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Quality of life features you wish were present in more games

Deft Beck

Member
"Quality of life" in the context of video games refers to features or aspects of game design that ensure that players have a smooth gameplay experience and do not get burnt out as fast.

As an example, I liked the idea of the journal in Pokemon Fire Red/Leaf Green, which chronicled whatever you were doing and then showed you this upon reloading your save. This allowed the player to pick up where they left off right away, instead of having them remember what they were doing, in case they had not played in a while. In larger RPGs, this would be a great QOL feature.

For RPGs centered around grinding for levels, it might be interesting to see an RPG with an auto-grinding feature. So, in lieu of grinding, you could pay in-game currency and expend in-game time to run on a treadmill or train in a gym to gain levels. Or, if this seems like it is antithetic to actually playing the game, perhaps it does not distribute skill points or unlock skills (ala Pokemon's daycare feature).

Of course, there are many games which allow players to save time by paying real-life currency to speed up a process or unlock content right away. But that seems like it would break the immersion of the game and could lead to more egregious practices of exploitation towards players with tendencies to overspend on these sorts of purchases. By having it be contained within the game world, it would be less exploitative.

What sort of quality of life features do you wish were present in more games?
 
The first thing I imagined when reading the title is Wii games asking you to take a break, LOL.

As an example, I liked the idea of the journal in Pokemon Fire Red/Leaf Green, which chronicled whatever you were doing and then showed you this upon reloading your save. This allowed the player to pick up where they left off right away, instead of having them remember what they were doing, in case they had not played in a while. In larger RPGs, this would be a great QOL feature.

I liked that in Zelda: Skyward Sword.

For RPGs centered around grinding for levels, it might be interesting to see an RPG with an auto-grinding feature. So, in lieu of grinding, you could pay in-game currency and expend in-game time to run on a treadmill or train in a gym to gain levels. Or, if this seems like it is antithetic to actually playing the game, perhaps it does not distribute skill points or unlock skills (ala Pokemon's daycare feature).

I've played Puzzle & Dragons Z recently, and that game has quite cool auto-grinding. Basically, if you receive an egg, you can either hatch a dragon from it or use it to boost your existing dragon.
 
- Auto-win battles when over-levelled in RPGs, particularly in "random encounter" style RPGs.
- Reorderable lists in UIs and menus (put most commonly used options where you want them at the top)
- Font scaling / resizing options(even just between 'big' and 'small')
- 'auto-buy' options (in any game where visiting a shop is a regular occurence; set up buy and sell orders so selling vendor trash and buying whatever it is you regularly buy as a top up is a one click action)
 

PlimpyD

Neo Member
Bravely Default gave the player the ability to change the difficulty on the fly with xp tied in. So the higher you set it the more xp you gain.

I found this a really helpful tool that basically takes the grind out when you don't really need. Well at least it significantly reduces it anyway. Was a nice touch.
 

Deft Beck

Member
Bravely Default gave the player the ability to change the difficulty on the fly with xp tied in. So the higher you set it the more xp you gain.

I found this a really helpful tool that basically takes the grind out when you don't really need. Well at least it significantly reduces it anyway. Was a nice touch.

This feature was also present in The World Ends With You. I admit that I used it to cheese the final boss, lol.
 
As an example, I liked the idea of the journal in Pokemon Fire Red/Leaf Green, which chronicled whatever you were doing and then showed you this upon reloading your save. This allowed the player to pick up where they left off right away, instead of having them remember what they were doing, in case they had not played in a while. In larger RPGs, this would be a great QOL feature.

Oh man i wish all games had something like this, i just started up VLR again and im completely lost at whats going on.
 

Sir TapTap

Member
Pause in cutscenes, AND a skip function. Start should always pause, never skip. A second button press after pausing will skip.

Fast travel right to the next relevant cutscene in Freedom Wars was fantastic, and honestly if a JRPG isn't going to have a world map it might as well have a big ol menu based map like Neptunia for instant traversal. Still miss my FF4-9 style world maps but at least make it easy on me.

VN style dialog controls, especially for RPGs. Skip, auto advance, pause, skip already-read dialogs, backlog. So good. Neptunia even lets you view previously seen dialogs, not as a text backlog but just watch the whole scene as it plays normally.

Also, basically everything in Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory 2's NG+ should be standard across JRPG NG+: lets you keep or discard your levels, lets you keep characters (ignoring story addition/removal of characters entirely), turn off tutorials, WALK FASTER, turns off some annoying features like random battles on the world map.

Checkpoints and/or a save-anywhere system. Sometimes I have to leave NOW and I want to know that less than 15 minutes will be gone.

Camera/sound options. Invert camera, mute music but keep voices/sound effects, crap like that.

Option to skip attack animations. Disgaea is godly at this and turns SRPG fights into amazingly tight sequences of input queuing and results. Yet another shout out to Neptunia for doing the same, they have a surprising number of quality of life features.

Auto-battle is nice, but I actually prefer just having skip attack animations as long as it makes the battle snappy enough (Disgaea makes it snappy enough), and if your game is grind heavy, include specially designed grind spots. Disgaea doesn't get enough credit for this--yes there is grinding, but there are spots where you can gain hundreds or thousands of levels in a single attack. Way different from grinding by mashing X for 10 hours on a normal monster. I'm looking at you, Tales Of.

On the PC side:
Controller support
Fullscreen Windowed mode
DON'T CRASH IF I ALT TAB YOU FILTHY SON OF A
Background input (BG input + gamepad + fullscreen windowed is a dream for multitaskers)
Steam cloud holy shit please
Also, in Steam "full controller support" is a huge improvement, because it shows up in Big Picture Mode and there's no mouse required for launchers and stuff. Everyone should aim for this if they have gamepad controls.
 

Eyeh4wk

Member
Quicksave anywhere, because sometimes I dont have the time to play another 30 min. just to go to a save point.
 

Rambler

Member
Every fighting game should let you check and edit your controls at the character select screen like in VF5FS. Fuck button checks.
 
Being able to play (and pause/stop/rewind) audio logs during normal gameplay, especially in open-world games. MGS: Ground Zeroes had it and that was fantastic — the natural sound of the recordings was great too (they didn't only contain the most pertinent information, had a believable amount of dead air, etc.).


On a similar note, for games with character profiles, it would be great if they could be read aloud while you're playing the game. In the Batman games, it'd be cool if there was a computer voice that could read those while you're gliding/running/driving around.
 

Fuu

Formerly Alaluef (not Aladuf)
Temp saving in every game. The ones you can make everywhere that disappear after you load.

Doesn't break the game and respects the fact that the player might want/need to stop playing at any given moment.
 

Seanspeed

Banned
'HUD On/Off' master toggle.

Toggling hud elements off. So many good looking games these days just have ridiculous screen real estate dedicated to huds.

Or at least fading ones based on relevance.

And even a combo of both. For instance, I love that Witcher 3 lets you toggle things off, but take for instance, buffs and debuffs. If you use a decoction, you're basically going to have ugly icons in the middle of your screen all the time. I'd love an option to have like. the buffs stay up if they're under a minute left, and anything longer pops up briefly every like 10 percent of its' time span.
Yes, and all of this.
 

Corpekata

Banned
Toggling hud elements off. So many good looking games these days just have ridiculous screen real estate dedicated to huds.

Or at least fading ones based on relevance.

And even a combo of both. For instance, I love that Witcher 3 lets you toggle things off, but take for instance, buffs and debuffs. If you use a decoction, you're basically going to have ugly icons in the middle of your screen all the time. I'd love an option to have like. the buffs stay up if they're under a minute left, and anything longer pops up briefly every like 10 percent of its' time span.
 

ag-my001

Member
Two things for RPGs from Chrono Cross:

1) The star system. Continual progress instead of grinding for levels. You still need to tweak equipment and element spells, but you'll never be over or under levels.

2) Auto healing after battle. If a healing spell was accessible at the end of a fight, it's automatically used on the party. No more digging through menus just to top off the party.
 

spliced

Member
TL;DR gaming. Let me skip all story related stuff and just give me notes telling me what I need to know.

Auto pick up loot dropped off enemies.
 
Any time there is a load or a menu is slow and unresponsive. Assassin's Creed games are awful at this with little delays between everything but if I remember right The Force Unleashed had a separate lengthy load just to upgrade your character. How is that necessary?

Make a less complicated menu so I can use it faster.

Arkham Knight has a fantastic menu that you can fly through and do whatever you need to do in seconds.
 

LaserHawk

Member
When I press "down" at the bottom of a menu and it takes me to the top of the menu. And vice versa for pressing "up" at the top of the menu. I know it's simple, but it's something I really like to have in my menus.
 
I want that Sackboy suicide thing in every game. Having played Lego Jurassic World exclusively these past few weeks and getting stuck behind objects or in infinite falling in water loops, it'd be nice to reset myself.

And something to fix progression blocking glitches mid-level instead of restarting from the beginning. Like reset last objective or something.
 
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