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General discussionGreat and obvious, but rare, game features(102 posts)(102 posts)
(102 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted September 23, 2015
Speaking about saving anywhere, anyone tried DOSBOX side build which allows savestates? Can say anything good or bad about it?
Posted September 23, 2015
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adaliabooks: Bravely Default on the 3DS has both of these. You can get a skill with one of the classes which gives you a tally of chests in the current map (so useful, I hate searching every nook and cranny of a map only to find I've got everything ten minutes ago...)
And you can turn encounter rate (and difficulty I think, been a while since I played it now) up and down, so if you're grinding for experience you can play lots of really hard battles or if you're running through an area you've already beaten, half dead or looking for items you can turn them off entirely.
I agree as the older I get I find that I want to spend less time grinding for levels in an jrpg. Therefore difficulty sliders make these kinds of games more fun for me when I'm pressed for time and want to invest in the narrative.

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dtgreene: Here's one feature I think should be more common: A mode that removes all cutscenes, allowing one to focus solely on the gameplay.
This is also a really good point. In contrast to my above comment, I'm also tired of how many games force a story on you via unnecessary dialogue or overly long cutscenes. Case in Point: Freedom Planet. The adventure mode is an absolute bore with a garbage story that often bogs down the fun gameplay. Luckily, the developers included a classic arcade mode to allow players to skip the story and make the game closer to a 16bit platformer (as opposed to the goofy Sonic-esque fanfic presented in the adventure mode).
Posted September 23, 2015
In JRPGs, sometimes a character leaves your group in a story cutscene, never to join your party again, taking all of the cool items with them that they have currently equipped. Your only choice here is to either go with it or to reload your last savegame, replaying the last 20 minutes up to this point and stripping the character of their stuff beforehand. The solution would be so simple: Automatically open the character menu when a character leaves the party and allow me to strip the parting character of everything I might still use. And if they should return to the group, I can simply reequip them.
Post edited September 23, 2015 by Falkenherz
Posted September 23, 2015
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Falkenherz: In JRPGs, sometimes a character leaves your group in a story cutscene, never to join your party again, taking all of the cool items with them that they have currently equipped. Your only choice here is to either go with it or to reload your last savegame, replaying the last 20 minutes up to this point and stripping the character of their stuff beforehand. The solution would be so simple: Automatically open the character menu when a character leaves the party and allow me to strip the parting character of everything I might still use. And if they should return to the group, I can simply reequip them.
This annoys the hell out of me. Even if it's only temporary and they do come back, when they take your really great armour and sword with them right before a battle or something...
I like it when they just auto unequip everything when a character leaves your party, but too few games seem to do this...
Posted September 23, 2015
I'll chime in with three things. I'm not sure how 'rare' they are, but they aren't common; or are becomming less-common in newer games I think:

* Save anywhere. Yep, it's been mentioned ITT, and I also think it's an important one.

* Pause and give orders in real-time strategy games. My mind seems to be getting slower as I get older lol, and pause/give orders allows me to enjoy real-time strategy games I otherwise would have to pass on.

* Complete quests before acquiring them. I love how the Gothics and Risens you can just be out exploring and if you do something that would complete a quest you don't yet have - it adds it to your journal and marks it completed. You can still go back, and (for example), tell the quest giver NPC "I've already killed the wampus' and get the quest 'reward' and usually a bit more XP.
Posted September 23, 2015
Three more, concerning inventory management.

#1: A tabbed inventory. Being able to select a specific category item is time saving and makes large inventories manageable.

#2: You can't throw away key items. In Outcast, I quit playing because I threw away a quest item by accident.

#3: Item descriptions. Not knowing what an item does can be very annoying. Looking at Outcast again...
Posted September 23, 2015
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Charon121: Regarding saving, I think it's shameful that games still have the simplest quicksave sytem in this time and age. It works by saving your game to always the same file when you press the quicksave key. What sometimes happens is that you accidentally save in an unwinnable state (e.g. an enemy behind your back just about to strike you when you're already at low health), and then you have to rever to the last hard save or autosave.

This could simply be avoided by programming the game to use multiple quicksave files, saving only to the oldest one each time you press the quicksave key. That way you always have another fairly recent quicksave to revert to in case of trouble. Some games have implemented it, but I can't remember which ones; they're so rare. Still, such a simple thing to program, yet almost entirely unused.
All King's bounty games available on GoG do this. No mess off 200+ save games like in witcher 1 - they rotate quicksave in 3 slots, and even reorder them by time saved when you are trying to load. I almost didn't use manual save with them. Quite rare and useful feature indeed. I miss it in almost every other game.
Posted September 23, 2015
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Falkenherz: In JRPGs, sometimes a character leaves your group in a story cutscene, never to join your party again, taking all of the cool items with them that they have currently equipped. Your only choice here is to either go with it or to reload your last savegame, replaying the last 20 minutes up to this point and stripping the character of their stuff beforehand. The solution would be so simple: Automatically open the character menu when a character leaves the party and allow me to strip the parting character of everything I might still use. And if they should return to the group, I can simply reequip them.
Or, alternatively, automatically unequip the character. Final Fantasy 5 and 6 do this, and 7 partially does this (materia and I believe accessories are unequipped), but 2 and 4 do not. (1 and 3 avoid the situation entirely).

Even better, design the game so that nobody leaves the party at all.

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Charon121: Regarding saving, I think it's shameful that games still have the simplest quicksave sytem in this time and age. It works by saving your game to always the same file when you press the quicksave key. What sometimes happens is that you accidentally save in an unwinnable state (e.g. an enemy behind your back just about to strike you when you're already at low health), and then you have to rever to the last hard save or autosave.

This could simply be avoided by programming the game to use multiple quicksave files, saving only to the oldest one each time you press the quicksave key. That way you always have another fairly recent quicksave to revert to in case of trouble. Some games have implemented it, but I can't remember which ones; they're so rare. Still, such a simple thing to program, yet almost entirely unused.
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huan: All King's bounty games available on GoG do this. No mess off 200+ save games like in witcher 1 - they rotate quicksave in 3 slots, and even reorder them by time saved when you are trying to load. I almost didn't use manual save with them. Quite rare and useful feature indeed. I miss it in almost every other game.
I believe Wizardry 8 also does this.
Post edited September 23, 2015 by dtgreene
Posted September 23, 2015
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HereForTheBeer: And yes, I do realize that those two things are somewhat incompatible: skip-a-mission and carryover units.
Thanks! I have heard of Warzone 2100 before, but it got overlooked. But it sounds like it might be right up my street. Downloading...

As for skip a mission, it might be a bit less necessary in the age of Youtube walkthroughs even for really old games. But yeah, there are some games that could definitely use it. You could fail missions in Earth 2150. It had such a singular focus (gather resources to escape the planet's demise) that individual missions didn't matter so much. There were enough missions to make the main objective easy enough to meet. But naturally they got harder as the planet makes its way towards the Sun.
Posted September 23, 2015
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Wishbone: I'm a family man. My wife or son may need my help with something very quickly, the cat may knock something over, requiring quick action, lots of other things can happen while I'm playing a game.
That's what put me off in The Wolf Among Us when I tried it. A nice thing about adventure games is that they're static: you put them aside, nothing happens. So sure, I get annoyed at missing some dialogue or cutscene, but The Wolf Among Us takes it too far by making"wait too long" an actual dialogue response.
Posted September 23, 2015
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Fortunately not that rare (but becoming less common as the years progress), but the ability to pause the game. (Exception: Games that are strictly turn based (to the point of not even tracking the time player) can do without this feature.)
Posted September 24, 2015
One thing I sorely miss in recent open world RPGs is the ability to place custom notes on the map. Ultima Underworld could do it, System Shock, Morrowind...

Why not Skyrim or The Witcher 3 (where it would be tremendously useful)?

Being "married with children" I heartily agree on "pause any time", especially in cutscenes. I don't know what's so difficult about it. Speaking of Witcher 3, it doesn't have a key to pause them, but at least they stop when the game loses focus (Alt-Tab).

That's another thing - the game should stop if focus is lost. Sometimes background stuff in Windows steals focus - totally frustrating hearing your character die while you are busy switching back to the game.

One thing Witcher 2 and 3 do right but many other games don't support is seamless controller switching. You can play the game with mouse+keys for the most part but grab the controller and simply play on if you're more comfortable with it during i.e. arm wrestling in Witcher 2 or horse races in 3. Works superb - should be like this more often.
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Sabin_Stargem: #1: A tabbed inventory. Being able to select a specific category item is time saving and makes large inventories manageable.
Agreed, and additionally lots of sorting options:
- recently aquired
- power (i.e. damage, armour rating)
- type (ranged, melee)
- value/weight ratio (for selling loot)

SkyUI for Skyrim is pretty good in this regard.
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timppu: I generally think the same, but then for some reason I was never expecting games like Wing Commander 1-5, Freespace 1-2, X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Need for Speed, Red Baron etc. to let me save during the missions. Somehow I was fine with the idea that if If fail at any point of a mission or race or level, I have to replay it all over. Not sure why I am ready to give such a pass for these games, but not for e.g. FPS or RTS games.
Although it would be nice to have a suspend save for simulations or racing games - a few of the missions or races can be rather long and when life gets in the way...
Operation Flashpoint handled it this way. Save on exit, and load and delete save on continue.
Post edited September 24, 2015 by toxicTom
Posted September 25, 2015
ESDF as default in FPS games.
Proper cheats built in so one doesn't need to run off looking up things such as little endian hex editing.
Posted September 25, 2015
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Navagon: Unit carryover in RTS games. RTS games often have units that gain experience from battles and can become quite powerful by the end of the mission. So why then start over from scratch each and every mission with inexperienced units. This is further compounded when you can actually research and design units.

Earth 2150 has both the R&Ded units and experience so thankfully it also has unit carry over to help get the most out of your creations. I really wish more RTS were like that.

Witcher 2 had a 'remove annoying QTEs' option. Sure, it's not as good as having that as the default, but at least having the option felt inspired.

You are Empty had the ability to destroy health kits. This meant that really pyrotechnic battles may go in your favour faster, but leave you with little chance of patching yourself up afterwards. So being a bit careful pays off. More games need destroyable pickups like that.
YES on the RTS unit carry-over. I loved renaming my guys in Myth and leveling them up.

Also, THANK YOU! I had no idea I could turn them off in W2! Next time I find a QTE I'm having trouble with, I'll turn them off. I don't mind QTEs, but I hate when they're irritatingly tricky to pull off. The first major boss had one that I spent probably an hour on b/c it is very touchy about how long and when a button had to be pressed.
Posted September 25, 2015
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toxicTom: One thing Witcher 2 and 3 do right but many other games don't support is seamless controller switching. You can play the game with mouse+keys for the most part but grab the controller and simply play on if you're more comfortable with it during i.e. arm wrestling in Witcher 2 or horse races in 3. Works superb - should be like this more often.
Good call. Most controller-enabled games are like this. In extreme cases they require restart to activate/deactivate controller (Ys series). I can live with that, binding two input devices at once is some additional work and programmers didn't think of that. What I can't wrap my head around as a programmer myself is when the game DOES detect that you touched the controller, but instead of switching it only pops up a message that basically says "go to input settings menu hidden several levels deep if you want to activate your controller". The same in reverse if you start with controller but touch keyboard controls. (Victor Vran I think).
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionGreat and obvious, but rare, game features(102 posts)(102 posts)
(102 posts)