Incline Option Menu Features that you wish more games would impliment

[IncendiaryDevice]

So I'm playing an old game at the moment. 1999 it was made. And while pressing all the buttons I discovered some real incline options you can use in the game, no modding required:

The first:

[Sorry about the screenshots. Here's me going on about incline features & I can find no way to get the game to let me take any screenshots of it. Decline! Ctrl + Prt Scr gives a black screen, as does Shift + P. There's no options for windowed mode and in full screen the Windows button doesn't bring up Windows to enable activating the snipping tool]

This option screen allows you to turn off cut-scenes:

The first list of in-game actions relate to any audio voiceovers & there's a button to allow you to turn all those off. But those are great, they don't stop play and the guy has a great voice "Your people are running low on alcohol" would make for a great meme. The second list of in-game features however are the cutscenes & you can choose to simply turn them all off. My god but this was a heaven sent option, wow, a game which just said "yeah, cut-scenes can suck can't they, here, have a button to turn them off". So, you want to hear the cutscene play out, but you just want to keep playing while it talks instead of cutting away to a cutscene that has to be either stopped entirely or watched slowly to completion? Hey, there can be an option for that!

Now, why can't all games have that option!

Second:

In the music options screen it lists all the pieces of music that get cycled throughout the game. Each one can be turned off and on at your leisure. Don't like one of the tracks? Gone. Want to hear the same one over and over for a bit? You can do that! How awesome is that!

Now why can't all games have that option!


Have you noticed any incline options menu features drift by the wayside over the years? Are there any that you'd love to see in a game that have no real excuse not to be in the game's options?

 

[HarveyBirdman]

Nier automata's integration of the settings as part of gameplay is cool.

 

[SecondAmendment]

Re-mapping controls is the one feature that needs to be in every game, unless there is a damn good reason to have them fixed. Most of the time it seems like laziness when this feature is missing. I want it in PC and console games. Ever since the SNES Genesis we've had enough buttons to make it worthwhile to change which button does what. PC has all the buttons, so custom controls seems a given.

Yet... many games from F to AAA omit this customization option. Pure decline.

 

[what am i doing]

Detailed difficulty settings that let you set up different aspects of the game such as damage enemies deal, how accurate enemies are, how fast enemies are, how many enemies, whether to limit enemies or let them spawn continuously, how alert enemies are, etc.

EYE: Divine Cybermancy has all of these and it lets you greatly customize the experience so it can be an easy horde shooter or a more stealthy game with a few deadly enemies where you can die very fast if not careful, or you can crank everything up for a wild ride.

A lot of games with nice combat systems don't provide enough enemies. Dark Messiah comes to mind. Having a gameplay setting for more enemies would be nice. Having more detailed difficulty settings would be nice too. In Dark Messiah the Hardcore difficulty makes enemies suitably deadly but also bullet sponges. You can adjust the difficulty settings so that both you and the enemies are quite vulnerable to damage and it works a lot better. That sort of thing should be in the menu and not need messing with config files.

Part of the problem here is that the faggy "achievement culture" demands games have standardized difficulties rather than leaving it up to the player to fine tune. So that achievements (cancer) will have standardized meaning.

 

[Wunderbar]

I see people asking for customisable difficulty everywhere, and i can't disagree more.

There should be just two difficulty settings: normal (the way game was meant to be played) and hard (for people who beaten the game and want some extra challenge). Well, maybe add a third, "easy" option, for inexperienced people.

Customizing stuff like AI, damage, accuracy, etc before starting the game is pointless, since you haven't played actual game yet. Customizing it after playing a bit is again pointless. Game is too difficult? It is either you suck and need to git gud, or the game is hard by design, and by stripping away its hardcore parts you're not getting the intended experience.

 

[Avonaeon]

You could do both; Present difficulty presets (Easy, Normal, Hard) when selecting a new game, but have more advanced difficulty options under options.

 

[what am i doing]

Customizing it after playing a bit is again pointless.

That's pretty idiotic, to be honest. You've never replayed a game and decided you want an extra challenge?

 

[soulburner]

Game options I would like to see:

- allow to choose between first person and third person view, like in GTAV or The Elder Scrolls series. If the combat system is designed around third person, it may switch to it whenever combat starts or the weapon is readied

- in first person games, let me choose weapon placement on screen. Doom 2016 did it quite nice allowing to put the weapons in the screen center, like in old school FPSs

 

[HansDampf]

Disable mouse acceleration without having to edit ini files.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

assassin's creed origins graphics menu

Spoiler

 

[Master]

Uninstall option would be nice.

 

[DraQ]

This option screen allows you to turn off cut-scenes

Cutscenes are either integral part of the game or completely superfluous crap.

In the former case being able to turn them off makes no sense, conversely in the latter case you shouldn't be able to turn them on.
Advocating for anything else is pure decline and mushy brained crap - what's next? Pure story mode bypassing all gameplay?

(Thread sucks, OP is a flaming faggot)

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

This option screen allows you to turn off cut-scenes

Cutscenes are either integral part of the game or completely superfluous crap.

I never had you down as a retadred catchphrase peddler, so this response comes as quite a surprise.

Let's look at a couple of actual examples rather than just spouting retadred rhetoric. In Civilisation 2, when you complete a Great Wonder, you witness a little cut-scene. This is a joyous example of a cut-scene that also provides a gameplay element in that it represents the end-moment of a particular short-term goal that may have involved a lot of very involved concentration. The cut-scene is the release valve. That moment when you can take your hand away from the mouse and fist-pump before sitting back and taking in your moment. When Civ 3 was released one of the first complaints was that Great Wonder completion did NOT have these little cut-scenes. However, if you're playing Civ 2 for the umpteenth time that week & you're so efficient and quick at the process & you're no longer pumped for a moment you know you're going to get, then having that option to just skip them this game would be advantageous to timely play.

And you can apply this to cRPGs as well. While some games think it's actually a thing to waste your time with a cut-scene every time you talk to someone new or walk into a new room/location, that's not how cut-scenes are used effectively in cRPGs. What you want, like the Civ 2 example, is for the cut-scene to come at that specific pivotal moment, that moment when it involves the player having that moment to sit back and take in the moment, usually goal-related, such as arriving at the important Boss. And in the same regards, these cut-scenes add a certain gravitas to the moment that mark these moments out as being important moments in the game that are lessened by not having their own cut-scene, but, again, upon replays are not fulfilling this requirement and should be turned off while still being able to hear the Boss give you their speech, but this time as you're cutting them in two etc.

 

[DraQ]

Civilisation 2

Well, I was thinking more about somewhat defined plot-based games like RPGs, FPSes, some strategies and RTSes (Myth, Homeworld, SC), etc.

And you can apply this to cRPGs as well. While some games think it's actually a thing to waste your time with a cut-scene every time you talk to someone new or walk into a new room/location, that's not how cut-scenes are used effectively in cRPGs. What you want, like the Civ 2 example, is for the cut-scene to come at that specific pivotal moment, that moment when it involves the player having that moment to sit back and take in the moment, usually goal-related, such as arriving at the important Boss. And in the same regards, these cut-scenes add a certain gravitas to the moment that mark these moments out as being important moments in the game that are lessened by not having their own cut-scene, but, again, upon replays are not fulfilling this requirement and should be turned off while still being able to hear the Boss give you their speech, but this time as you're cutting them in two etc.

And that's what "skip cutscene" button is for and the reason why it should always be available unless there are strong technical reasons against it (Anachronox even incorporated "fast forward" function for both cutscenes and gameplay after a patch).

Bonus point: If you complain about having to click "skip cutscene" too much, chances are your game has too many fucking cutscenes to begin with, so cut this shit out.

 

[Avonaeon]

I get the idea for a skip cutscene option in say a singleplayer fps you've played before. At least ones where the cutscenes play out the same no matter what.