Having x amount of life. The only resons to have this was twofolded

a - in arcades it was one of the main ways of limiting the playing times and makeing the punters throw in more quarters.

b - in the early home computers, it was a way to increase difficulty and making the players re-play the same stages over and over, to mask out that the games where not really that long due to limitations of memory and storage devices. Also many games where arcade conversions (see -a)

There are a few games where lifes can work, for example high score attackers or arcade games. But most often, it does not make sense to punish a player like this for a game they have bought.

STILLL the new stuff where you auto heal outside of combat seems just as ridiculous!! i mean there needs to be a bit of sense how and why else why portrait humans ?? right?

Generally I'm 100% hardcore is how I like my game mechanics, but yeah having to draw my own maps is where I draw the line.

I feel that permadeath should have been considered obsolete from the time Bard's Tale 1 was released. (One thing that BT1 did better than Wizardry is that it didn't permanently kill characters, and it didn't auto-save (aside from some versions removing money from saved characters when adding them to the party). Etrian Odyssey 3 has a rather interesting take on this. In the later part of the dungeon (5th/6th stratum, so late game and post game), you will encounter areas where the auto-map feature doesn't work, your position is not shown on the bottom screen, and you also won't be able to see the position of FOEs on the bottom screen, either. Hence, for those areas (and only those areas), you need to keep track of your position and map it manually yourself. (Note that you can still draw on the bottom screen during this part, so you can use that to draw the map; could also put something on the map to mark where you think you currently are, for example, but it won't automatically move when you move.)

This is one of the few times I got the feeling of being truly lost when playing a video game, though I believe I had an Ariadne Thread in my inventory that I used once it got scary. (Also, I did make some mistakes in mapping this area, having to erase lines I drew and draw new ones.) Or:
c - So that a player death doesn't force them all the way to the last save point. Stranger of Sword City Revisited does this on the easier difficulties; you get a certain number (1 or 3) of revives in case of a party wipe, with those revives restored when you return to town.

I remembered another one: non-retroactive HP gains.

Basically, in many RPGs, the HP you gain depends on your vitality at the time of level up. In a game where you allocate stat points at level up, for example, this means that a character who raises vitality early will end up with more HP than one who raises vitality late. (Note that there's typically no comparable mechanics for other stats.) In other words, if you want a more poweful character in the long run, you need to raise vitality first, which makes no sense.

Examples of games where this is a thing and is a problem include the Elder Scrolls series (from Arena up through Oblivion), Final Fantasy 3 (it's not an issue in 1 or 2 because 1 doesn't give you any control over stats and 2 only ties the difficulty of gaining max HP to your actual max HP, not the number of times it's increased).

Limited save slots. Let me store as many save files in my hard drive as I want and I will worry later about how much space they take.

Well, I for one like a good mapping challenge. Too bad there are so few of them.
In linear or 3D dungeons I much prefer an automap, though.

I feel like some of what is being named here isn't truly obsolete. I do get that "insert quarter to continue" may be virtually obsolete at this point.

But lack of auto-map, permadeath etc still strike me as viable options to have in games for those who like it. Perhaps ideally, one could have the option to turn those settings on or off, without throwing them out altogether.

To me obsolete implies something that shouldn't be used or brought back due to some sort of objective reason, not just subjective preference.

It's not that these are objected to in the sense of complete rejection, it's more a matter of having the conveniences of modern technology should render them more as a stylistic choice at best, like a deliberately limited color palette. How many devs do you know would be able to get away with 1-bit color?

People clearly have a desire for ironman modes and other restrictions, as challenges.

Their omission from a game which does not style itself after products of yore would be a baffling disappointment; and may simply prevent some of us from being able to fully enjoy the games of yore without augmenting them with accessibility patches and hacks.

Permadeath. Since the invention of the save game function, this has become totally obsolete.

Which reminds me, having to invest points into cartography in Eschalon was a big whiff against it. Can you guess how many points you need to max out the automap?

16. You get 3 skill points per level, and all of them are better invested in anything else.

I don't know, indie devs have been able to get away with 8-bit graphics for the last decade+ so probably a fair bit could if they tried. On that note, would you count deliberately "pixelated" graphics to be an obsolete design choice at this point? I guess it depends on the type of game one is making, but if bigger engines/tools are available for cheap/free, is there any excuse for not using them?

Right, 8 bit. I mean, that's actually quite a spread of colors and potentials. I said 1-bit. Realize that's less than the Game Boy.

Though, one could argue there's a matter of difference of making pixel graphics of intent and of convenience.

I know, I was being snarky :D