As a gamer with every new game you will have to configure the inputs to your preferences, key bindings, sensitivities, graphics: FOV, tweaked GPU settings for frame rate/quality and audio settings.
Then you have to fine tune them to your liking as you get the feel for the game.
You can manually do this with every game and if they have a cloud based server they will remember your settings but you still have to do this for every new game.
By now shouldn’t gamers have an input settings template they can just link to in the game and voila the game will be setup for them with only a few new keys to learn?
And what about when your hardware changes could a good smart players settings system compensate automatically for upgrades?
Or with the modern twitch streamers could they not share their system player settings so anyone could try and match what they do?
I like the idea, but I don’t see it happening because this is really just a PC gaming specific thing. Console gamers don’t go through this generally, and console games are the larger market.
If anyone was in a position to do this it would be Steam. They could make a Steam API call to import/export control schemes with their games, and add a feature for sharing control schemes with other Steam users. I actually think Steam should do this as a minor feature to help fend off competing game stores, by giving another reason to buy games on Steam (so you wouldn’t need to customize your key bindings, just import and done).
Would be especially handy for an older guy like me who came up with a custom FPS control scheme before WASD existed. I created a custom control scheme for Quake 1, which I still use today. WASD didn’t really become standard until the release of Half Life, 2 years later.
Key binding and inputs would be on its own a massive endeavor, for little to no gain.
Games are already shipped with defaults, with something maybe to tweak.
Unity already brings basics default inputs for FPS and platformers games for example.
Deciding weather q/e/f/z/x/c/ctrl/shift should be used for special functions, is often game play dependent.
Regarding Graphics settings, this is separate challenge. So much varieties, including OS/platform and running background task, that it is safer to default into lower settings for “safety”. And allow player to increase these, if they are happy. Some games run own performance testing, to set optimal graphical settings at first game runtime.
On consoles, I suppose settings are already fixed optimally?
Is this anything more than a triviality? I can’t really think of the last time I had to adjust any settings… maybe a year ago to rebind a key for my gaming keypad in satisfactory. But video settings are alway spot on, as is the resolution. Audio settings… who uses those? If you are spending anything more than a minute setting your input settings, the game developer has failed with planning or UI/UX.
Steam and Epic game store already have issues with cloud services, spending 30secs setting up a new games input it vastly preferable to have to do it dozen times because of global system updates, failure to connect/update, profile corruption, having to log into another service, etc. Over engineering and adding unnecessary complexity to a simple system is a complete UX fail… not only for players but for developers. No one needs or wants it. From the dev side, the time would better spent evaluating and refining their UX for settings/input (and possibly controls) rather than hammer some global/third party solution into a trivial functionality.
Generally yes, because with consoles you can count on everyone having the same hardware - but for an example I can recall with PS4 Pro, OnRush lets you select from a performance mode of 60fps vs. higher quality at 30fps. I think that’s a good call… and their 60fps mode was never disappointing from a quality perspective either. Personally, if a racing/driving genre game won’t run at 60fps I won’t play it (aside from briefly checking it out). Any game with fast-paced camera movement needs to prioritize a high framerate or at least allow the user to select it despite any necessary reduction in quality. It’s just not fun to navigate a fast-moving scene that counts on reflex and low input latency when there’s half a screen of content changing every frame… however beautiful.
There isn’t even a standard way of setting sensitivity. What do the numbers mean? In Halo, I use sensitivity 7.5/10. In Doom Eternal, I use 40/100. They feel more or less the same, so what do the numbers mean?
Even if they unified it, people would still find something to complain about. For example, fov is always in degrees. That’s probably best for the average player but what about us engineers? I’m certain everyone who visits this forum would much rather see radians than degrees because that’s what we normally think in.
Also, most games have different actions. You can’t just take your Halo settings and throw them into doom. Doom has boost, chainsaw, weapon mods… Halo had a flashlight, crouching, reloading…
your spoiled, at least the standard controls have standardized. When Quake launches, you moved forwards and back with the arrow keys, turned with the left/right arrow keys, strafed by pressing alt and the arrow keys. If you wanted mouselook, you had to enable it. Be glad wasd is the default in games now at least.
Here’s my unique game with my/our ideal settings and you can play it, we also provide you with pages of options you can configure to try and get the game ideal for you.
Hi your COD* input and settings profile matches our new game go on have a blast, and here are the new controls you need to learn and a tutorial system to teach you.
It’s like having highly skilled tennis players then going ok now our game also includes a stick so one hand for the bat and one for the stick.
*COD is just an example but any leading game within it’s genre where gamers will have learned and honed their twitch muscle memory.
LOL FOV radians, I wonder how many people would think wow more pixels, most people who use games at least understand angles or a scale.
Good point on the scales maybe a unified input/settings template system would help developers agree to common standards e.g. radians/degrees, scale ranges.
Side notes:
DOOM has a flashlight, or was the DOOM 2 or 3 or the remake one of them had a flashlight.
HALO did not have crouching not the original one or two.
Maybe you’re thinking of Doom 3? Doom did certainly not have a flashlight, Id tech 1 was sector based lighting. The Quake engine was the first with that kind of lighting tech. Halo CE has a seldom used crouch function. It’s forced on you exactly once: going from the cryo tube to meet Keyes for the first time, but it’s a necessary component of speedrunning because it lets you jump slightly higher.