Customisable difficulty. Have a single or multiple presets balanced to what you'd like your players to experience but give me an option to adjust some of the stuff to my liking. There are SO MANY games I'd love to play way more than I do but none of the difficulty options feel "right", bringing the whole experience down.
It's also a great feature from an accessibility standpoint - pretty important thing for those who literally can't play your game for reasons that could be easily worked around if such customisation was there.

"But my artistic integrity and vision!"

No, shut up. Your vision doesn't mean squat if my experience with the game is annoying to the point where I don't even care about the lore implication of an enemy placement or how gameplay systems intertwine with themes and story of the game. It's important, sure, but it shouldn't be more important than player's enjoyment of your product.

Balance your game how you imagine it but let me play with the sliders to make it feel how I want it to. Just drop a scary message about it not being the intended way to play and it'll be fine.

For over-the-shoulder games, separate field-of-view AND CAMERA DISTANCE.

For player-hosted games, an option to reject hosts using unsuitable hardware or low bandwidth, high latency networks. My gripe is specific to Warframe on the Switch 1, but if the developers of any game can't/won't operate public game servers and choose to offload the responsibility to the players, the choice should belong to the players.

Adjustable HUD offset for widescreen.

I have a 32:9 display and it SUCKS when HUD elements are anchored to the sides. I have to turn my head to see it!

Please let me invert y-axis for games where I control the field of view. Nothing takes me out of a game like suddenly staring at my feet when I try to look up.

Subtitles for the hearing impaired. Like when a switch flicks it writes click on the screen.

I'm not impaired, but I like to have the sound down for stealth gaming.

Not a setting, but a "here's what you did last time/here's where you need to go now". If it's been a little while since I played the game, I shouldn't be lost trying to figure out where I am or where I'm going.

All fighting games (or anything that runs deterministically on all players' machines, like fighting games do) should always have a performance test requirement before you hop online. We figured this out over a decade ago, and plenty still don't do it, resulting in people with weak computers causing matches to appear laggy.

As a society, we should agree on which menu subtitles belong in. Is it language? Audio? Display? Game Settings? Sometimes I've seen games put them in multiple menus so that we always find them where we're looking for them.

I'm no expert on colorblind settings, but I tried playing Monaco with someone who's red/green colorblind, and that game was nearly impossible for him.

If your game runs online, I should be able to host the server myself, and launching a listen server from within the game ought to be present, too. It might be nice to surface port forward information there as well. LAN is nice; Direct IP connections are better. (Thanks, Larian, for including both!)

I get enough of this from my glasses, thanks.

• Description of the effects and hardware demands of graphics options.
• An actual benchmark for 'optimized settings' (even if it's just crunching numbers) instead of hardcoded GPU names.
• Clear indication of which difficulty the game was balanced for.
• Msaa. Hate running old games at 200 fps with jagged edges and blur thanks to fxaa.
• Instant controls switching between controller and keyboard. Tired of games that pick input type at startup, pick input glyphs at startup, ignore first button press from a different input before switching, disable controller if keyboard input is detected etc etc.
• Not games but steam: just let me force steam input on all games like Proton.

Also how 'full potato' do you want it to be? I assume the settings don't scale below low, so it'd be just turning off shadows, reflections etc. Would even the lowest resolution textures fit in the vram of an older card? And besides, the engine is probably designed for modern multi core cpus so even if the graphics could be scaled down it might not run well

Chromatic Aberration toggle

Motion Blur toggle

Distortion Effect toggle

Vignette Effect toggle

FoV slider

DLSS/FSR implementation (cause fuck TAA, like really, really fuck TAA and its smear)

Oh, and Head Bobbing/Camera Shake slider, forgot about these

Give me a way to replay cutscenes, and history of dialog.

Save and exit to desktop straight away with no going back to the main menu before. I'm looking at you Dark Souls series! It's like the developers have never used a computer for anything not related to writing code before.

I can't think of a setting that would universally apply to all games, like I'd be hard pressed to say a setting in Tetris that would apply to Minecraft. Vision and auditory accessibility is probably about it, but those settings would look pretty different I think depending on the game or genre of game.

I just want a exit to desktop button always available. I don't always have time to go all the way back to the title screen just to edit out.

Multiplayer games should have toggles to allow more than 4 people. Why do we need to install mods or change a 4 to a 6 in some config file?

This obviously doesn't work for games like It Takes Two where more than 2 players would be senseless, but your survivalcraft game shouldn't be limited in the same way.

Another commented said Fully Remappable Controls, but I want to foot stomp it. On PC games, I use EDSF instead of WASD, but if some controls can't be remapped and they overlap with EDSF then I won't play the game.

On console, I fucking hate that Elden Ring maps "crouch/sneak" to pushing down on the movement stick. I'm furiously fighting for my fucking life against a boss that attacks every 0.7 seconds. I'm moving that stick as fast as I can, which means I'm pushing hard on it. It sucks to be trying to run away from an attack but then start crouching and sneaking away from a 40ft tall axe coming down on you.

As much as Starfield is hated, I like how they did the difficulty settings. Each type of interaction has different settings, the easier the less XP the harder the more XP earned. I like fragmented difficulty settings, not just easy, normal, hard and nightmare fuck myself have no fun.