Topic: Your gaming (opposite of) pet peeves

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@lolwhatno chef’s kiss?

@lolwhatno good point… I’m gonna keep mulling this one over.

@lolwhatno I have to go out for Sunday lunch in a bit so I just googled it instead 😅… and I guess the result kinda fits. So the opposite of a ‘pet-peeve’ is to have a ‘soft-spot’ for something.

@lolwhatno will do 👍

Well pet means domesticated animal to which the opposite would be wild. I don't know that there is an opposite word to peeve so maybe just reverse it.
Therefore my suggestion is that it should be 'Wild eveep '

@lolwhatno
dilveps hmmm.... Well it's quite common I suppose but I really appreciate the option to reset skill tree allocations, free up all the points and then reinvest them in different builds. Saves me the necessity to restart the full game after getting quarter- to half-way through a game and realising I've done it wrong.

I’m not sure if we’ll coin the term from @Sorteddan “dliweveep” 😄, but here are some of my soft spot / nice touch / “appreciated perks or qualities in a game that enhance the experience and give me added joy to the extent that I’d like to see them widely used” —

Playing FF7R now I’m really liking the ability to save anywhere. I’m amazed and delighted when I boot up my save-state later, I find I’m in the exact spot, facing the same direction, with the exact screen set-up as when I exited. Most games put you back to a checkpoint when you reload, but this game can save the exact situation you were in, which is nice. It means you don’t have to replay sections again and that I don’t have to strategically plan out where I’m going to finish my game session.
The game also saves and loads in a flash, thanks to the PS5’s speed, so it makes for a nice combo.

I’ve discovered that I also like (and this will be a little controversial) haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. For some reason FF7R implemented very little in the way of utilizing the DualSense. As a result the experience feels a bit more hollow. Having played games recently that really utilized the controller well like Returnal, A Plague Tale, Control, and Astrobot’s Playtoom, I have grown accustomed to having the tactile experiences of the controller. They dropped the ball on the FF7R Intergrade version on PS5 in this regard. The combat and fight scenes could have been so much more impactful with haptics and adaptive triggers. It’s not essential by any means, but it’s a “nice touch” that I have a “soft spot” for.

@lolwhatno Yeah, I’ve been known to leave my character in a favorable position or setting when I exit. Not sure why I do that either 😄

Something I have appreciated since starting to play a lot of the Sony first party stuff is the dialogue and exposition between protagonist and companions during gameplay. Think it was probably Uncharted (Drake & Sully) within which I noticed it first... but its become common place since in games like The Last of Us with Joel & Ellie, God of War with Kratos & Boy, Days Gone with Deacon & Boozer etc. It adds a nice cinematic feel to various aspects of the gameplay loops.

I quite like in uncharted 4, if Nathan falls off a cliff and dies, the characters react, and they have multiple lines. Sam curses, Sully yells, it just adds to the experience.

@lolwhatno @Just_2_milky I'm still to play Uncharted 4 (& Lost Legacy) but yeah those are perfect examples of what I mean.

@Just_2_milky Yeah, it makes think of — “Snake? Snake! Snaaaaakkee!” Followed by the little tune when Solid Snake dies. 😂

One thing I loved is the way Ghost of Tsushima handled picking items up, in that the only animation is the item disappearing. You don't have to sit through a tedious animation watching the character pick up an item for the hundredth time. And also the horse, you can just whistle after climbing a mountain and he's there.

Those really made playing an open world game so much nicer, when I compare it to say Assassin's Creed.

@NedStarksGhost I dunno, I played AC Odyssey for like 90 hours and I’m fairly certain that you have a teleporting horse and instant picking up items in that too!

@nessisonett when I played Valhalla the horse wasn't always instant, if I remember right. It did depend on the situation, but I think if I left the horse at the top of a hill I'd have to wait for it to travel down. I think items you're right actually, maybe AC was a bad example.

@NedStarksGhost Oh no it’s alright, I haven’t played Valhalla yet so it could be different!

• For games with shooting on consoles, I appreciate when developers patch in gyro aiming options. Aiming with the right stick and nothing else sucks. Heck, it doesn't even need to have guns, necessarily: I'd love to have the ability to quickly aim at opponents when throwing my axe in God of War with gyro controls. The PS4 has an excellent gyroscope built into the controller, so it's a shame so few games have the option.
• I appreciate when developers include extensive text re-sizing options (i.e. better than the option for resizing the text in God of War, which barely helps). I'm near-sighted, so unless I'm playing a Switch or Vita or something and have the screen pressed up close to my face, it can be difficult to read stuff when the text size is small.
• I appreciate games with snappy character movement. There are AAA games I play from time-to-time where movement of your character feels... weighted, so there's an immediate disconnect between me and my in-game avatar.
• I appreciate games with strict boundaries between cutscenes/narrative and gameplay. Having characters randomly speed up or slow down, yammer incessantly at each-other during normal gameplay with plot-relevant dialogue, or yank control of the camera away from me while I'm still moving my character drives me up a wall. When I'm playing the game, I just want to play the game. There are always exceptions to this (I enjoy Kratos' stories during boat rides in God of War), but those are few and far between.
• If there are a variety of collectibles and/or elements that affect gameplay, I appreciate when games have robust in-game tools for tracking those. Horizon Zero Dawn, for example, has a ton of stuff to collect, challenges to complete, types of robots to hunt, etc., but it does a great job of allowing me to keep track of all that.
• While we're onto this: I appreciate games with exploratory elements to have great map systems. Horizon, again, is an example of a game with a fantastic in-game map, and it really adds to the experience.
• I appreciate when games selectively abandon realism in order to facilitate a smoother gameplay experience. I'm going back to Horizon again: at some point in that game, you unlock the ability to just whistle and immediately summon a robotic mount to ride around on. Makes not a lick of sense to me, but that's cool: it's a video game. Video games are supposed to be fun. And I'm having more fun when I have immediate access to a mount.

@Ralizah I think the weighty character thing depends on the game for me. I love how human the characters feel in Rockstar games for example. But then I wouldn’t want Sonic to feel like that.

@nessisonett It drives me nuts. If the character is humanoid, I want them to be responsive.

Although obviously I'll be more understanding when it comes to games where the characters are supposed to be slightly unwieldy for reasons and/or older games where they were still figuring out 3D controls.