One other one:
* I prefer it if games *don't* track time played.

Nope.

Thought it would be more mainstream, but turned out it wasn't:

Games' mininum requirements should make them playable on onboard GPUs such as Intel UHD 620.

Agreed.

(Also, maybe go back as far as the HD 4000 series. (Yes, even though 4000 > 620, the 620 is more recent than the 4000. What?)

Too many mods is a turnoff.

Hello Breja and everyone else!

I would even go further, adding that not every game needs RPG (roleplaying) elements, experience points and corresponding stat-increases!

Recently, I finished playing "Alan Wake" for the first time, and think it captures not only a great atmosphere but also both the dread of the unrelenting enemy and the relief when stumbling over the next weapon, which is substantially better than the simple revolver (pistol). The game often provides some challenging choices on the loadout, should I carry the stronger hunting rifle or two-barreled shotgun with less ammunition or the faster firing and spreading pump action shotgun? Even the most powerful weapon in the game, the flare gun, has its downsides besides the limited ammunition for it - its devastating effect can be nullified in the shadow of nearby obstacles.

Another example for my argument can be found in the "Silent Hunter" series of submarine simulators. Without doubt, the third installment was a huge improvement overall in simulation detail and its graphics.
But the original release version of "Silent Hunter III" came only with boring patroling missions (the gold version added individual scripted missions selectable from the beginning) and you now had to deal with the management aspect of the crew including individual experience points, fatigue and resting hours.
I want to command a submarine as in "Silent Hunter II" and not 'babysit' each crew member!

And I am tired of game content (e.g. abilities or features) or unit/item performances artificially being locked away by stat-increase requriements.

Kind regards,
foxgog

I'll go further - I almost never use mods at all. They tend to be a bother to get to work right, and mostly deal with stuff I either don't care much about (like graphics improvements - I'm fine with playing older games with their original graphics, in fact I usually prefer it), or some crap that may sound amusing but gets old fast. Of course there are useful exception (like getting back the gold filter for Deus Ex Human Revolution Director's Cut), but 99,9% of the modding scene I just ignore.

I'd argue that not every RPG needs those mechanics. Furthermore, while those mechanics are often associated with the RPG genre, I don't consider them to be genre-defining.

(The way I define RPG, the main requirement is that the success of the character's action needs to depend on the character's abilities, not the player's. Such a thing would be hard to do without stats, but stat growth isn't required for this to work.)

I'm Soviet, I don't really get "native English" accents. Some manners of speaking are hard to parse, but they don't map to broader groups (English / Scottish / South African / Australian / etc). I can tell when the same person is talking with different accents back to back, I can't tell when different people are talking with the "same" accent.

My issue with voice acting is the actors ham it up to levels unbecoming of even cartoon villains. I know the constraints of producing a videogame (ordering lines then having to mix and match them as plans change, having to resort to remote work) aren't to blame, because the same issues also plague more expensive productions of non-interactive content.

I've no idea how it caught on. I suspect it comes from theater. Maybe it's one of the many examples of the madness of crowds, like, shitty actors ham it up, shitty prospective actors think this is how voice acting is supposed to be, shitty directors decide to follow suit so they have the excuse of doing everything "by the book" when taken to task by shitty producers. Some of these assholes have celebrity cults built around them. They lay claim to characters, even though they just badly read the lines someone else wrote and a different someone else translated.

Voice acting sucks. Dubs suck. I'm not against either on principle, but I wish people would come to their senses and take a serious look at the state of the industry. If you're an indie developer who needs voices, put a mic on yourself for a day and listen to yourself talking, then hire some normal people and direct them, or read your own script voiceover-style.

I don't understand this complaint. I'm Soviet. I play in English. I think that, especially for people who don't know a foreign language well, written language is easier to understand than speech. Not having games translated to your language is one more reason to favor subs.

Gotta admit I played it in 2011 and don't remember much. But yes, some games have to have spoken audio signals by design. It's still a waste to hire "professionals" to ham it up, with the possible exception of hiring women to play children (if you don't have any of your own, because children are a pain to hire).

Text typing sound has been around longer than voice acting in games. It's good when it's used well (most recent masterpiece: Loop Hero), but the text has to be part of the narration, think the opening crawl in Star Wars. Trying to increase the readability of filler text dumps (e.g. logs) with text typing makes everything worse.

Loop Hero is great. Papers, Please is garbage. Undertale is garbage. Visual novels (which often use text typing) are all over the place. Higurashi is the only visual novel I know which benefits from voice acting, it helps to somewhat humanize the terrible writing.

Some games use sound effects (Amanita) or glossolalia (Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons) instead of meaningful speech, and I usually hate those.

Didn't play it, but I played La-Mulana, which is awesome.

Many games have stories / premises with only a tenuous connection to the basic mechanics of gameplay (puzzles, platformers, shoot-them-ups) but are nevertheless an integral part of what makes the game awesome.

And then there are games with log entries / journal pages found throughout the game which are supposed to reveal the "deep" backstory and "intricate" lore, and I despise most of those. SCP should've driven the final nails into the coffin of this shit, but no, instead of realizing how boring logs are, everyone thought, hell yes, an easy way to pad wordcount!

Great games can have no text, little text, a lot of optional text, a lot of mandatory text. Voice acting is still a detriment: it prevents games which'd benefit from a lot of text from having as much as they need, and it gets in the way of editing.

I generally don't like artsy "make of it what you will" games. Tengami's problem isn't the lack of voices, it's the lack of everything else including meaning. Games without words are habitual offenders, but nothing is really safe: there exist text-only games which are nevertheless devoid of meaning.

In contrast, many Zachtronics games have great motivating stories, hardcore puzzles, no voices, and music that's technically "relaxing" in a game which is decidedly not. Teslagrad has a solid story, relaxing (except boss battles) music and no text, it's great.

I kind of can see the idea here; if you're having to fix the game the developers made, one could see it as docking points against them.

For example, Skyrim is a shit game potentally saved by a plethora of mods.

Yeah... I heard that before and I didn't agree with it that time either.

Does my edit help? :B

Is this your favorite Skyrim mod? https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/53938

Never played Skyrim (since it's not yet had a proper PC release), but Oblivion was a skeleton of a game that was made playable by giant piles of mods. Not good, just playable.

But in general I'm rather pro-mod. However I tend to play games rather exhaustively before I mod them. Except in cases like Oblivion where it was unplayble without. Mods bring a lot of extra life to great games. Modding mediocre games is usually not worth the effort. But modding an already great game often makes it even better.

(I played Oblivion because EVERYONE in my social circles raved about Morrowind and I "meh"ed on it and then again with Oblivion and they insisted I play it more. So I did 100% of it (before Shivering Isles, but with all the original small DLCs)... and it was a snorefest with just a few scant pleasant moments.)

I literally have owned 0 copies of Skyrim and consider it a badge of honor.

Howdy Starmaker,

I haven't played Loop Hero, La-Mulana and Zachtronics games. I will try them in the near future thanks to your opinion, except Higurashi: VNovels are not for me.

I bought Brothers: a Tale of Two Sons months ago but haven't played it yet. I did a 20min gameplay on Android and yeah, the glossolalia wasn't a pleasure (thanks for the term!) but it got a second priority due the game mechanics, the nice graphics and performance to be Android. Anyway, to fully enjoy it I decided to stop playing there and do it on PC, but is still pending...