Gaming

Not really a game, but I feel this way about being a completionist achievement hunter

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.

I made this account just to say that i love EvE online but I hate how addicted I already am. within 2 weeks i've played over 150 hours already. I REALLY don't want to play it like i played final fantasy 14 or warframe because playing games that much really burns me out really fast. So i'm trying my best to play EvE casually, which the skill system helps with to some degree but obviously i have 150 hours logged already despite this. I knew I should never have tried out EvE online. Now i can't go back :(

It used to be LeagueOfLegends.

Loved the game for the gameplay, lore and characters but hated the game for its community. I quit though, a month or two now. Hopefully stays like that.

Destiny 2.

I love the feel of the game, the best feeling shooter out there for me.

I hate how dumb Bungo are. I understand why they have to make some of the decisions they do, but it's beyond me why they consistently pick the worst solution to that problem imaginable.

No Man's Sky. It's fun and addictive and grindy and dull.

Satisfactory. I love this game. I hate the fact that it chews up so much game time. This blows CIV games out of the water for the “one more turn” effect for me.

But I was cruising the other place one day, and saw a user with the flair “it’s not a game, it’s a hobby”. And that changed a lot of my attitude towards this game. Now I treat it like an overly complex model train builder.

Destiny 2

I love the gunplay, movement, and abilities, but I hate how much the upper management in Bungie has turned the game into a cashcow to milk until dead.

Overwatch. I keep wanting it to be something it's not and it keeps rewarding me with pointless gameplay and addictive micro txs. Same with the rest of the blizzard lineup actually. They all used to be so much fun, but now they just ring hollow even when I'm having a good time.

World of Warcraft. Ugh.

The Binding of Isaac. Thousands of hours in that game. Love it because it can be so fun if things go right (or at least okay), and so incredibly frustrating if things go wrong

Csgo

Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Elden Ring/Sekiro

Love 'em. But also hate 'em.

The love should be obvious to other fans. The hate isn't from the difficulty, though. The hate comes from little niggling bullshit like the size or shape of certain hitboxes, the way the input queue works, the delay in rolling because roll and run are the same button, the fact enemies don't use up stamina or mana, etc. There's always one thing or another that will make me fume in all these types of games related to one of the above mentioned things. Like in Fromsoft's offerings specifically I regularly get upset by the camera and lock on not doing what I expect or want. But Lies of P has a really nasty habit of totally eating my inputs where sometimes my dude won't even swing his god damn weapon. And The Surge has the most funky input queue so if you accidentally press a button twice, you are fucked.

I used to play Call of Duty.

Halo 2 on Legendary difficulty.

Valheim.

I love it so much. Especially starting a server with friends. The exploration and possibilities are endless. So many designs for buildings to try, looking for a new spot to put a base, etc.

I fucking hate the swamp and mistlands. Both feel like you run out of stamina continually. At least in the swamps once you're geared to that tier you handle the combat. In mistlands you go out exploring, can't see shit, have 3 seekers and a soldier come running at you from all directions, and a gjall drop in from above you. Even if you've got all the magic set fully upgraded it's just ball ache waiting for stamina and eitr to refill. Also the last 2 bosses are a pain. I still haven't killed the mistlands boss.

In addition, I hate farming resources for building. It's fine when you are building your first house, but then it becomes extremely boring.

But if any of my friends are like "yo, gonna do a Valheim run to get ready for Ashlands," I'm in.

Me playing Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth as a huge fan of the OG.

Dead Cells. Great graphics, super tight gameplay, rouge-lite maps and weapons. Stupidly fucking hard at 2-boss cells. I hit that wall so hard I quit playing the game entirely even though there is a bunch of new DLC that would be fun to play with at 0 or 1 BC.

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.

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.

Honestly? I'm having a love-hate-love-annoyed thing with Baulders Gate 3. It's great but I have no fucking clue what I'm doing a lot of the time, the looting is so crucial and so so so slow, it's glitchy, and I wasn't googling things or using guides until I failed an entire area by triggering a timer I didn't know about but I feel I have to use guides now because I don't want to repeat that.

Also I'm peeved that I've either accidentally locked a romance option or it just glitched out altogether.

But still, having a good time. It's a good game.

Currently in Act 2. I'm playing Durge but fighting my "nature". I did not know what I was getting into until THAT ONE THING happened at camp. Luckily I save scummed and found a way around it and did the thing with the backup/stand-in which was better than the alternative but also kinda sad because I'm playing a base model Durge if you know what I mean.

It's been a fun mental roleplay experience, I'm enjoying it but GODDAMN I hate checking 15 empty crates until finally finding one rotten carrot that I still am grateful for because I need that 1 gold.

Friends don't let friends play League.

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.

Waking up each morning? 😀

Dyson Sphere Program, it is great in multiplayer and cool to see your dyson sphere grow. But at some point it is just tedious to expand and you don't have any real benefit from it. The few runs I made were nice but never finished a sphere. It also takes so much time I do not have anymore.

Eve online, although it's more of a love the game, hatee the community/players kinda deal.

Most recently Chivalry 2... When it's good it's sooo good, but when I suck it's the most infuriating game I've played in years.

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.

Yu Gi Oh. Most of the love is nostalgia.

Nowadays every card has like 4 paragraphs of abilities with obscure rulings that while not errata'd on the card, are expected to be understood by every player, which themselves amount to LITERALLY 15 pages for the current Master Duel version.

Not to mention that over they years they have added mechanic after mechanic that exists for the pure purpose of forcing everyone to rebuy a deck every time a new mechanic is added.

It's gotten so bad that not even KONAMI knows what's going on and constantly releases gamebreaking cards that get nerfed or removed later because they can't keep track of every possible interaction EVEN WHEN using massive automatic parallel testing.

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.

Basic answer but Valorant.

There's no better feeling than winning in a tac shooter. There's no worse feeling than losing in a tac shooter.

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.

Helldivers 2. I love everything except for the constant crashing

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.

Killing floor 2. It's a great game, and I love it, but it has downgraded in every way since mid-early access. It's too bright now, they ruined the flashlight system, made it way too easy, and added some really stupid, annoying enemy types.

That said, I just can't get enough of it. After all the bad decisions they made, the core experience is so good that it's still a solid 8.5/10 for me.

Oxygen Not Included. Base building, but with stupid "clones" instead of competent people. Can't tell you how many times these idiots have built out dug themselves into suffocating... 10/10 would recommend, unless you're predisposed to heart problems...

Team Fortress 2. It was so well balanced when they nerfed the spies backstab for that 1 week back in April 2008 😂

Trove, it's nostalgic and has a cool art style but it's soooooo grindyyyyy