Because I’m not a game designer, I will act like everything in this article is super easy to do.
Modern videogames do a lot of things right. The so-called AAA blockbuster games are more cinematically engaging than ever before and despite the at times stagnant annualised releases of mega franchises, there are new and exciting things to be found within big releases all the time. And of course the indie game development scene continues to serve up some real gems.
However, all types of games to this day are guilty of not including some simple practical features that surely must count as rudimentary by now. In my book including these miniscule but super-convenient features makes your game just that little bit better, no matter what, even if their presence won’t fix any major problems with game design. What’s more, they require little to no creativity to execute. I’ve noticed enough of these regular and baffling omissions to write up a decent-sized list. It’s certainly a subjective list but I’m sure I speak for a lot of people on some of these in particular. And sure, there are some modern games that nail all of these bread-and-butter inclusions (or at least all the ones they can), but I still find it more than a little weird just how rare these games are.
I’ll admit that some of these entries may be harder to execute in practice than they are on paper, but from where I stand it’s hard to see how they could be any more difficult to implement than any other aspect of making a game. Also, about half of these things are specific to a certain console.
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1. Include an hour counter.
Really, this is the feature that inspired me to write this list. It is the one basic thing that I see most frequently left out of games these days and surely one of the absolute easiest things to fix. Being able to tell just how long you have played a game helps you judge its worth and makes conversations about said game involve a lot less guesswork. This is especially handy for RPGs, which tend to involve a great deal of time sinking, but a counter really should be included in every kind of game, because really, where’s the downside? The likes of the Pokemon franchise have been doing this for decades but the best recent example of great usage I can think of is Tales of Graces f, which not only has an overall time counter at your fingertips whenever you bring up the menu, but boasts a second counter right underneath the first to gauge the length of individual play sessions. Top form, Namco Bandai.
Vagrant Rant 