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

[GloatingSwine]

Unskippable cutscenes. We've still got them, but they're becoming less & less prevalent.

I'll see your unskippable cutscenes and raise you checkpoints before the unskippable cutscene.

Hell, checkpoints before even skippable cutscenes are bad enough, I've recently gone back to the original Saint's Row, and it's chronic for no checkpoints in missions and putting the checkpoint before the cutscenes.

One issue that seems to be getting worse over time: unnecessary number inflation. Health & damage & stat numbers being much larger than they need to be. Don't be doing 5400 damage to something with 37665 HP, please instead be doing 2 damage to something with 13 HP. Either way you're defeating the target in 7 hits, but latter is much easier to plan & strategize around. It's part of why Paper Mario 1&2 are one of my favourite turn-based games, the HP almost never leaves double-digits.

Conversely expanding the number scale gives you more scope for effects that change the amount of hits it takes without requiring the player to deal with fractions.

Like if you do 2 damage at a time you can't have an effect that gives you +25% damage unless you're willing to let the player do 2.5 damage, and even then .5 damage doesn't sound like a lot.

Whereas if you do 200 damage at a time you can because people will grasp the value of going from 200 to 250 damage and won't rebel about having to deal with half points of damage.