Parent mode, haven't played in a while? Here is a recap of the story so far and here is what you did last time you played.

It's mental to me that most console games still don't let you change the controller bindings like you can on PC.

Final Fantasy XVI's Active Time Lore. Being able to pause the game and have a list of relevant characters, places, and concepts for the scene you're in is so helpful for my ADHD, for when I take a break from a game and come back not knowing what's going on. I want to see this in every story heavy game.

Cut-scenes that can be paused, skipped and replayed later.

Keep a rotating history of 20 or so autosaves/checkpoints, not 1, in case the last autosave was at a bad spot. Storage space is cheap. Yeah, I can do that myself with manual saves, but why make me do that? Maintaining that isn't a fun part of the game for me, and it's easy for the developer to do.

I would be nice if the game detects that it's been quite some time since I last played, and give a quick refresher of the keybinds as well as brief rundown of recent missions completed / story-so-far.

Phobia-friendly settings/modes. There are so many games that I can't play or have to find a mod for because the fantasy genre is obsessed with giant spiders. The only way I could ever play Skyrim was with the Arachnophobia mod that replaced all spiders with bears. I haven't played Grounded, but I know it has an arachnophobia setting that can simplify/cartoonify the spiders or replaces them with floating orbs. I'd love to see these types of settings in more games, and ideally similar settings available for other common phobias/triggers besides spiders and blood.

I wish I could choose size of font, so many games have a font that only works on certain TVs or played in handheld mode.

Also I wish we could all align in settings menu at some point, so I'm not hunting down these weird unexpected settings.

Gyroscope controls. Especially for first-person shooters and other first-person games. I used to be a diehard mouse and keyboard player when it came to FPSes until I played Quake 1 on the Switch with gyro controls turned on. Now I'm trying to find ways to be able to play every FPS in my collection on a TV with gyro aim because it just feels so much better.

Story mode / Infinite lives / invincibility modes.

Difficulty should not be a barrier for entry. I like how Insomniac games like Ratchet and Clank, and to a lesser extent Spiderman, offer a really easy mode for those who just want to blast away or swing around New York.

More split screen games, there are gamers that have a SO gamer you know? Or brothers, cousins, neighbors etc.

Only Nintendo keeps this thing alive in a wider scheme.

With games taking more and more drive space i would like to be able to choose if i want to download those 4k textures or this new map that i don't want to play

I like how in Breath of the Wild, when it tells you to a button like ‘A’ or ‘Y’ for example, it shows you where that button is relative to the others. This way, if you aren’t super familiar with the controller, you don’t need to take your eyes off the screen.

• Make the story automatically skippable. Every time. Many games explain the mission/objective in a short sentence or in the minimap anyway. Don't make me watch a long cutscene or press/hold a button to skip the dialog. I'm never going to care.
• Always have a tutorial or practice area to remind me how to play the game after I put it down for a month or so. Bad enough that the controller map is hidden in the menus (if there even is one). It don't help much to just say what all 16 +/- buttons do, depending on what mode I'm in. I have to actually use them to get back into the swing of things, and I'd rather not jump right into the action (and potentially lose progress) right away.

default game master volume starting at 50%

No Denuvo
DRM-free versions (fuck every AAA client, give me the setup files and piss off)
Linux-friendly anti-cheat
If your game has an online component, release the server files so the community can self-host!

Basically, anything that preserves a game well beyond its prime.

Here's a really small and easy to fix pet peeve of mine: graphics options that cycle through the levels of fidelity with inconsistent scales. I like to set my graphics to max, try it out, and then adjust down where needed. It's very annoying if a game doesn't stop where the max option is, so if it's currently at "High" I have no idea if the next option to the right is going to be "Very High" or "Low" again. So I often end up overshooting the highest setting and having to go back one, or purposefully going to the lowest setting and then one further.

Unless it's an online multiplayer game, let me pause whenever! Playing Starfield now and it's so annoying that you can't pause during dialogue or ship fight by hitting ESC.

Make 4K textures a separate download, via a free DLC. That way if people only ever play in 1080p, they don't need to waste disk space on files that will never get used.

• Dual subtitles, aka polyglot mode. Doubt that it'd ever happen, probably I'm the only one who wants it. Sometimes I'd just merge 2 subtitles with python script and upload it to my Plex.

• Fast forward and save states especially for classic remaster. Some have this, some don't

• Bigger subtitle fonts

Fully (or at least more) customisable controller settings. It's not difficult. Let me bind what controls I want to what button I want. And adjust the stick dead zone, god damn. Why are you giving me pre set control schemes when we've had fully customizable controls figured out for decades? Fuck you game

Conversation logs (for the games where they make sense). I loved having this available in Dragon Age: Origins and it helped me remember my rationale for doing specific things. Also was just fun to read back through.

Some things were already mentioned so here my other pet peeves:

• customizable difficulty - no default preset will be as good as one that can be modified to your liking. Sometimes the issue lies with difficulty making things more of a chore than a challenge, sometimes they tune things too much where you get stuck in a weird middle ground where one difficulty is way too easy and the other bashes your teeth in.
• character speed control on PC - we had this stuff figured out in 2002, when Splinter Cell came out! Why the hell are we still stuck with terribly slow walk and slightly too fast jogging? This isn't hard to implement either - there are already multiple speed states when playing with a gamepad, all that's required is an option to control it with a keybind.
• visible body in first person games - I always try to immerse myself as much as possible and having a physical body helps sell the idea that I'm a character in this world rather than just a floating camera.

Don't do unskippable cutscenes. Even if you're using them to cover up for a loading screen or something, at least give me the option to not watch them. Let me tap a button to skip the scene.

I have cognitive impairments and it does my head in that it's still hit or miss whether games have rewindable text and voiceovers. Definitely my favourite thing in a game is eing ale to open a dialogue log and even replay voiced lines. Should be in every game, it's such a small accessibility thing.

For any RPG (especially one with multiple characters):

Highly flexible keyboard controls to manage inventory.

I want text-editor levels of search, move, drop, swap, open, and close. Give me regexes, custom filters, and macros. Give me unlimited tags for items, and simple interfaces to manage them (eg: sell all that have a tag, move all items tagged with a characters's name to their equipment slots).

It doesn't need emacs keybindings, but that would be a big plus.

Proper benchmarking tools in the main menu. Even better if there's a demo for this.

Call me a madman but I'd love to see the feature of games that work on launch day without a patch.

Resizable UI/text everywhere. Not every gamer plays at a desk.

@Plume Oh yeah and this: Start the game in a neutral area or room where you can test the controls and sound are working properly and ensure the performance is right BEFORE the intro cutscene plays.

Maybe not everywhere, because then it wouldn't be nearly as special, but I absolutely adored the "asynchronous multiplayer" aspects of Death Stranding.

Viewing the "strand contracts" tab and looking at how many other actual humans used and "liked" the infrastructure you created, or helped to create. Creating contracts with players who seem to appreciate your work, so that you see more of their structures, and they see more of yours. Only a couple examples. Trying to find the most optimal place for a bridge, or watchtower so that other players will appreciate it and give you "likes." That nice feeling of warmth you get when you finish building a road that others had started...

Just the whole freaking thing fits so well into the "we're all in this together, even if we're (forcibly) isolated" message the game is conveying. Working together with real people that you will never directly see or speak to, in order to make an incredibly arduous journey a bit easier for all. Amazing.

At least I think that was one of the messages, Kojima can be cryptic at times lol.

Again, I wouldn't want it to become the next "climb the tower to reveal part of the map" mechanic, and get ruined. You can't just shoe-horn it in, it has to make sense in context.

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.

• LET ME TURN OFF THE CLAUSTROPHOBIC VIGNETTE, PLEEEAAASSEEEE. Even games like Cyberpunk 2077 that have gained countless features over the years and have individual HUD on/off switches still ignore this.
• UGC as a whole. I grew up on Half-Life mods, custom Counter-Strike: Source maps, and LittleBigPlanet. The fact that we've pretty much abandoned that outside of Halo, Counter-Strike (just barely, mind you), and more recently Fortnite with proper Unreal Engine support is a terrible thing. It makes more sense than ever in an era of live service where you want players to never stop playing.

I'd like to see leaning around corners for strategic shooters. I think rainbow six used to have this, I know the original system shock had it.