The Outer Worlds, by Obsidian Entertainment and Private Division [PC]

I consider a toggle to be something easily accessible, not diving into the folder tree to edit a value outside the game.

It Just...

....Flips (╯°□°)╯︵ □

 

Thanks! I was trying to find out where you found that and discovered the following over here at Kitguru:

Gonna see what it looks like!

 

It is laughable how editing .ini files is still considered acceptable practice for the PC. It really would not be hard to create an automatic in-game options editor for .ini files with a simple front-end. One editor could be created for every publisher, so it doesn't need to be recreated every game. Hell, if these settings were stored in JSON, you could use a single universal prefs interface.

 

Agreed, one would hope that developers would follow Microsoft's lead in this. After years of neglect on the PC, they've now basically surpassed all other PC games makers WRT offering in game options to the player.

Hopefully, the next Obsidian title will have good options.

Regards,
SB

 

The Tomb Raider games have been great too with changing options pretty well instantly. In the future, I’d like to see some sort of test scene or a fairly unobstructed view of the current game scene while folks change individual options.

 

There are countless new PC gamers who have never known anything but Windows and GUIs. It's not tradition but an unwillingness to improve. As long as PC gamers excuse this, devs won't bother to change.

 

My take on ini tweaks...

The option in the games are the things that were blessed and tested by the developer.

Ini tweaks are options that the developer too "lazy" to properly hide and lock.

 

My take on ini and cfg tweaks, I likes 'em!

 

To be fair, that's true in that .ini files allow users to tweak 'unsupported' features at their own risk. Which is fine, except everything gets shunted into these instead of properly implementing an interface for normal, safe preferences like turn on/off a post effect.

 

Indeed. But I think psychologically, if they make those "your own risk, untested" stuff into proper game UI, it will give it too much unintended "credibility".

Thus resulting in even more support nightmare.

E.g.

I used option X and then Y happen, your game is broken.

Support can't really say "it's an unsupported option, as already stated right beside the option you enabled" without making customer even more annoyed

 

I agree, high-risk options can and should be relegated to the .ini file, as then your users need a degree of competance to implement them and understand the consequences. A 'chromatic aberration' toggle shouldn't be one of those though, and should be exposed in a nice options page, along with whatever other options are appropriate for it. There should be a clear separation between standard, user-definable options and lower-level tweaks hidden outside of the game.

 

Yep! On/off toggles for "simple" visual FX should be accessible thru game UX.

Some less simple stuff like MSAA could results in issues if disabled/enabled if the game use it for critical stuff (IIRC ff13 on PC, ai somnium files)

But where we should draw the line? Although something like chromatic aberration really obviously should have a toggle. No way it can broke anything if disabled

Unfortunately some devs swears chromatic aberration (and many other "controversial" FX) is awesome and it's their absolute artistic choice

 

That's why I love ini and cfg tweaks, it's the best of both worlds! You can have all the options in the GUI that you know won't break anyone's game and have been fully tested, but more advanced users can fiddle with more options to get better performance/visuals in exchange for understanding it's important to back up files before you play with them too much.

Tweaking games is a hobby almost as much as gaming is, at least now. Before it used to be necessary to be able to make the games work, now it's more of an optional thing that lets you improve your gaming experience with a little experimentation/research.

Finding the balance, well that's up to the people putting out the game. I really hate it when they make it intentionally difficult to find and change the settings, like you need a hex editor and a bit more knowledge than I have to figure it out.

 

Heh, me too!

And I hate myself for that. Even for PS4 PRO games I tweak the settings hahaha.

 

That's one of the reason I stopped PC gaming, I ended up spending more time not-playing than playing. Too many distractions when I would try to start playing.

 

It's the luxury of it