand exchange from other players), but then the most prestigious cosmetics are untradeable, meaning that you actually have to earn them in game through playing and there's no way to buy them (no legit way to buy them at least). It hits home with the theme of "I earned this" that I used to love about unlockables of games of old, rather than "I bought it because it looked cool".
It also helps that most of the cosmetics in the game fit thematically.
"Bushido mode", applicable to any action game - either you hit them and they die, or they hit you and you die.
Starters: every first person game [editing wording] now has an additional accessibility mode for static images or 2D or isometric etc.
I dream of being able to play Portal or Slime Rancher or Witness without hurling.
You can’t play first person games? Does this affect you in other ways?
Indeed I cannot. If I take two doses of gravol or other anti nausea pills, plus having a lemon on hand and a slice of ginger in my mouth, I can push for about 15 minutes of playing, say, Slime Rancher, moving only when absolutely needing to, closing my eyes in between movement. I have also tried playing Witness with my spouse handing the screen I tell him where to point. Still less than 15 minutes before I feel too ill to continue.
Wasn't always like this :'( I used to be able to play Rainbow 6 (poorly) with my friends (I was the hilarious team handicap). After the pregnancy ---> months long nausea, video game motion sickness became permanent.
I just read about this in a game design book - it's called DIMS or Doom-Induced Motion Sickness. It approaches solutions from a designer's standpoint, not a player's, but you may be able to do the following:
This is fascinating to me, as I've had a much milder struggle with first-person games and increasing FoV has been what helps. But then again mine is more headache-y and less nausea, so maybe it's a different mechanism.
Same here. I have to increase the FOV in nearly every first-person game I play. 70-90 seems to be the default for most games, while 105 is what seems to work for me most of the time.
Luckily the genres I typically play don't tend to overlap with first-person much, but I remember having to increase the default FoV in Outer Wilds.
Hmmm comment saved, will try it when I feel brave and have a rest of the evening to recover :D most games don't come with all of those settings of course but I'll try for as many as I can find
+1 for sitting farther away and reducing field of view. I cannot play or watch streams of FPS games at my computer, I get motionsick watching Jet Lag, I can't read or look at my phone in a car or on a train (airplanes are ok), and I get nauseated a bit on swings.
But if I'm sitting about 10-15 feet from a tv, I'm more or less OK, and I was able to play through a few games like that in high school (when I had access to my brother's system) and college (when I had access to my ex's system). I can also watch someone else play first-person games as long as I'm sufficiently far away from the screen.
Still, I agree with you, having a birds-eye view for every single game would be my desired change. Starcraft and League were both fine, Skyrim made me ridiculously motionsick. I never even finished the Portal campaign.
Also, I would suggest to not view the 60fps as a target but as a lower limit. The higher, the better.
I feel your pain, chocobean. It’s not nearly as bad for me, but I’m pretty sensitive to first-person games as well and have gotten my share of FPS sickness. I have to be very selective about what I play and do a lot of settings tweaking before I dive in to anything with a first-person camera. Some games I can make work, but others I simply can’t play.
The worst part is that by the time you’re aware of the sickness coming on, it’s already too late. You’re stuck with that awful feeling for a while — even if you stop playing immediately.
:( I'm less surprised by it these days when they are reliably terrible for me. I dont mind missing out on the Doom or shooters....but I am sad about missing the beautiful and cute.
One of my recent happy memories of playing a first person game game : family put on virtual reality goggles, walked the PC to a beautiful knoll in Slime Rancher, and pass the headset to me, so I can sit down and just enjoy being in their happy slime environment. I still had to turn/look around carefully but it was wonderful.
Don't include launcher/online requirement (especially for singleplayer type of play).
I hate Ubisoft, EA and Rockstar with a passion. So much, actually, that I won't buy games from them anymore. I haven't olayed RDR2, I won't play AC4: Black flag on my Steam Deck (which is a thing I would love to do), I won't play GTA5 (even though it should work offline, but it didn't when I tried so F-off). Their own software just stands in the way.
It's like you want to rive a car you paid for but first you have to call dealership and announce you would like to drive. If there's nobody in the dealership today, you are not driving anywhere (server down, maintenance, etc.). If there is only serviceman in dealership, he can't find the proof of purchase and you won't drive today (various problems with launchers). Well, in those cases, I'm no buying your cars anymore, I will go elsewehere.
And in this age, there are PLENTY of games that are great and don't come from a studio that distributes this shit software with their games. Zachtronics makes great puzzle games, FTL and Into the breach are awesome, Factorio, Satisfactory, Creeper World... Hell, even Sony with at least some of their Playstation games doesn't include launcher!
Sorry for the rant. It's just that so many of games are held down by unnecessary software you have to have and use in order to just play them.
I use Linux and some of the games run well but sometimes don't start because the launcher is messed uo in Linux. You have this multi-gigabyte software that runs on your unsupported OS but you can't run it because there is that 300MB shit that you need and that doesn't fucking work.
I know, I run unsupported OS, it was my choice - stop rambling. Instead of rambling everywhere, I do so just once in a few monhs in post like this one. And in the meantime, I don't buy these games, this is my "fight" against it.
I certainly hope I don't get banned for discussing piracy on tildes but if you'd like to play slightly less than legitimate games on the steamdeck, mayhaps google game repacks.
I'm right there with you on loathing always online or launcher requirements, though. I don't care if Ubisoft wants to know my every movement in their 12 year old videogame; I should be able to play a game I buy without having a constant Internet connection.
I didn't pirate a game (that is availavle to buy) in likely more than 15 years. If I'm honest, I don't even care for their games anymore. They may be great games but this is a matter of principle for me.
Just like many friends speak about various TV series they are watching (some of them legitimely, some pirate them), I don't care about it. Either distributor of those series distribute it the way I, possible paying customer, want or they can go F themselves. If the srries is THAT good, make a Blue ray release and I will go and buy it and likely spend more money tha I would while watching it using monthly subscription. Oh, you don't do physical release or downloadable (DRM-free, that is dirext file download) option? Well, I guess you don't get my money then and I don't even care about the content you made.
Me not knowing about the content makes me out of circle when friends talk about it, but it also means I'm not spreading a word about the content thus not making any advertisement thus not making them any money. I have plenty other things to talk with my friends about.
New accessibility option: flash reduction/elimination, black flash bangs and other flashes.
Few things in games grind my gears more than a game with lots of flashing, an epilepsy warning, and accessibility options. Like they were almost there then missed. It's made me wonder if I can try to implement some low level software that catches when the graphics is trying to push a frame with all white pixels (or something close) and skip displaying it, I'd take missing a couple seconds frame updates for no flash.
Off topic a bit, but this is so prevalent in movies and TV shows these days, too. It's frustrating in the extreme to be watching a TV show and then come across an episode that has a flashing warning at the beginning. Ok, great, what are the people with sensitivity supposed to do now? Skip the episode? Stop watching the show they were so invested in?
It's so unnecessary most of the time, too. In both games and watchables. You can have atmosphere without cinematography that's in your face and yelling at you. I'd even argue that it's a superior atmosphere, if it's been built without flashy gimmicks.
I would turn Elden Ring into Dark Souls 4, and I would do it by simply removing all the open world time wasting bullshit and making it more linear, because everyone knows "open world" is just a filler buzzword used to pad out game time and doesn't actually add anything of value except for in extremely rare cases. Elden Ring has almost no replayability at all because the vast majority of it is spent running from one place to another. Meanwhile, Dark Souls 1-3 have near infinite replayability because the action never stops. Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
I love an atmospheric open world. Shadow of the Colossus is easily a top 5 game for me, and most of the game is riding your faithful horse to the next Colossus to resurrect your dead girlfriend. Give me breathtaking panoramic views, give me little game trails to nowhere in particular, give me a cozy glen or spooky cave or dramatic cliffside! I want to climb mountains far from the plot and be occasionally surprised by a little easter egg or lonely and unimportant setpiece.
I'm enjoying Elden Ring and barely played any of the other Soulsbornes.
I strongly disagree. Hyper linear games are generally a positive for me but what I love about Elden Ring is just wandering around seeing what shenanigans Torrent and I can get up to.
If I want to zone out to something hyper linear that’s what all the other games are for.
plus remove/limit fast-travel, although in a more linear setup you don't have to travel as much.
For almost all of the new Nintendo games: just give us back the options menus. Controller remapping, audio channels, HUD scaling, color blind options. Seems like all Nintendo games give you now is brightness, language and subtitles.
And for every action game: A story-less mode. Something that essentially turns it into Hotline Miami. Just minimal possible time between clicking heads for dopamine. There's so many games I really want to replay but the thought of even one long narrative or walking simulator segment is an instant turn off.
Also a Blaltro style option to just automatically unlock everything in roguelikes.
Some games have way more than one so in these it would not be as much help but generally modify the games so the player has better control over how they want to play it.
So:
Some of these frequently come with games where you can tell the developer had strong vision for them. Mostly this can result in a truly unique game but it is with going over into forcing that vision on the player where they start to lose me.
It doesn't matter how good the designer is they have zero idea about how each individual player would best enjoy the game. Soulslikes generally are from what I can tell especially bad in this regard.
Better yet, allow it to be changed on the fly!
I was trying the new Metroid Prime Remastered recently (I never played the original), and enjoying it on normal difficulty right up until I got to the Phazon Mines. I'd kind of like to be able to drop to casual difficulty just for that one section, but no dice. That, or having an open save system, as you mentioned, would work too so that I'm only retrying shorter segments.
(I'm pretty decent with tight FPS combat, but I grew up playing it with K+M on PCs; controllers just feel clunky by comparison.)
A bit late for this given how far you are in the game, but if you (or anyone else reading this) ever wants to play Metroid Prime with M/KB controls, then PrimeHack is great.
I posted it on one of the game discussion threads here a few months back, but I found Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales to be a 9.9/10 game. Literally the only thing I disliked about the game was the RIDICULOUS difficulty spike on the very last boss, so that's the one thing I'd change. Played the whole game on the hardest difficulty since I was a Gwent veteran, and loved every minute of it. There were times where I died, sure, but none of them felt unfair. Just maybe some bad luck here, or a near miss there, and then with maybe one or two more attempts I overcame my hurdle and got back into the amazing story.
But the final boss was nothing like that. Had like five different mechanics that were each completely overpowered, broken, and extremely unfun. After a couple dozen tries and coming nowhere close, I lowered the difficulty setting by one and beat it first try. Sucks that it was right at the end, too, since it left such a sour taste on an otherwise perfect game.
(If you haven't played it, don't let this put you off though. It's still one of the best games I've played in recent years. Incredible story-telling, world-building, and gameplay. Just pause before the final boss fight and lower the difficulty setting and you won't go through the same frustration that I did.)
I'd add an industry wide standard for PC gaming where we get the option to add a command line argument like '-continue_last_save' (or just a checkbox in Steam) and then can do just that: start the game and instantly continue the last save that we played without having to click through a bunch of logos or a main menu or anything else.
Just start the game, load the last save, play.
I think it's the same qualm as most folks. I would change the water temple in Zelda: Ocarina of Time so you don't need to take off and put on those stupid boots.
This actually has a much simpler solution, which has been implemented in remakes: make it so that the boots can be toggled via a button rather than only from the Start menu. Greatly improves the experience.
Ah, I still reply it through my N64 and curse my way through every time.
I would add a play option to Tetris that allows you to build up infinitely.
Personally, the satisfaction of Tetris has always been reducing the number of active lines to zero. If there were no upper bound on the play space we could play the same game long term. I’d love that.
This sounds easy and desirable. Someone should make this
I hate it when single player games have 1000 lore/codex pages thrown all around the place.
If I decide to read them, it just keeps breaking my immersion and completely ruins pacing. I am doing this really cool mission and I am at the edge of my seat to find out what happens next... aaaand I keep having to stop in my tracks every few minutes to read some stupid crap.
And if I decide to not read them, it feels like I'm missing huge part of the lore and world-building of the game. Especially since many games hide important details (even plot/gameplay hints) in them.
It's just such a lazy way to info-dump/lore-dump. I wish they stopped doing it.
I like it when rediscovering the past is part of the setting. Dead Space: uncovering the mystery of what the fuck is going on here. Horizon Zero Dawn: what happened to Earth? In both cases it would detract from the story to have people around that could explain it and dping it entirely passively like Left 4 Dead did with idle dialogue and graffiti doesn't work for deeper stories.
Sonic Adventure 2: Remap actions to more buttons. Mostly just for light dash, but others would be nice too, like the sunglasses/treasure scope. I'll never understand why this was made as if there were only 2 buttons. (I do know there are mods to do this on the PC version, just would be nice to have it everywhere!)
Ooh, this just reminded me of what I’d fix:
Jet Set Radio has
graffitiandrecenter cameramapped to the same button. There’s absolutely no reason for this because there are unused buttons already on the controller. It’s also obnoxious while playing for obvious reasons — nobody wants their camera to suddenly shift when they’re trying to do something else!Maybe there was something up with Dreamcast devs and a desire for unnecessary input efficiency?
Put one more boss in Signalis. The cage is interesting in the story but a total non-thing to fight, and the game needs another big moment to break the last few segments up like the Mynha does.
I would give Classic WoW better, more adult storylines that are presented in a way that makes it compelling to experience.
How would that look for you?
I admittedly haven't thought this through, but what I have thought is unlikely to please a lot of people. I'm just very particular about some things.
I feel like Classic (pre-Cata anyway) is already better than mainline WoW in this way. In mainline you occasionally get the odd good true one-off quest but most quests are written into a larger overarching narrative which gets fatiguing for the same reason TV getting taken over entirely by serialized shows is fatiguing. In vanilla especially one is more likely to run across quests that are little self-contained vignettes or something totally random and silly.
I agree that, in Classic, you eventually encounter good, interesting writing. However, since they are few and far between, by the time you get to those quests there's a good chance you won't read them. If the previous 20 quests were dull "kill X of Y" drivel, players don't have a reason to give that one cool quest any attention. That is because the odds of it being interesting are very low.
That’s true, Classic could use fewer filler quests or at minimum, cutting down the tedium of the objectives - is there really a need for [Boar Liver]s for that infamous Westfall quest to have such a low drop rate for example?
I think there may be some risk of reducing mass appeal with such a change, though. Depending on execution it could increase the game’s appeal to self-directed/self-starter players while reducing it for players who like for games to provide an unending stream of things to do.
That is a good observation.
When I talk about reducing the amount of quests, I don't mean to also remove those quest objectives from the game. I would rather relocate some of those objectives to a list of area goals that could be given by a single NPC, with just one thing to read/listen/watch instead of 20 quest givers each with their own boring quest text.
You would still have plenty of things to do, but the game wouldn't have to pretend that each one of those goals required a narrative of their own.
So you would have an overall goal such as, for example, "Aid the exploration of AREA", and inside that you would have all the simplistic sub-goals that are already in the game.
Plenty of quests would still exist, but they would be required to be interesting. So the idea is to preserve the narrative aspect of the game to things that are interesting, avoiding making players apathetic to it. But the game would still have all the mindless grinding it has today.
Pacific Drive (the horror game) isn't relaxing enough. It has too much of the 'walking around, looting stuff' part (which is spooky and boring) and not enough actual driving.
So, I want Pacific Drive to be more Pacific and more Drive.
iirc they added a bunch of difficulty options after release, so I wonder if there's a configuration there that would help with this
Not really, the problem is baked into the map design. And if I'm being really honest, the game design - like, Pacific Drive just doesn't have much gameplay (besides driving, which you don't do enough of).
The game has an amazing spooky soundtrack that really puts you off-edge, until some point halfway through the game when you realize you've never been jumpscared and never will be, at which point you start running blind through the darkness fearlessly whenever it's even slightly convenient.
So besides the horror, there's going into buildings and either opening containers then hitting the 'loot all' button, or scrapping radios etc. Yawn. The buildings are (quite understandably) reused and small and fairly standardized, so you stop caring about exploration and just care about looting. So, what's left?
Well, you can loot anomalies (lightning towers, hoovering up the swamp pink-stuff etc), but honestly besides the lightning-tower that gets tedious and repetitive pretty fast, motivated only by the jackpot of having found loot.
There's picking up the stability anchors, which are fun I guess? No, they're a fun sensory experience, it's really cool to see everything go nuts as you sprint back to the car. They're probably good for pacing and making the place feel less like chernobyl disneyland, but nothing that interesting.
The Gateway Portal bit at the end of a run is fun, it's perfect, but I don't think it could or should be expanded. It's a great climax, pacing-wise.
I've played with the difficulty settings. I think I shortened or disabled nights (nights suck, they're miserable and the views are nonexistent), I either reduced or disabled part wear (you inevitably need to replace panels etc when they get worn, which is just a matter of grinding more materials), I disabled fuel when I upgraded the engine - I ran out of fuel (yes that includes all the stuff in the map, at least the easy-to-find stuff) in the 'the wall' story mission, and I couldn't be assed restarting the mission then never bothered re-enabling it (I was just sort of over everything but the story at the point) since I realized the sensible thing would be to either downgrade the engine or add a second backseat fuel tank, and I just didn't want to give up the speed/hill climbing.
Speaking of hill climbing: bashing through impractical terrain is some of the funnest parts of Pacific Drive, but the engine can't do plenty of slopes and the parts damage is horrendous. I feel like they deliberately encourage sticking to roads and really treating the car like a car, and not a land rover or tank, which is thematically kind of cool but also kind of limits what they can do, because they also refuse to have long stretches of road to road-trip on. It really feels like they designed the game around getting out of the car frequently, which is a problem because there's nothing interesting outside of the car.
Half of the stuff I disabled, I don't actually dislike - its implementation was just flawed. For the car maintenance stuff, I actually wanted more of it, it's just "oh your HP bar on this part is low, go craft a new one" is boring. The answer is always either "craft a repair item" (or swap with an identical item in the repair bay, same thing) or "craft a status-fixer item". It's never "open up the part and modify its insides".
I actually really like fuel mechanics, but it just involved a ton of small, relatively frequent fuel pickups. If it's too frequent and doesn't last a while, it's less "at last, more fuel!" and more "ugh I guess I should be responsible and go siphon that barrel". Like, I think fuel trucks should be a huge deal that you specifically seek out but it just isn't, because you can't take it all and you get plenty from the barrels, anyway.
More specifically, these sorts of games should motivate you to specifically seek out stuff on the map, instead of thinking "I need resources, I'll just sort of aimlessly wander, any direction is fine. If you're going anywhere, you're going nowhere, and your journey doesn't have events.
If there were maps a bit more like Jalopy or Mad Max (2015) where you just drive a long distance exploring the place and keeping an eye out for occasional loot, that would be nice. They could quadruple the size of the map and delete half of the buildings, maybe. Actually, more than half.
Skies of Arcadia: Legends, but with the high-quality audio from the Dreamcast version.
I generally think the GameCube version improved on the original, but the music is completely butchered. I’ve been bemoaning for years that the emulation scene still hasn’t managed to combine the best of both versions into a definitive ROM.
The studio working on RIGS: MCL was never cancelled. Most fun game I've ever played and it was completely killed when Sony shut down the studio at Guerilla Games.
Final Fantasy XIII - It now has a fully real time combat system and, not the weird turn based/real time
abominationhybrid that they went with for the game. Holy shit was it not implemented great, it caused me to bounced off of the game so hard that I really don't want to go back and play it.Civilization - It is now a RTS, not a turn based strategy game series. Because I want the chaos that will come that the long term Civ players (myself included) will have, trying to learn a new way to play our favorite game series.
A magic wand you say... I'd like for time IRL to freeze while I game, so I can finally have time to play all my games more...
World of Warcraft (mainline/“retail”): Controversial perhaps, but I would spin high-end competitive content out into a new server type with its own entirely separate class design, balancing, and ruleset.
This feels necessary to me, because as the gulf between entry level and high end endgame content has grown, it’s become more and more difficult to balance the game in a way that doesn’t leave someone unhappy, and more often than not that’s the lower end more casual players. If this group didn’t make a point of raising a ruckus over proposed changes on the official forums they’d be given no consideration at all (see the recent hunter marksmanship pet debacle, in which spec design catered only to the desires of players who primarily raided and/or did high end M+ until causals made a stink).
This gulf has also enabled a thriving market for paid carries, which are essentially loot boxes with the community acting as an intermediary for purposes of plausible deniability, which I don’t believe is healthy for the game as a whole. It’s also what allows illicit real life money carry/boost services to continue to exist, bringing in ethical concerns (some such services operate out of East/Southeast Asia and utilize prisoners and similar and sometimes hacks to provide their services).
This didn’t use to be as much of a problem because originally, the number of players doing cutting edge content was a small single-digit percentage and so making changes to the wider game just for that group was a lot more rare, and carries were less common because the gap wasn’t as wide.
Over time the number of participants in competitive content grew as did the number of difficulty levels and the ceiling of the highest difficulties, landing us where we are now.
There’s also how competitive players are generally disinterested in the game outside of their favored content and treat the remainder like a nuisance, so it’s not as if everything is peachy for this group of players either.
So I’d split competitive content out into a new set of servers with a new ruleset. Balance/design changes aimed at high end content would be confined to these servers, and perhaps things like world content would be disabled since much of this group tends to always either be in a city or instanced content.
Meanwhile on “normal” servers, the number of difficulties would be pruned down to something more closely resembling vanilla/TBC/WotLK. For dungeons, current day heroic would replace max level “normal”, current mythic would replace heroic, and M+ 4 or 5 would become mythic. For raids, LFD difficulty is removed with normal replacing it on the raid finder with heroic being the top level difficulty. None of these difficulties require players to operate at maximum potential and so class design/balance can be focused on what works best for all players instead of those at the top. Demand for carries on normal servers would be greatly curbed too.