Lol I'm not playing games at work don't worry, but I would if I hated my job and could afford the time. In truth a button like that would've worked a lot better when I was still in highschool, playing Diablo instead of doing my stupid accounting homework. I hated that damn subject. I even burned my books after I finished highschool in an unholy ceremony. I still have the ashes...

That's cool, but might be tricky to implement for general situations, like quicksaving when you just don't have enough health to finish a boss fight or enemy encounter. The easiest I think would simply to have, say, three quicksaves in succession, in which you only overwrite one by quicksaving 3 more times. For some reason I think Half-life had a system like that.

I rarely ever save during fights. And you may be right about Half-Life, iirc it was one of the first games to have this feature.

Regarding cutscenes, Diablo III (and I think World of Warcraft as well) have the auto skip cutscenes option. And in South Park: The Stick of Truth, skipping a cutscene by mistake is really hard, as you have to hold the spacebar until a meter fills. (By the way, there is one point in the story that you need to skip the cutscene in order to continue.)

I think Mafia II's approach to collectibles was good. The ones you unlock are permanently unlocked, so if you miss some in your first playthrough, you don't have to go for the ones you have already found again.

Also, auto-saving after beating a game and being able to keep playing, free roam style should be the norm. I hate when you beat a game and doesn't save.

Yes to all of this.

And yes yes yes to saving anywhere and easy savegame management. One can say this isn't a rare feature, but many of the new releases on Gog tout arcane save systems and permadeath like they're the greatest thing since sliced bread instead of a frustrating throwback to consoles and arcades.

Two Worlds has a feature I hadn't seen before: low-level enemies drop the usual cheap items: tunics, daggers, etc, but you can combine 2 of, say, Leather Trousers so they become slightly better Leather Trousers. Then combine again with the next 5 Leather Trousers. Ad infinitum. Saves inventory space at least!

There are games where items of the same kind don't stack. This can take up a huge amount of inventory space or make things unmanageable. To say the least, item stacking is something that I consider to be Game Design 101.

An worthwhile feature that some games have: You can permanently expand the item selection available in shops. This is usually done by paying a fee to research an item or to sacrifice objects to unlock something. In my opinion this is very nice, as I don't have to grind any longer to get additional copies via drops. Instead, I can just buy the item in question.

Oh, and Final Fantasy VI had something neat: You can swap equipment during combat. This means that you can exchange an fire weapon for a holy one. This is handy, on account of not knowing what a random encounter could throw at you.

Not the same thing, plus I've still gotten screwed from auto-saving not working (or in some cases, saving when I don't want it to save).

Thing is, items not stacking can be a deliberate design choice in order to limit the number of consumable items the player can carry at once. (With that said, I think games should separate consumable items, which can have limited carrying capacity, from equipment, which should not IMO.)

Swapping equipment during combat is not unique to Final Fantasy 6; it could be done as early as FF2 (with FF3 being the first one that lets you access shared inventory). Also, I have seen this feature in other games, including Elminage Gothic (where it is quite useful for equipping the charm that will boost the spell you are about to cast).

Anachronox
You have fixed "save points", but they also included an option in the settings to be able to save anywhere. Shadowrun Returns
Every save has a "rewind" function that allow you to go back to any significant point in the adventure of your character.

The Battle for Wesnoth
When playing a campaign you can both recruit new units (cheaper) or recall experienced units from the previous scenarios (more expensive, but well worth it).

Pillars of Eternity
You have access to a lot of difficulty options to really customize your experience instead of the more classic Easy/Medium/Hard most games use.

Deponia
Most puzzles have an option to skip them that unlocks after a couple failed tries.

Warcraft 3
When a hero quit your team during the campaign you’re given back all of its items at the beginning of the next scenario.

Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War
You can pause the game with a single key press, and give combat orders to your units, order a builder to launch the construction of something, queue some units in your production buildings, etc.

Path of Exile
Potions get emptied when you drink them for their benefit, but they fill up again (slowly) when you go back in a fight.

Yeah, and the latest Thief game is really the king of difficulty customisation. I just wish more games would take up that feature, it's not that difficult to implement.

Iirc this goes back to System Shock. I really wish more games had that feature.

Sure seems like a lot of people want save-anywhere, pause-anywhere and there are a lot of good reasons for both, in particular many people can get pulled away from a game at any instant by real life circumstances such as a phonecall, business interaction, a family member or child in need or just an interruption, or even just to need to take a bathroom break or eat. Being unable to save or pause can be frustrating as hell. Back in the console days (by which I mean 8-bit NES for young folks) that was one of many people's biggest complaints was going on some insane difficult mission and getting killed and having to do it all again without any save game ability, or with checkpointed saves where you had low granularity. There were many games that we ended up just giving up on because they were too difficult in certain areas to be fun and continuing to play them was more anger inducing than entertaining so we moved on.

Later on however, in the late 90s when emulators hit the PC scene, they usually had features like "pause anywhere" and "save anywhere" built right into the virtual machine that implemented the emulation, as well as other game enhancing features. So we went back to play a number of those games from NES and solve them while being able to save anywhere. It was a much more pleasant experience to say the least.

Back then the game companies to a certain degree had an excuse though, as the consoles did not have much RAM or ability to save games anyway and adding that ability would raise the cost of the units significantly. Nowadays however this is just not true anymore and both primary and secondary storage are in extreme abundance. There's no good excuse based on technical grounds for not implementing save-anywhere and pause-anywhere. The only reason it is done now is purely by intentional design. The developers specifically want that to be the experience we get because that is how they implement it knowing full well that there are other options easily available if they choose to care.

They can of course do as they wish though and it's fine by me largely because the market is flooded with games, and for every game that does something that I dislike and find makes the game less enjoyable or uninteresting, there are 10+ other games that more closely provide an experience that I am personally looking for.

So in the end I guess we let the cream rise to the top by how we vote with our wallets.