The things I miss and the things I hate kinda run together.
- Not having a physical manual come with a physical copy of a game. Opening a case and seeing a slip of paper with a QR code or a URL where a booklet used to be fucks me up in a strange way. I still have my manual for Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. It's 183 pages of game information, world lore, information about the races, and all sorts of shit. The thing is a fucking tome. I remember Morrowind having a pretty thick manual as well.
-The internet has essentially been condensed to a network of apps as far as mass usage goes. Smaller niche forums and websites have all been merged into a Reddit blob.
- RGB lights taking over pretty much everything in the PC industry. I just want a GPU and case that aren't going to fucking glow. It's one thing when it's optional, it's another when it comes with it.
-Fuck the mass adoption of Discord. I'd rather be a fucking boomer and go back to Ventrilo or Teamspeak, but those are basically moonrunes to most people these days.
-The focus on optimization being lost as time progresses. Since storage is now relatively cheap, file sizes keep getting larger and larger. The advent of PC gaming came about from 1st and 2nd generation coders trying to balance what they could achieve in terms of presentation with the hardware that was available at the time.
The "Doom runs on everything" meme is a testament to how well optimized the game was to run on the hardware at the time. Kind of an aside I suppose, but here's a video that skims the idea. The title is kind of clickbait, but the subject matter gives a good perspective of why people treat John Carmack like a techno-wizard.