What are some game features you really appreciate that make your experience much more enjoyable when present and much less so without?

One of the bonuses of the recent move toward accessibility in games is a move away from button mash qte's or the ability to replace said input with a button hold instead. It's certainly saved my thumbs a lot of grief in some updated games that relied heavily on such qte's.

Another thing I really appreciate are well designed and informative maps, particularly in large or intricate games with lots to unlock and collect. Knowing visibly what areas of the world I've already cleaned out and which still have secrets to uncover can save me a lot of aimless wandering. This depends on the game of course and sometimes the mystery is part of the fun.

What about you guys?

Autosave. Only really notice it when it's not there. Tried playing Days Gone again in January but the saving system not working correctly (other issues than just the autosave) massively killed my interest in the game and I've abandoned it again. Hard to go back to it when it crashes and since it never made a single autosave your last manual save from 2-3 missions back is the most recent save. Especially annoying when it's not the first time that's happened either! Wonder if I'll ever finish it.

Also replaying Civ 4 at the moment too and the autosave is broken in that as well. At least it hasn't crashed or anything on my yet so I haven't lost any progress, still an annoyance however.

Also had issues with Stellaris. I usually play ironman which autosaves whenever you close the game. Tried some mods recently so no ironman mode, forgot that the game doesn't autosave when I exit so I just exited as normal, lost a bunch of progress due to that a couple times.

NSO and PS Plus Retro games having instant rewind and save anywhere features. All singleplayer games should have these.

When games give you a sort of recap of the last few things you did, so if you have to put the game down for a bit you can reorient yourself. Some Pokemon games did this, the Tales Series has a book you can use for a recap, and stuff like that.

Game saving that came in two parts.
1. Replacing passwords with saves.
2. Replacing those original cartridges with the old save batteries with a saving system that actually works! As in, one that doesn’t delete your saves if you turn off the system’s power. I think Gameboy was probably the first console that had working saves, some NES games were better than others.

My least favourite one is when companies try to make their controllers more “comfortable” by rounding them in a certain way. For whatever reason, controllers like the Dreamcast and Gamecube one always cause my hands to cramp up when playing games with any degree of action. Games like Skies of Arcadia on Dreamcast and Animal a crossing on the cube were fine, but Soul Caliber and Mario Kart were murder on my hands. Which leads me to my next QOL I liked:

I love split controllers like the Wiiremote and chuck, as well as the joy cons, and any VR controllers I’ve used.

Another one is making all games available digitally. A lot of people love the physical copies, I’ve never been a fan. While digital distribution hasn’t been perfect, for me its always been vastly superior. Especially on Switch where you can basically import without having to pay ridiculous extra fees (my imported copy of FF4 is in the region of 300 USD with inflation). Each generation, from Wii (which had VC and Wiiware), to 3DS (which added most games), to Switch (which unified the divided libraries), has shown vast improvements. The big flaw of the earlier consoles is they didn’t carry over. If the Switch EShop has fixed that and 100% of the EShop content will be on Switch 2, then that would be massive (interface fixes aside… the Switch EShop is built for massive lists, but it seems the hardware limitations struggle to handle it—as it’ll occasionally crash once you’ve scrolled down past 100 games or so… also, videos occasionally skip, videos should never skip).

idk if this counts but Cloud saves are literally everything lol I love having all my saves available whenever I decide to redownload a game, move to a different console, or even switch to PC (play anywhere).

Definitely agree with Ice on cloud saves. So many games I would have lost saved data if cloud saves weren't a thing.

Also, the SSD has made gaming A LOT more enjoyable (especially when grinding achievements/trophies). That saved minute or two makes grinding a lot less draining for me.

Being able to put your system in sleep mode with the game suspended and being able to continue your progress hours or even days later. Withthe 3DS and the Switch that saved me a good amount of times.

Button layout customisation. Most games are perfectly designed and their button layout is perfect (most are basically standardised nowadays) but some are either really fiddly or unintuitive. Allowing you to change buttons is a great step and it annoys me if it's not there, even if I don't need it.

Best example I can use is probably Overwatch and Doomfist and Moira. Moira has her orbs ability, you press a button then chose heal on left hand, attack orb on right but for some reason, when you did on console version of the game, the heal in the left hand was thrown by the right trigger. and vice versa. Very confusing. I easily just changed it.

Doomfist was the same where his shotgun on his left hand was fired by pressing the right normal shoot button and his fisting on his right hand was his back left bumber ability. This didn't make sense to my brain but I was easily able to change it.

I agree with most of the posts above, most important ones for me:
- autosave
- the mini-map
- ability to stop the game whenever and wherever you want, to have it back as you left it even 3 months after, a very great feature