10 Incredible Video Game Mechanics That SHOULD Be Everywhere (But Aren't)

Options are a great thing in any video game, and while major strides have been made for accessibility in recent years, there's still a lot of work to be done.

Accessibility can mean many things to many different people, but here are just some of the most-requested features which should absolutely be commonplace across the medium.

The Last of Us Part II has proven itself to be a shining beacon for accessible gameplay, touting over 60 different settings allowing players to fine-tune gameplay down to the most granular degree.

From including visual and aural cues to remapping the entire control scheme, mitigating motion sickness, tweaking the difficulty of every facet of gameplay and so on, Naughty Dog took accessibility seriously enough that blind gamers are able to beat the entire game without assistance.

Obviously Naughty Dog is one of the biggest AAA studios on the planet with considerably greater resources at their disposal than, say, a five-person indie developer, but there's no real reason why other mega-budget AAA titles don't rock the same level of accessibility.

And even in more basic terms, every single video game, no matter the project size, should include features like a scalable interface and selectable text sizes, especially with so many people playing handheld on Switch and Steam Deck these days.

Elsewhere, make subtitles the default option if you're going to make players sit through a lengthy cinematic before giving them access to the options menu, and let players adjust the various levels of the sound mix independently.

Allowing players to define gameplay parameters to reflect their own abilities should be a priority for anybody making games these days, and we're just going to say it - yes, SoulsBourne games aren't exempt from this.

Nobody's taking anything away from the hardcore set simply by giving a larger swath of players options to play the game however they wish.