It’s 2019, These 5 Features Should Be in Every Video Game By Now

Skippable Cutscenes

I want you to raise your hand if you’ve ever been victimized by unskippable cutscenes in video games.

I want you to raise your hand if you’ve ever lost a boss battle only to be forced to watch a cutscene over and over and over again before you could get back into the action. I want you to raise your hand if unskippable cutscenes have messed with your gaming life in any way.

I understand that sometimes cutscenes are there to be loading screens in disguise or to set up a scene that developers think is crucial to the narrative of a video game plot.

There has to be an option to skip these things nowadays. There are still modern games that have yet to come to terms with reality, like Far Cry 5 for example.

You can skip dialogue between NPC’s and in-game cutscenes but you know those pre-rendered scenes that the game is full of? Yeah, you can’t skip those for some reason and that just sucks.

Some of you care, and that’s totally fine, go ahead and enjoy! For the rest of us though, please let us skip cutscenes, we’re begging you.

Text Size Options

God of War and Fire Emblem: Three Houses are two huge games that had text size issues that legitimately bother me to the point that I couldn’t even read anything without putting my face right up to the television screen, especially the former.

God of War’s menus were dense as hell with tons of different equipment, stats, and other stuff to look at. Eventually, Santa Monica added in an update that allowed users to modify the text size (thank goodness) but that should have been a thing from day one.

I have 20/20 vision so if I have a problem with in-game text in a video game then I can only imagine how bad it is for folks who literally have eyesight problems. Big text is always good. The bigger the better if you ask me.

We all can’t afford to have 100-inch televisions in our studio apartments –you have to account for the players who still have tiny, 30-inch monitors. I really can’t see anything…

Mappable Control Scheme

You know when you play two or three different games at once and each game has a totally different button control scheme from the others? X is to jump in this game, but in this other game it’s the shoot button, oh and in this game, it’s the button used to roll.

It’s a disaster.

How lovely would it be for games to be unified in their control schemes thanks to optional button mapping?

Now, all three games that you’re playing at once will feel similar and you won’t end up rolling off of a cliff or shooting your partner in the face –talk about awkward.

Auto-Saving

This feature is frequently absent from genres that tend to go on for very long such as JRPG’s, but how does losing hours of progress make any game any more fun?

I know JRPG purists are going to hate on me for dissing save points but if Persona 5 had autosaved every time I finished a fight, I would have finished that game way more quickly. Heck I would probably be more willing to play more JRPG’s if I didn’t have to stress out about losing progress due to surprise three-part boss fights.

At the least, games should allow for the option of auto-saving, regardless of the genre. We’re humans, we forget to go into the menu and save the game sometimes –can you really judge us for that?

Auto-saving saves lives. Auto-saving saves time and in the long-run, it just makes everything so much easier and is another video game mechanic that needs to stay and never go away.

Extra Save Files

I remember as a kid playing Pokemon on my DS when I was unable to create multiple save files on my system. This was an issue even going back to the good ol’ Game Boy days when there was just no space for extra files.

If I ever wanted to have a separate adventure and choose a different starter Pokemon or something, I had no choice but to start from scratch and delete my hundred-hour journey and say goodbye to all of my Pokemon.

Nowadays, most games have multiple save files, but there are still times when games won’t let you have more than one file and that’s just wild.

It should be illegal to not include multiple save files. People love experimenting and trying out new things and taking other routes in video games so having extra save files is very important this day and age.