Submitted 6 months ago by Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net to games@lemmy.world
What are some things that just get under your skin about games?
For me, it’s games that do not allow controller rebinding. I have neuropathy and my fingers don’t all work. If I can’t rebind buttons so that I have necessary moves (for example: parry) be on buttons I can reliably press the entire game becomes unplayable.
And on console, where I can’t refund a game after I downloaded it (fuck you Sony) then it really screws me over wasting what limited funds I have on games I just can’t play.
Lack of accessibility options, not unlike you.
Most games are better about this now, but subtitles, difficulty options, and the ability to turn off flashing lights are critical to the point I can’t play for long, sometimes at all without them.
In a similar vein, games that have sounds for everything. I have to play with sounds off in games I enjoy, and some sounds are used to foreshadow dangers that I end up unaware of because I can’t deal with the sound of crickets or bees or a random humming that are always present. (Shout out to Satisfactory for the incredibly granular sound control, overwhelming at first, but once it was set up it is great.)
Remapping keys. I have function (and not always voluntary) but no feeling in part of my left hand, and an essential tremor that appears randomly. I need to disable some keys because I will find my character suddenly crouching/running/attacking or whatever at really inconvenient times, and with some games the controls are so touchy that I can’t aim or move in a straight line.
Not colorblind, but some games have some very headache inducing colour choices, I have sympathy for those who can’t see colour A font on Colour B background.
Thank you for saying difficulty as an accessibility feature. So many people think difficulty is something inherent to a game’s design but completely miss the fact that difficulty is subjective.
Every game should have difficulty options. No exceptions.
Granular difficulty options also help. Things like being able to make the parry timings easier or harder than that rest of the difficulty.
If your difficulty presets are turning a bunch of levers at once, letting folks make their own can be very helpful.
There’s also things that aren’t often considered difficulty, but that can definitely make a game harder for some folks.
With Witcher 3 the only way I was able to play it successfully was modding it to be able to ignore a bunch of mechanics I found tedious. Things like ignoring carry weight, turning off item durability, lengthening potion duration, having items scale to my level, and hoovering up loot. Inventory management is often exhausting for me.
It’s not an easy fix this can break a game’s economy, and I think I had separate mods to reduce the impact of that.
Good games have a difficulty curve that scales, usually they just speed up level by level.
"Life is just like tetris, it just gets harder, then you die." - Mark Twain
You can't make an 'easy' mode for tetris, but you could effectively start at level minus 10 or something.
I disagree with the idea that every game should have a difficulty option. If the difficulty is there just for the sake of challenge, then difficulty options should be there because in that case it’s not all that different than setting self-imposed rules for additional difficulty. But when difficulty serves a bigger purpose I can absolutely understand keeping a level difficulty experience.
For example in ARC raiders the ARC are so dangerous that they’ve pushed people underground and going topside is this risky endeavor. But if the ARC were pushovers you get this narrative dissonance where the enemy is supposed to be so dangerous that humans can’t thrive but when you fight them they die instantly so why can’t humans thrive? ARC also pose as a balancing act to the game because if the ARC weren’t dangerous the game would just be PVP with looting. You have to take ARC seriously even if you know how to deal with them because of how easily the script can be flipped on you. ARC raiders obviously doesn’t really have difficulty options because of its multiplayer nature but it does show that difficulty can have a narrative impact and difficulty can impact how you approach the game. If the game was easier it would arguably end up as a worse experience.
And difficulty can also be used to make you feel a certain way. This is why I’ve argued against Dark Souls needing difficulty options (and to be clear, I’m talking about ONLY Dark Souls 1). There’s a reason some people call Dark Souls a cathartic experience, because that’s what the game is going for. Lordran is a world in despair. The end of an era is coming and the world has been plunged into decay. The denizens of Lordran have fallen into despair, given up and hollowed. And Dark Souls wants you to feel that. Dark Souls wants you to feel the despair and find the will to continue despite that despair, lest you become one of the hollowed people of Lordran. The game is challenging specifically to make you feel like you’re being treated unfairly, like you’re against impossible odds, like you’re supposed to fail, like there’s no point playing and just give up and never play again. Because when you eventually overcome that unfair and impossible scenario you’ve failed a dozen times all the emotional tension gets released and you achieve catharsis. If you don’t feel the failure you can’t feel the catharsis thus by making the game easier the game loses a part of what it is.
Dark Souls is not a game, Dark Souls is a piece of art. We give other art the respect to be their own thing. People accept Kafka novels are hard to read. People accept The Downward Spiral is hard to listen. People accept Requiem for a dream is hard to watch. But when Dark Souls is hard to play we complain? I say let art be art. If we want to treat games as art then every game can’t have difficulty options. Some games can, will and do use difficulty in a way that elevates their artistic vision. In my eyes denying games the tool of difficulty is to deny that games can be art.
I completely disagree. Difficulty is not an accessibility option. They are a cheap way out of fixing more complex problems, but ultimately easier difficulty just means that you won’t have to interact with the game as much to get through it. No problem if the parrying lacks clear indications when you can just take the very weak hits from the enemies instead of learning the parry system.
But for most games, it doesn’t really impact anyone if you add a difficulty slider, so game developers just do that instead of dealing with accessibility issues in their core systems.
And then there’s the souls games. These games would become objectively worse by adding a difficulty option. When overcoming impossible odds is the core principle of the game, then adding a slider to make the odds mildly inconvenient instead of impossible will actively jeopardize that very principle!
In fact there are countless stories of people with severe disabilities who found new hope in clawing through the souls games. They let go of their learned helplessness precisely because they realized that what their playing is hard and failing over and over again is an important part of the process.
That being said, the souls games do deserve some criticism in some aspects regarding accessibility. There’s a lot in the UI and feedback department that could be done to improve accessibility without having a negative impact on the game itself.
Well I think your mom only has easy mode.
No quit button or hiding it in the settings menus
No ability to rebind controls
Endless, unskippable intro videos
Taking control away to have a cutscene that is all dialogue and no action that could have just as easily been something you control as you walk and listen. Especially if it’s not even an in-engine, real-time scripted thing but a pre-rendered video that doesn’t even show your actual character as you have them dressed.
FOMO and most MTX in general.
No ping/latency stats for everyone on the server
Unskippable cutscenes absolutely need to die. Even on the first playthrough - give me the info I need in a notes section or something, but do not waste my limited time on this coil with slow “exposition.”
I usually quit those when they get too grating and move on, but it’s frustrating nonetheless.
I’d say that viewing cutscenes on your first playthrough is appreciating the artistic intent that goes behind it.
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I cannot fathom how Bethesda still can’t get this right. It can’t be difficult to just set NPC speed to match player speed.
It’s supposed to guarantee you can always catch up with them.
it just works
Aah, i think it was tie-fighter, where you could lock on and press a key to match speeds with an enemy - (albeit instantaneous only).
Maybe it was there in x-wing, but i feel like it was one of the minor qol improvements in tie-fighter that made it better.
They ported it over to X-Wing in later versions. Also, play XWVM, if you haven’t already.
I think about that surprisingly often. Also how nice would that be in real life too, not just games.
And then there are games that seamlessly matches your pace and animation with the NPC once you get close to them. cooms
Games that wont let you quit to desktop in game.
Honestly this is my favorite feature of the Steam Deck and SteamOS.
May I introduce you to my good old friend: alt+F4 😬
in old dos games "boss key" was usually ctrl+b or ESC
I never understood the point until I grew up a bit.
I’ve noticed this is especially bad in Japanese games for whatever reason.
PC Gaming market in Japan is treated like Second Class Gaming Citizens, sadly
Alaternatively, PUBG lets you quit to desktop from the in-game pause menu, and I’ve hit it accidentally so many times.
*flashbacks to The Forest pause menu having the exit game button in the same place as the back button*
Lembot_0005@lemy.lol 6 months ago
Showing a long plot-explaining intro right after start, before I have a chance to get to “options” and set the resolution, subtitles, etc. I also “love” unskippable short logo videos at start. And a few screens with only “press any button to continue”.
Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net 6 months ago
Unskipable splash screens are the worst.
DesolateMood@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
Luckily, at least in my experience, most of those are just a .mkv that you can either rename or delete and the game will just skip it entirely. Unfortunately that can’t be done on consoles