Most of the time I wish games had an option to auto-skip everything that’s skippable (and just about everything that isn’t gameplay should be skippable).
I usually start a game intending to fully immerse myself in it, but the story part of the game usually doesn’t click with me. I’m playing Ghost of Yotei right now and it’s a perfect example of that. Super fun game, boring story.
I've also wanted the reverse option. I tend to want to play the story first and foremost and get deep into that, but the gameplay keeps getting in my way. I still think a lot more gameplay content should be skippable, especially in games that work so hard to tell a deep story.
LucasArts' adventure games had a skip gameplay button. I remember using that the most in Full Throttle, but there were a few other places it came in handy.
Of recent games, I've felt this desire the most in Baldur's Gate 3. BG3 has won awards for its deep story. BG3 has a ton of writers that worked very hard on it. BG3 has some pretty complex to navigate dialog trees that I want to deeply and widely explore. Every time it drops me into combat I roll my eyes and often quit. I tolerate D&D's turn-based tactical combat socially with friends around a table or Discord/Zoom call, but I never want to Solo an entire Party by myself. It's just not fun for me.
It frustrates me that all of the stuff I find fun (the dialog trees and cut scenes) are skippable but the part I don't fun isn't (the turn-based combat). Sure, I can play other games with combat types and difficulty settings I find more fun, but it's weird that award winning stories in games are still inaccessibly gated to specific combat styles. LucasArts added skip buttons for everything and nobody cared, but now it is controversial to ask for combat skip buttons in games that have won awards for their stories. I find so many super fun stories with boring games attached.
(Sure mods/cheats help, and that's how I've gotten my furthest into BG3, but you don't need to mod in a "Skip Dialog" button. It seems silly to me that I have to manage a complex mod build or install an expensive cheat engine just to do something that is out-of-the-box for people that don't want stories. We all play different parts of games. "Combat" shouldn't be special in narrative-heavy games, I want to get deep into the story game and you want to get deep into the "combat" game. It's the same desire, just different, equally expensive, "sub-games" we are optimizing for.)
Visual novels usually present an autoplay feature[1] which stops at choices, or just skips text you haven't met yet. The genre is famous for its multiple endings, even in the dozens, so a game can branch a lot and players re-play a game many times, so the autoplay feature is appreciated.
You can also set the text speed in many games, and there's a play log called history[2] if you missed something.
I usually start a game intending to fully immerse myself in it, but the story part of the game usually doesn’t click with me. I’m playing Ghost of Yotei right now and it’s a perfect example of that. Super fun game, boring story.