10 Obvious Features We Can't Believe All Games DON'T HAVE
These features need to be industry standard already.
It's truly incredible to see the leaps and bounds that gaming as an art form has made over the years, and while modern gaming is basically an embarrassment of riches, it's also fair to say that the medium as a whole is lagging behind in a few key areas.
Sometimes we'll be playing an otherwise great game and be left agape that it's actually missing a most basic quality-of-life feature, and depressingly, it's an all-too-common realisation across gaming.
Very few games are packed to the gills with all the fantastically pro-consumer features players would love to see, and if we're lucky, the developer might patch some in later.
But these 10 features in particular are so beneficial to the experience of basically any game that it's baffling they aren't ubiquitously in use throughout the medium.
From basic accessibility options to more detailed - yet still relatively straight-forward - settings that let players tailor their own experience. these features should be in basically all games.
As advanced as modern games are, they can often overlook those simple grace notes which nevertheless open up the experience to so many more players...
10. Pause Cutscenes
It's truly maddening that, in the year of our lord 2024, there are still video games being released that won't allow you to pause cutscenes.
Once upon a time players who needed to run to the bathroom or, y'know, deal with real life in the middle of a cutscene were all out of luck, though by the late 2000s, games such as Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots popularised the trend of pausable cutscenes.
Today it seems laughable to even consider the prospect of a non-online game that won't let you pause cinematics, and yet, it's far from a ubiquitous feature across the medium.
Perhaps the most infamous recent example is Marvel's Midnight Suns, which launched without the ability to pause its cutscenes, and almost two years on from its release, it hasn't even been patched in.
While there are mechanical considerations which make the ability to have full control over cutscenes a more daunting task for developers, the industry cracked pausing them over 15 years ago.
How is this not an accepted industry-wide standard nowadays?