Mine would have to be League or Warframe tbh.
Apex Legends. The core mechanics and gunplay feel amazing and the highs of BR gameplay made for some of my favourite moments in gaming. I spent over 1500 hours in this game, long after my friends gave up because it’s that good.
And yet I haven’t played it more than a few hours since 2021. Oh, I’ve tried, I even had a 12 hour checkup on it with the old squad a month ago to give it a fair shot. In this session we encountered collision bugs that caused player death, weapon swap bugs, healing selection bugs, inconsistent movement (inb4 “player error rawr grr”, whatever), UI bugs that put us in the wrong gamemode, and probably more that I forgot. Many of these issues have been in the game since season 0, 5 years ago, yet they still pop up every session. Plus, the matchmaking gets worse and worse every season, especially so for solo play. Without fail, our below average, rusty Plat-ranked asses repeatedly got matched against Predator teams with 4k/20 badges to get stomped.
Each nuisance may be small, but compound them together and add years of them not being addressed, and you’ve ruined my favourite game. By focusing solely on the content output instead of the core game, they’ve sacrificed the game’s integrity and I fail to truly enjoy myself any longer. After several years of on and off, I sadly don’t see myself comung back anymore.
The new season feels “fun” again (to me at least). Last season was the worst it’s ever been in terms of BR. The TDM/mixtape stuff was all I played.
This season BR and ranked is fun again. The tweaking they did has me enjoying it much more. The ranked is better because you can overcome bad teammates a little easier because it’s not a rat-fest where kills don’t matter (a la last season). I basically only solo q because my friends gave up on it a couple seasons back.
Don’t get me wrong. It can still be infuriating and you still get absolute dog shit teammates or occasionally rolled by a 3-stack, but it seems less frequent.
And mm in tdm is pretty good most of the week. I end up with really close games alot(eg 50-48 ). The weekends seem to mess it up though and its more common to get the 50-20 style shellacking where it’s super lopsided.
And controller aim assist and cross play is still super noticeable. when you get shot from someone on a console if feels like old school lag.
For me it’s cod. I know I’ve played too much of this franchise and it’s getting to the point where I don’t love or hate all of these games as a whole it’s turning into indifference which is a corporation’s worst enemy. Can’t make money if they can’t even turn my very low standards into interest.
Since my last post i am now lost to war thunder as well as eve online :'(
at least i kind of dont hate myself like i used to and can control how much i play now so i dont make myself completely miserable and only slightly miserable
Original Demon’s Souls. The missable upgrade materials, and the world tendency system that stopped working the moment the game wasn’t being heavily played anymore. I badly want that remake on PC. Here’s hoping one day…
Guild wars 2. I’ve been following the franchise since it started so it’s near and dear to my heart. I haven’t been real happy with where they’ve taken it over the past few years though and it’s frustrating to see.
For me it has to be Death Stranding. Absolutely gorgeous game. I loved to explore the world of that game.
But the gameplay is extremely repetitive. And the story drags on and on. And once you reach a certain level, is almost too easy.
Planetside
I find it so fun but also easy rage quit
Stoneshard. It was a kickstarter my Dad had backed before he passed away and it delivered afterwards, so I just tried picking it up to play and it’s such a goddamn frustrating game. It’s an open-world roguelike, fantasy RPG with tactical combat and retro-ish graphics that tries to simulate alot of different stuff, but it has such a goddamn high difficulty curve (for me at least) that I can barely make any headway with it. Just moving across the map to go to actual locations can be deadly as even an encounter with regular wolves or bandits can end up fatal or injures you so much that you have to go back to town. Saving isn’t an option unless you’re in town, you could die while traveling to a dungeon, boom, you lose everything since the last save. I’m used to playing difficult games, but this one I haven’t been able to get into a good groove with it.
X4 - Foundations. I’ve played over a thousand hours of this game, and cursed it’s name through much of that gameplay. On the surface it’s a passable first-person space-flight simulator (in the loosest sense of the term) with combat, trading, and various missions. It also supports higher tier empire building and strategy, which I’ve found the most compelling, but that aspect is often at odds with it’s first-person nature. I grit my teeth every time I’ve had to interrupt the act of building out a new station or coordinate an assault on an enemy system in order to personally save a single transport ship from a pirate/Xenon/Kha’ak attack because no matter how good or how many NPC escorts I hire they are never adequate. And if you lose a ship, good luck figuring how which station or trade routes it was servicing. The one saving grace was the ability to pause the game in order to do things like designing a station or directing ships without the concern of being interrupted. Naturally, this drags out the game significantly.
Other major detractors are the clunky, thoroughly inadequate UI (yes, there are mods that help, but they never go far enough) and the laughably bad missions. However, I must stop myself here or I will end up writing a lengthy thesis on this game.
Suffice it to say, it’s a flawed, but oddly addictive game.
Every time I fire up X4, I play for an hour or two, get frustrated with it and go back to X3 instead. I don’t think I’ve ever even left the first area of the map because the first couple of missions require obtaining things that are only sold by pirates and also it’s RNG whether a place has it or not.
I don’t think it’s that bad compared to X3, in fact I would say X3 is a better candidate than X4 for a “love/hate” award due to the almost constant jank and the… harsher consequences of unplanned rapid deceleration.
spoiler
X3 is still better though
League of Legends… If that game was open source… All of its problems would have disappeared a long time ago.
Rust. It’s simply the most toxic game I’ve ever played, but I actually love the game (not the toxicity). I have something like 5K hours in it.
It absolutely sucks when a game you love have a horrible community.
If I understand Rust correctly the toxicity is a core game mechanic. (I only got to play for a week before Facepunch dropped Linux support)
Horizon Forbidden West
The core gameplay of shooting robots with arrows and spears while exploring a huge and beautiful post-post-apocalyptic world with your trusty grappling hook and hang glider is really fucking great.
The never ending scrounging for materials, especially when those materials have to be ground out of %chance drops from huge monsters that don’t appear frequently enough for the % to trigger without running in circles is not so great.
The plot being firmly on the rails while trying to pretend that you’re making choices sometimes, is pretty fucking obnoxious. If they just stopped pretending that my choices matter and made the way the story unfolded more linear, it would be a lot less infuriating.
The character face animations and the pace of the editing during conversations is TERRIBLE. It’s not so bad when everyone is fairly stoic, but every time someone has a big smile it looks like the “Is this better?” moment from Men In Black. And virtually every conversation is punctuated with a bizarre pause where it’s obvious that the game is transitioning from conversation mode to gameplay mode, but they couldn’t be bothered to trim that added ¾ of a second so there’s this super unnatural pause where the character model goes back to neutral while the camera is right on them.
Oh, and also there’s a handful of weapons that work with any reliability, and then there are several that are worse than useless and get me killed every time I try to use them. I justify these in my mind by pretending they are the in-universe equivalent of mall ninja shit that someone thought would look cool but would never actually be used.
Friends don’t let friends play League.
Funnily enough I hated league before my friends made me play it for “fun”
Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom.
I love Zelda I always have. The first game I ever played was the original Zelda on the NES and I was hooked ever since. I’ve even played most of the games and really enjoyed all of them.
But there’s one glaring issue that I have with botw/totk. The weapon/armor system. I hate games with weapon/armor degradation and Zelda’s system is even worse than normal.
They went from weapons never breaking or taking damage at all, to shields taking damage but get the Hylian shield and it’s unbreakable, to every single weapon and shield breaks after a pathetic amount of uses.
I would’ve even been fine with an Oblivion style degradation system where the weapon does less damage the more damaged it is but can be repaired with the right tool or by going to a blacksmith.
It’s even worse when you notice that higher tier weapons break faster than lower tier ones, or that enemies can use weapons forever, yet the chosen fuckin hero only gets about 15 whacks before a solid piece of wood/metal just fuckin explodes.
This is why I don’t get Zelda games anymore. I also am not a fan of the huge open world thing that makes most of your game time running from place to place so they don’t have to make much content.
I agree, it was not very fun. It would have been much more fun to just find one copy of the elemental swords, wands, and such, and just carry around as many as you could carry and use the ones that made sense for the current battle. Even better if there were slashing versus stabbing swords which were better for certain enemies. Stuff like that.
I will say, though, even a few hours into the game it got to the point where I had too many weapons, and I very rarely ran out. Every enemy drops some. And it turns out, I didn’t really mind fighting Lynels or “Major Test of Strength” guardians to get their goods weapons once every blood moon. I enjoyed how those fights were difficult and technical.
Even just adding a repair mechanic would have been great. It also would have made a lot more sense lore-wise if BotW had the “everything made of metal is degrading from a curse” that TotK had. It made sense in TotK that weapons were fragile, but not in BotW.
All in all, it was a top-design choice. They didn’t want you to find one Royal Guard weapon an hour into the game and faceroll everything all game. That’s one of the downsides of even having a “this sword does more damage than other swords” type weapon system. How do you even explain that lore-wise? If a sword is magical, sure, but some “Royal Guard” sword isn’t automatically better than an ordinary sword of the same size, shape and also made of steel.
I broke Skyrim for myself on my first playthrough because I did dual wielding, smithing, and enchanting, maxed both of those out, and made the most insane double-enchanted dragon bone(?) swords before I finished even 1/10 of the plot. When the first dragon attack happened, I chopped it up in like 5 seconds. I was so insanely overpowered. That never happens in BotW. Even with the best weapons in the game, fighting a Silver Lynel is work!
Yep, I hate spending a decent chunk of time going somewhere to collect some good weapons, then like 2 encounters later half of them are broken.
It MASSIVELY slows down the pacing of the game and makes it feel like such a slog.
Every few months I come back to black desert and level some characters just to drop again. I don’t like raiding from the more popular games but I also don’t like the lack of direct gameplay of the more sandbox ones, so this bizarre sandboxy-themepark scratches a very peculiar itch of mine.
