What's One "Old Game" Mechanic That You Don't Miss?

[Amechra]

Grind for the sake of grind to extend gameplay.

Case in point: Dragon Warrior on the NES. You can beat the whole game in under a half hour if you didn't have to constantly grind levels to be able to survive. A substantial majority of the gameplay is nothing more than grinding cash/xp.

Sadly, this is still a thing in a lot of modern JRPGs as well. Heck, a lot of "sixty hour" games are only that long because they artificially pad the runtime with useless grindy quests.

I don't think we'll see the tail end of that one any time soon...