What's your love/hate game?

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

I'm still trying to learn Mahjong for Yakuza 0...

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.

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.
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!
For me BotW was amazing right up until you fired your second ancient arrow. Guardians start as terrifying monsters you have to run from. When you finally get ancient arrows, you get revenge, and that's extremely satisfying. After that, it's just a boring slog of killing guardians to farm their parts to kill more guardians ad nauseam until you beat the game.
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 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 :(

That’s why you use Excel at work… to take the edge off.
- Joke's on you my friend. I don't have a job :) Also i use linux so i use libreoffice and not microsoft office.
  also i've never used microsoft edge (even when i used windows) so i don't need to take it off my pc :) although i probably would now if i ever went back to windows.
You really chose poorly for a “casual gaming” experience my friend. Good luck
- Eve Online : casual gaming : : married with children : casual relationship
Came here to mention Eve. I love flying through space and assembling different ships, but it is such a time machine; it almost reminds me of getting into Civilization and feeling that 'one more turn' compulsion.
I'm pretty anti-capitalist irl, but something about the game has got me satisfying market demands and working in a corporation for fun. It's weird.
- Pretty anti capitalist as well. Its got me thinking about many things differently

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.

The game played fun and I liked it. But once at end game it's: premade teams, yelling on comms and people that take the game very serious, combined with many features and challenges being time limited. Pushing a "must play" mentality, playing on FOMO.
At one point we where in a game, people yelling cause it was the last day to unlock some weapon. And I realized.. why the fuck am I doing this.. this ain't fun. Finished the round with the guys, got the unlock. Uninstalled the game and have not missed it since.

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.

We are on the same boat, played some urf just see if I could have the same feeling for the game again but it's gone, it's a shame because I really enjoy the gameplay just everything else about doesn't justify it. I also quit a handful of weeks ago.

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

They may have fixed it since I last played it but my problem was always every planet is toxic or too hot or too cold or something.
- You can buy (or find) upgrades for your exosuit to handle that.

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.

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.

My biggest issue was how needlessly complicated it was making anything look halfway decent, particularly with tracks. Just getting the tracks to not float over platforms takes hours, then trying to get the platforms to sit on the terrain nicely takes more, and no matter how nicely that turns out, it looks like the game forgets to render plants wherever you build anything... All to pump ever more complex crap into a trash compactor while the cool space elevator stands dormant.
Ugh, it's such a cool idea, but every action feels like a mistake, and every project feels like a waste. I wish I loved this game.
Oh, and I almost forgot the hilarious amount of waste nuclear power makes, while coal and oil are infinitely renewable and objectively the cleanest forms of energy. Feels like oil & gas propaganda.
- There is an option to align things to a global standard grid. If you start construction using that option, everything in the game snaps together perfectly.
  It changed the game completely for me.

World of Warcraft. Ugh.

Yep, though I feel it is mostly nostalgia.
The game has devolved to a point where only tryhards and boosters (or people paying for boosts) are having any fun. The rest of us having to wade through the toxic waste they leave behind. The game feels like middle management having control of all the resources and if you're in a lower position you get screwed over.
Ahead of the Curve achievements, gear scores, raider.io, simulationcraft, DBM, perpetually unbalanced classes and specs and mechanics interviews over Discord have ruined the game to a point where I no longer feel I can play the way I want to. Rushing to the point where you're ready to raid and then spend hours reading strategy guides, configuring DBM, applying to groups, is not a fun way to experience end game content while basically skipping all the storylines, and everything that makes the world feel like an actual world.
And most of it is just symptoms, it used to be that bosses had relatively simple mechanics and raids were there to experience crucial battles in the story. People used to just get a group together and try defeating a raid, not too worried about failure. Nowadays people are obsessed with managing away risks of failure.
Being kicked from a group halfway through because your spec has slightly lower DPS for the specific encounter while topping the damage done charts in others is the kind of bullshit that I won't deal with anymore.
Actually engaging with the end game content feels like applying for an entry level position where they require 10 years of previous experience to even qualify.
damn, fellow mmorpg player, feel your pain. FF 11 and FF 14 got me good, but im still gonna do every quest anyway. Although currently in 11 the game for me ends at limit break 3 quest because i had trouble with it last time i played, maybe i'll pick it up again and give the parts i was stuck on another shot at some point. Once im past genkai 3 the rest seems a lot less frustrating. the lb 3 quest isn't really hard, just obnoxious as all hell.

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.

I loved Overwatch. As a Paladins refugee, it was everything I wanted from such a game. I played for quite a while, but then Overwatch 2 came. They turned Overwatch into Paladins, I was so disappointed and angry that I quit mid season 1 and that's the end of competitive shooters for me. I play Vermintide 2 every now and then (great game if you give it the chance) and no other online game anymore, except some co-op survival game with a friend or two every now and then.
Same with the rest of the blizzard lineup actually.
Diablo 4 and modern WoW could easily be great games if they'd just ditch the fucking level scaling.
Whatever braindead asshole at Blizzard thought it'd be a great idea to not get more powerful when you level up (you actually get weaker because your gear stays the same) needs to get launched into the sun.
- I think they both have significant issues past level scaling honestly, and I think it's all by design to sell you the game as a service instead of a fun experience. It incentivises them to make a game that keeps you playing, not one you're glad you played.

Csgo

Cs gone
I've always been a huge Valve fan, and I still kind of am, but giving CSGO the Overwatch """""2""""" treatment was such a blatant act of disrespect to the players. I'll never be able to forgive them for what we lost during that update.
Community servers still haven't recovered, the weapons + buy menu are fundamentally different, we're still missing a significant amount of maps and game modes... And they ruined any chance for GO to be able to continue on powered by the community.
- Yeah I never expected Valve to do that. Very disappointed. It was a tad buggy on linux last time I played but I'm sure they have fixed all the kinks now

I used to play Call of Duty.

F

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

Halo 2 on Legendary difficulty.

Man, this brings back memories.
- I actually never played a single Halo game until MCC got ported to Steam on PC, so I'm a fairly new but now die-hard fan of the series.
I routinely replay it and beat it in coop, but it's definitely akin to CBT
The jackal snipers become so ridiculous at some areas where there is like 10 covering a given area, I got collad'd with my buddy and in the death screen I saw an additional 5x beam rifle shots where we were standing. It's honestly genuinely hilarious how bad it is.
- Played thru it twice on Legendary. First once to do it, and then they fixed Achievements on Steam Proton/Linux so I felt I needed to do it again. shrugs.
  I'll probably stick to Heroic in the future, now that I have most Legendary-specific Achievements.

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.

the way the input queue works
This bothered me a lot when I first started playing these games, but it's actually a good thing once you're very familiar with it. Everything becomes very predictable when you know the timings of your enemies and your own moves, so you can know ahead of time whether or not something is going to play out the way you want, and sometimes you can even back out without getting punished.
the delay in rolling because roll and run are the same button
There's no delay in rolling in any of the games, it's starting to sprint that's delayed. The roll comes out the moment you let go of the button, so you can have it come out in 1 frame. If you have it ingrained in your head that it comes out on release (instead of on press) you'll be in full control with no delay.
But everything else is pretty true lol. I think the hitboxes are a lot better than people make them out to be, though, except for DS2.
- There's no delay in rolling in any of the games, it's starting to sprint that's delayed
  It's delayed in the sense that it doesn't happen on pressing the button but on letting it go, so it takes a split second longer than you might expect. If it went on press it would not appear to be delayed by a millisecond, as any game where the dodge is it's own dedicated button would show. It's super easy to hold the button down longer than intended in an intense moment and end up taking a hit because of it.

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.

Agreed. The swamp is a steep cliff but it works once geared. But mystland is just vile. I do not understand how they thought that would be a fun addition.
The must, okay.. but combined with the vertical terrain is stupid. For us it also killed the desire to keep playing.
- I think something that would at least make it not quite as bad would be to have the middle click/secondary attack for the fire staff be a rocket jump. That in combination with the feather cape would be cool because you could leap up mountain cliffs, out of melee combat, and above the mist to help give you an idea of where you wanna run to.
  Also, it would be available as a moderately easy to acquire gear upgrade. After you've got the 5 black cores from one or two infested mines, you've got access to everything else you need to each item without too much difficulty.

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

I'm a huge fan of the OG but I'm also loving the new one. Only thing I'd currently complain about is I prefer the weapon upgrading in the previous entry over what we have now and the folios. Feels like a step back.
- I like Rebirth so far too, and the combat feels much smoother for me than Remake. Red XIII is so fun, and the character writing for our party (especially Tifa imo) is so good and exactly what I wanted from an expansion of the original's story.
  My major hate part I can't really talk about without getting into plot spoiler territory, so I won't. But I also don't like the open map atm. It feels very...Ubisoft-y; busywork or empty. I know I can skip them if I want to, but I'm a completionist that doesn't want to miss any story/lore, and the side missions are really dragging for me. It was the same with FFXVI, and I don't know if I like this approach SqEnix seems to be gearing towards. I wonder if the new Kingdom Hearts is going to be the same way.
I want one damn game, not however slices they give us
- You know how the original was on four discs? You'll get the same experience, but spread out over 15 years, and you have to pay for each disc individually.
  God, I hate this shit, but I'm such a loser when it comes to FF7 I spend money like a fucking gambling addict.

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.

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.

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.

Same for me my first playthrough. I was very confused and overwhelmed and missed tons of shit. But my second playthrough is much more a love love thing.
it's glitchy
I keep hearing this but I've never experienced it. What bugs are you getting? (Also what platform?)
- PC with an Xbox controller.
  Most of it is little things, not as bad as early release vanilla Skyrim - no flying mastodons.
  Like right now the Patch 6 broke my inventory UI a little bit. I'm no longer able to turn off "Tooltips" in my inventory which now covers the menu when interacting with items and is really annoying.
  One of my quests refused to resolve even though I did everything correctly. I looked it up and it's a common occurrence. (Save the kid from the harpies on the beach).
  Without spoilers I recently took Karlach to the smith for the second time, which should hypothetically open up the next romance option for her. Despite being super high approval I couldn't get the romance to trigger. I even went back and tried to do stuff according to a guide I found online of people experiencing the same thing and it's still broken.
  Frequently the audio or battle animations for a character in my party just cut out entirely. It's completely random and not consistently one person. I'm not sure what triggers it and it will fix on its own either by going to camp or fast traveling or a cut scene sometimes. It's totally inconsistent and random.
  So a bunch of random things.
There's a bulk loot option. Not sure what you play on, but you should be able to Google it.
- PC with an x-box controller. Holy cow thank you! If this works it will be a literal game changer. I hope it works on stuff just placed around and on the ground (the "pick up" vs loot). I'll try it after work!
  Edit: GAME CHANGED. It's still a little slow but much better than it was.

Friends don't let friends play League.

Funnily enough I hated league before my friends made me play it for "fun"

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.

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.

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.

I once shot someone from halfway across the map with an arrow. Instant kill. I can imagine that that was somewhat rage inducing
- Two days ago I joined a game, spawned, and instantly got flattened by a catapult. Had a chuckle. Spawned in the same place .. instant catapult. Mildly annoying but what are the chances? Smaller chuckle. Spanwed again... Made it three paces, ballista to the chest.

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

Eve online: excel spreadsheets as a video game. :)
- Not wrong! ;)
  Sometimes I'm sure I spent more time on my spreadsheets than I did undocked.

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.

Yeah. You ought to try Magic. We've had tons of time to practice the old everything-is-complicated-and-fucked dance; we've been doing it since 1993.
The one "saving" grace you can consider (except to your wallet) is that official competitive play allows cards from sets only up to a certain age from the present, with the most restrictive being "standard" which at the time of writing doesn't allow any cards older than a set released in 2021. It's not even that the metagame makes old decks nonviable -- you're literally forced to buy new cards when expansions come out if you even want to be allowed at the table.
"Modern" is a little less restrictive with the time span, but still restricted. Because otherwise, there would be no way to contain the pileup of legacy unstoppable strategies and broken combos, plus the combinatorial explosion of interactions between old mechanics and the seemingly mandatory 2-3 new ones added per expansion set.
So casual players (myself included) just play with whatever damn fool old cards we have with a gentleman's agreement not to be assholes with the game-breaking combos because fuck it, crack is cheaper.
- I got out of MTG at Legends and haven't regretted it. It used to be fun but I've tried the recent video games and it's almost completely gibberish to me.
  Keep in mind I complained when they introduced trample, so I'm probably not their demographic.
  If they did a Beta only tournament with reissued cards I might try it but the game has been powercreeped to oblivion.
Need to replace all this with real life gwent

Waking up each morning? 😀

The game is called Outside.
- Jokes aside, if I woke up outside each morning, I'd likely consider not waking up anymore.
Feel you bro. I just stopped waking up in the morning
- Right?? Gonna try it out this morning and see how I feel.
I am not a morning person, so I consider the best mornings to be the ones I sleep through.

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.

It has multiplayer?!?
- Depends on how you count it. There is a multiplayer mod, nebula. Before the latest major patch (introducing enemies), it worked pretty flawlessly. I only had some glitch with infinite bot charge sometimes but nothing game breaking. Very rarely it randomly stated an error and had to re-join the host. Only downside is that you need to (and must be able to) port forward yourself! Otherwise playable like if it was singleplayer.
  For the latest version, last time I checked, there was still no official release. But a work-in-progress I could have potentially downloaded and compiled myself. But since my motivation to play was already low I chose not to figure that out.
I have one playthrough that I've completed 8/10 spheres on the first star, and everything is automated to the point that I could manage to build all 640 spheres, but.... That would take me 1.5 hours to gather the resources, turn on the rail guns and rockets for 30 minutes, and shut it down again to gather resources for the next sphere.
Before you ask, that 30 minutes doesn't include pausing the game and adding in the next shell, but after the first system, I could copy paste each other systems shells. The 30 minutes is building the frame and capturing all the solar sails. I generally average ≈100 solar sails wasted per shell, hence the stages.

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.

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)

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.

I will never understand tactical shooters, too restrictive, i wish planetside 2 was better/had more players. and also that they could fix some of the issues with the server, specifically limitations to the number of people in one fight. But planetside 2 is a game i love and also hate.
Yep, no better way to feel bipolar than to play a 40m game of Valorant.

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

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.

KF1 was such a blast so many hours grinding every level 6, modding servers, to me all they had to do was give that game better textures and polish some things and I would be hooked again, kf2 missed the mark for me.

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.

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

For the longest time it was Overwatch. I couldn't stop playing and I always left more pissed than I started. Thankfully OW2 made it so I can hate it and not play in peace.

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...

Escape From Tarkov

Seconded. It's so infuriating and I can't put it down.

Black Desert Online. I still think about it from time to time and love it as a game but it is also a dangerous addiction that destroyed my life for a time. So I just stay away cause I don't want to be sucked in again.

Currently, Helldivers 2. It's tough, but chaotic fun at its best. Frustratingly unfair at its worst.

Chivalry 2.

I always love playing. But the more I play the more salty I become...

Stardew Valley is getting there for me. I usually burn out on a game at 80 hours, or whenever the credits roll and there's no more fun content to pursue. I'm creeping up on 200 hours in SDV, and I often feel like I'm playing it because I have to harvest those blueberries to make mad cash to get that 10M clock that prevents decay on my farm. It's starting to feel like a job, but then, I still fire it up when I'm looking for something to play because it's just comfortable and easy to get into the groove. I think I really need to give it a break, but I just keep coming back.

Animal Crossing New Horizons

Overwatch

Fortnite. Love the game, appreciate the mechanics and skills of good players. Hate the game, because I suck at it

Planetside

I find it so fun but also easy rage quit

Monster Hunter World right now. IMO the game has fantastic worldbuilding, monster design, weapon design, armor design, even the combat is pretty good.

But the UI is an attack on humanity and it has a lot of feel bad mechanics. For example some monsters have attacks that even if you dodge or are otherwise not in the hit area, you still get stunned/wobble/etc. If you run out of stamina, your character takes a 10 second nap during which the monster can delete you. If a monster hits you too frequently, you also take a nap. Some monsters don't have cooldowns on their attacks and just spam them. Some monsters ignore or otherwise punish you for using gear (Behemoth slaps you through evasion mantle and Lunastra explodes sometimes if you flashbang it).

I still love it, but it can definitely be frustrating.

I usually have a little bit of both for every game I try, but if I had to pick, it would be Elite: Dangerous. I really love the visuals and how immersive it all is, but the gameplay gets repetitive and boring really fast. I guess I'm part of the problem, since I only did exploration and exobiology (if a game gives me a pacifist route, then I'll pick it in a heartbeat); maybe I should try something like mining or hauling, eventually.

I also have some nitpicks concerning the gameplay, like, if I'm in a planetary rover, I have to use the laser turret intended for combat instead of a dedicated mining drill/laser. Or, when I'm collecting genome samples for exobiology, I can only gather from one species at a time. Considering that you only gather data for a single population, which usually spread out far and wide, gathering genome data on a single planet takes a long ass time.

EDIT: Also, traditional roguelikes (Brogue, Cogmind, Dwarf Fortress). They look awesome, but holy shit do they make me stupid

EDIT 2: Also, Etrian Odyssey games. For the same reasons -- top notch visuals and presentation, but frustratingly difficult and obtuse gameplay

Has to be Apex Legends for me. That game can be extremely infuriating or a blast.

Shenzen IO

I had some coding experience when I played it, but Oh god, I was not prepared. BUT I LOVE IT SO.

Rocket League.

My laptop is currently eating shit, so right now it’s this mobile game called Solitairica. It’s just a solitaire roguelike, but the shuffling is truely random. Sometimes you go into a fight and the enemy just does their highest damage attack 4 times in a row and you literally can’t win without incredible luck.

Old School Runescape - an amazing game with so much content and depth in the end-game, as well as great experience in early-to-mid-game. However, the game is insanely grindy and it sometimes feels unbearable to actively train a skill for 20 hours straight in order to do a single task, or to go unlucky on a boss and spend 50 hours killing it over and over just to not get what you wanted. It does feel really good when you do finish a difficult grind, though.

Nier: Automata

Such a great game story- and gameplay wise. But I always feel like a creep the entire time I'm playing, because of the oversexualisation of the main character. Every outfit is skintight or miniskirted, and the cutscenes are full of deliberate upskirt angles.

State of decay, absolutely love this game bc for me it's "almost" realistic zombie survival game out there (same like project zomboid). What i hate from that game basically just game bugs....so....many bugs....that i can't stand, from inconsistent zombie spawn, buggy driving control, inconsistent zombie alert range, inconsistent horde/hive, etc

OW2

Ark Survival Evolved; only game that I say "fuck you and I'll see you tomorrow"

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…

League of Legends... If that game was open source... All of its problems would have disappeared a long time ago.

Shadow Empire - it's so challenging, it feels amazing when you pull something off, but then at least half of the games are just getting rekt by the AI.

For a while it was Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate because I kept trying to go for 15 rounds in the endless mode to unlock a mode that I find underwhelming for how much effort I put into it.

Now it's just the pokemon fan game Pokemon Keishou because I'm being dumb and doing my best to do a gen 9* only run and am stubborn about trying not to lose.

*my box of members who helped in major battles does have non-gen 9 mons otherwise I'd still be stuck at the beginning of the game with a level 100 starter. Also, starter isn't gen 9 because it's not gen 9 starters. It ain't leaving my team either.

It's my username. I'm a diehard fan, but MajorHavoc still kicks my ass around level 6 or 7.

Binding Of Isaac Afterbirth - no other game I've ever played has made me so suspicious that the developer hates the player almost as much as they hate the main character. I've rage-deleted this game off my PC more than any other - which says a lot.

There's also Jagged Alliance 2 and all it's mods - inexcusably shallow world-building, a threadbare, low-stakes plot that nosedives in early game and never recovers, awful political subtexts and badly broken game mechanics (despite the miracles modders have managed to achieve with it) - yet it still (somehow) manages to be one of the best turn-based squad-based affairs around that inexorably tantalizes you with what it could have been.

The Sims 4. It's the worst game in the mainline series, but it has the best mods (which are the only thing making it playable) so I put up with it.

Currently Vintage Story. It's a fantastic game. But there's no easy way to anything in the game. It's all hard mode. Fuck it makes me angry but I still blew my Saturday away playing it.

Mordhau

Star Trek Online. Gods what a janky mess, but I keep coming back to it.

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.

wizard101

no need to elaborate, all those who play/played it know

Apex Legends

Gotta love a game to really hate it.

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

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.

Ark: survival evolved. It's the buggiest, moast bloated piece of unbalanced trash out there. But run your own server with decreased timers and higher gathering rates, plus the occasional mod abuse to circumvent some bugs, it's a great time with friends. Oh and just disable all the alphas. They're dumb. Your T-Rex shouldn't die from a random raptor.

Ark 2 is gonna be a fucking trip and if it isn't a massive buggy mess at release I will buy 3 copies.

any valve game, any rockstar game… getting over it

Ksp

Playstation, but Steam also.