Stopping rendering / game logic / music if you alt tab. And resource management overall. It grinds my gears when games use resources even when there's nothing happening. (Civ6 for instance constantly uses absurd amounts of cpu just for idling in game and doesn't use any more when calculating so turns.)

Give me a cheat menu or something after beating the game. Let me run around as God causing chaos and break the game. Easy extra hours.

For survival/crafting/whatever games - let me adjust drop rates and toggle things on and off individually, rather than just choosing a difficulty.

What I mean by this is looking at something like Ark versus Subnautica. Ark gives a super fine grained level of customization around spawn rates and other settings. You don't even need to strictly enable or disable hunger but can set the decay rate, for example.

My biggest one is robust modding support. I understand it's something that potentially needs a lot of extra effort to implement from the developers, but when I look at my collection of games that I love, almost all of them let me mod like crazy. Let me download 90 bugfixes and 40 QoL tweaks for a game from 2003.

Transmog

Also being able to adjust subtitles size is nice

I think this might be a thing in modern games, but I don't play enough new releases to be sure: Changing the accessibility settings before anything else in the game. The first time I encountered this was on The Division 2, a Ubisoft game of all things, and being able to tune my subtitles, visual cues, sound options, among others before even the Press Start to begin the game is an incredibly comfortable feeling.

A minor feature that is unfortunately underused is having an archive/library/compendium of characters, plot events and the like. The Yakuza series has entries for its major characters, which is a bliss in games that are essentially soap operas introducing new families and plot twists every with every new installment, and being able to catch up after a few days/weeks without playing is a relief.

LAN, direct IP connections, private servers, and when it makes sense, same-screen multiplayer. Several of these used to be standard. Games as a service are creating a dark age in video game history where lots of these works will arbitrarily disappear, and they don't have to.

I like how Sony PS5 lets me have subtitles on for all games. I think that's part of the accessibility features you were talking about.

Left handed mode. I didn't realise how much I liked it until no man's sky. It moves the body of the character to the right hand side of the screen. So you can see the character holding the items in the left hand.

Most games just mirror the item into the other hand and that's it.

I always appreciate when the game allows you to choose how far the camera is from your character, and when they let you pick if you want to play first of third person.

The option to hide helmets. I like to spend a lot of time making my character, I don't want to hide it under some doofy looking helmet.

Maybe go one step further and let us hide any and all pieces of armor.

• The option to skip puzzles and not get punished for it.
• Independent difficulty options for things like exploration, combat, crafting, etc. Whatever the game has.

I love a game with a good large settings menu that lets me change as much as possible. If you don't lock me out of changing all the keybindings then you're already ahead of the game. I hate when a game has a really badly implemented feature and no way to change it or disable it.

The ability to turn off various typical live service features. Hiding the store and annoying announcements would be awesome.

I want decent AA back gdi

Ray tracing isn't worth how horrible TAA can make some games look, imo. We're getting close, but it's been years of this and I'm so tired of choosing between ghosting and jaggies. Or worse, some games that just force the ghosting TAA onto you anyway (cyberpunk you fuck)

Subtitles forced as on.

Or at the very least, the option to choose subtitles right away at the very start of the game.

I fucking hate when games have intro scenes or full chapters where you can't pause or bring up the menu and you cannot turn on subtitles and I just don't play games without subtitles (when the game has dialogue).

Less a design choice and more a technical feat, but I'm hoping that we start to see the phase-out of loading screens and more of a push toward seamless gameplay. I was watching a video from the newest Spiderman and it was pretty damn cool. Practical for all games? Maybe not for a while. But I certaintly would like to see more investment in leveraging improvements in disk and memory capabilities going forward.

Holding down MMB for callouts in online games. Apex and Risk of Rain 2 both do it and it's super useful.

@Plume The Witness has no menu and no savegames. When you boot it up, you're instantly exactly where you left off.

This doesn't work for all games, but I wish more games would do it like that.

I want to be able to adjust the volume of the rain apart from everything else. Yes, I know a lot of games have an “ambient sounds” slider, but it usually includes other sounds too like Thunder, wind, animal sounds, and other stuff. I just want to make the rain louder. Rain is almost always too quiet in games, and it’s a tragedy.