In the Devil May Cry series, there’s a feature in the game that makes it so enemies that aren’t visible on screen can’t attack. This helps to prevent issues where you get hit by something you couldn’t have possibly reacted to, particularly in the “Heaven or Hell” and “Hell and Hell” difficulties where you die in one hit. It’s not perfect and has some issues, for example enemies sometimes start an attack right before they go off screen, but it helps cut down on it a ton.
Now that I’ve played DMC, I’ve started to sorely miss it in other action games. In particular, I’m playing Kingdom Hearts 2 on Critical for the first time, and on that difficulty, there are a decent amount of attacks in the early game that can kill you even if you’re at or near full HP. It’s rough, especially because Kingdom Hearts isn’t as responsive as DMC. The block button has a really long start up animation and there are more animations that completely lock you in with no way to cancel them, for instance. So every time I die to an offscreen enemy, I can’t help but feel I’d have a much better time should it have had a system like this.
What are some other features that you wish were more common in games?
Looping menus. Pressing up on the upmost item should send you to the lowest item in the list, same for left to right, right to left and down to up.
There should always exist a way to close all menus and return to gameplay with one button press or hold. It sucks to need to press the back button 8 times to close all the tabs just so you can get back to gameplay.
Bestiary and or model viewer. Nioh is the best example every enemy have a model viewer and lore about it. Defeating more enemies of the same type unlocks more lore.
Being able to select any language no matter what region you bought the game. Audio and text.
Any and every accessibility option. From button remapping and text size to the more advanced stuff like audio description and highlited vision.
If your game has pauses, you should be able to pause anywhere. The pause button should never skip cutscenes. If your game doesn’t have pauses you should be able to use the menus and control you character at the same time.
Cursor style menus should not exist for games played on controller.
Load screens shouldn’t exist anymore.
The player should know what difficult the game was developed upon and which ones are the derived difficulties.
What do you mean “load screens shouldn’t exist anymore”? What do you want the game to do while it’s loading? Just be blank?