Society nowadays has a lot of conveniences. Many of us have access to online shopping, toilets where you press a button and get your bum washed, public transportation instead of calling a carriage, the ability to render payment electronically instead of using physical currency, precious metals, or goats…
You know what would not be a convenience? The ability to fuse two moth-ridden anime t-shirts I purchased at conventions years ago to produce one Umamusume tee of perfect quality. That’s not quality of life, that’s a goddamn fuckin’ miracle.
When assessing the features available in a hack, a lot of players tend to mistake “genuine mechanical buffs to the player’s arsenal” with “quality of life enhancements”, and it’s important to get the two disentangled. Solely for my own sanity, of course, but also so hack creators don’t have to hear some stupid shit like “why doesn’t your hack include super thracia omega ultra galeforce trade???” Quality of life is, like, when you could do some shit and the hack just makes it easier for you. Like I can wash my own ass, or I can press the button, that type of deal. For the betterment of society, my calmness of mind, and the future of hack discourse itself, I will detail below some hack features that should be considered quality of life, some that are strictly buffs, and some that are strictly buffs but you should probably include anyway unless you have a very specific reason not to.
What is quality of life?
Threat display/danger zone. The player can gather any information you need from the little red squares of a threat display whenever you want. Heck, if you have short term memory issues, you could draw it or take screenshots or pictures or whatever. This is pure quality of life. It does make the player experience easier usually, but it’s not something the player couldn’t do.
Displayed health bars. Same shit, the player can, at any time, just pop open some fucker’s info menu and see their HP, that shit ain’t hard. Seeing who’s damaged at a glance makes the game easier in terms of mental load, but it doesn’t actually change what’s available to the player.
Animation skips/speedups. They don’t do anything in-game, straightforward quality of life for the speed addicted youth.
What is NOT quality of life?
Improved trading. GBA trade is “you trade once per unit action and that’s it”. Improvements to this are nice (and sometimes downright insane if you allow move → trade to be canceled), but this is overall a genuine buff to what the player can do. As such, hack creators might have reason to not include enhanced trading if they balance with a specific action economy in mind, or if trading to change inventories before enemy phase is highly relevant to their project.
Combining weapons. Can you, in vanilla FEGBA, replicate the mechanics of mashing two weapons together to create a whole one? Yes, kind of: you could sell two irons that are fucked up and buy one, but you’d be out some gold. And in terms of rarer weapons, the answer is a straightforward “no”. This is not quality of life, this is a straight enhancement of player capabilities. Do not expect this to be in every hack, especially if the gameplay intends tight inventory management. (Alternatively, some hacks with very tight inventory management might include this feature on purpose to help alleviate the pain.)
Growth displays. Yes, growth displays are not quality of life. The information is not something the player could have access to in vanilla FEGBA, and thus the decision to include or exclude growth displays is a meaningful mechanical choice. Now, of course, everyone has their own preferences as both designers and players whether growth displays are good enough, but I literally don’t care about any of those and neither should you because growth display discourse is an abomination upon Nuggan. The point is that it’s mechanically significant; “it’s quality of life” is not a valid reason to include it or expect its inclusion.
Further actions after Talk/Support. In the same vein as improved trading, this is something you cannot replicate without the feature being available. This one is arguably in the “people should include it anyway” bracket, but there are valid reasons not to, especially if the hack has a tight action economy, is focused around LTCing, or has Talks that occupy a significant mechanical niche.
Literally not quality of life but like c’mon man
Display available talks/supports on map. Without a patch that allows this, you can’t know who’s able to talk to which other units on the map without just sending it and walking up to them. Even in the case of supports, because players do not inherently know a unit’s base support points/support point growth with another unit, they can’t know a support is ready without smashing two units together. In both cases, this isn’t really mechanically meaningful information to hide from the player, but improves player feel by a reasonable amount, so it’s usually better just to, like, have it. The exception is if you’re really checking player reading comprehension on enemy unit recruitments. If so, well, you’re bound to be sorely disappointed.
Anyway yeah like subscribe and hit that bell why do you need to hit the bell anyway like what the fuck is a “personalized notification” youtube if I subscribe to someone’s dumb ass I wanna see their shit if I don’t anymore I’ll unsub like fuck off you ain’t my mom get out of my head
the only instance of talk display being good are map talks between two blue units, because those are like 200% harder to convey in the script compared to blue-green and blue-red interactions
genuinely i forgot this screen existed (which does actually move “display support convos on map” to “pure quality of life and therefore really should always be included”)
but yeah, I’d say that generally any change to a game that mainly compresses known information into a more readable format is generally a QoL - and things that can generally alter heavily how a game plays is a (literally by name) game altering design.
Like knowing how there’s the option to have GBA screen displays show like either of these (which are reminiscent of older FE entries), the ability to get the compressed variant that already calculates whether you double or not and relevant damage reduction can easily be considered QoL that doesn’t change how you play the game.
But factors like freely merging weapons for convoy space/more weapon uses? That changes how the game plays in a relevant manner. Multi-trading allowing for item-passing (let alone trade-cancels) also allow for some relatively strong maneuvers with correct (or sometimes non-existant) positioning - and can’t be called QoL.
If its something you can build a game around thanks to that specific mechanic, is it truly just QoL?
No really give me a game where you’re scavenging for weapons and only get like 5/46 Iron Swords
Talk not consuming an action is a buff.
It’s also quality of life though cause “talk” commands are like chance or community chest in monopoly. You have no idea if you’re gonna get anything or if it’s going to be a good thing or a bad thing, and so the buff helps offset the costs so that people are willing to try out “talk”
A similar situation (which I doubt many people here will have experience with but oh well) is ucf in melee. It’s a “qol” patch that “fixes” input polling in the game’s code by making inputs successful every time instead of being contingent on a bunch of stuff the player can’t control. It’s a buff to every controller and character, but improves game (I tucking hate typing on iPhone this shit is cancer)
I don’t disagree with op, I resonate with his sentiment, just wanted to mention that qol and buffs aren’t mutually exclusive.
QoL in this case is defined as something you could normally do that the game does for you, like display doubling automatically or threat ranges. The OP did cover exactly this - like he said, it’s nice to do and why a lot of hacks do this, but if there’s things like mechanical buffs or variants tied to them, then it doesn’t fall under the Quality of Life definition given.
Ted talk:
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE (like the sabrina carpenter song) includeee animation speed up I’m begging you, I am on my knees ready to do anything necessary for you to do this. I am going to church confessing my sins and praying to all the gods and eldritch deities for you to do this.
Can you add random enemy stats to that list as well? It’s explicitly a gameplay choice and not QoL as well but I’ve heard several people say that it is.
Typically only if the animation’s script is flawed in the first place. Lots of animations already hang or crash in certain circumstances; speedup just makes these errors happen more often
I think speedup is funny because it makes animations on faster than map animations for most things
it is, which is really good for me because I do a lot of full-game runs of Do5 as of recent if we need to release a patch because there’s been a lot of instances of adding something leading to the rom breaking, so now I gotta verify the changes if we ever make another patch and I have to keep anims on to make sure they dont break
but mgba uncapped turbo just makes that practically instant anyway
I respectfully disagree - I view all of these things as QoL. My criteria is basically:
improves my personal experience of the game
has a minor impact on how I play overall
I’ve been playing the fe8srr a bit lately which includes tiamflniayatdi debugger, and the way I use it I would describe as QoL. The debugger gives you complete freedom over units, allowing you to trivialize anything, and shouldn’t be considered a QoL patch. But I use it to grab items I could’ve carried with me since the prep screen. Sure, I could’ve given each unit a vulnerary, but it’s faster to not do that, so it improves my experience to cheat a little bit. It doesn’t really change how I play overall, so I’m abusing it as a QoL, if that makes any sense. But someone else would use cheat codes or the debugger to trivialize the gameplay. A QoL feature for one person can change the way someone else plays - displayed growths are QoL for me, but some people immediately bench low growth units or go out of their way to feed kills to high growth units, making the feature far more impactful on some people’s gameplay than you intended.
anyway, all that said I figure you just define QoL in fe differently from me