Things games should have, but don't

[PatientZero]

or as a pure gameplay mechanic, being able to save and load whenever you want takes a HUGE chunk of the risk or tension out of any game.
Imagine if Silent Hill let you save wherever you want, suddenly there's ZERO risk and it stops being scary.

Games can still keep this if they have a quicksave like in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, where you could save to turn off the game (but not start over from there in-game), because sometimes you just have to quit playing immediately.

As a feature that works, but again you're assuming that it's even possible to do with the engine being used, there are simply cases where the only option is to use hardcoded saves.
It's also worth noting that in some cases a quicksave actually isn't a real save at all, it's basically just a memory dump to a file, similar to how save states work on emulators, which is a really bad practice a lot of devs still use.
(I won't bother boring you with the technical details, they're honestly not that interesting.)

What I'd like to see more of in games myself, is people willing to push the boundaries, experiment with new ideas, new concepts, even just new scenarios.
I always enjoy finding a game that doesn't assume from the start that you're an American white heterosexual male teenager.
(I'm looking at you almost every FPS ever.)