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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Minecraft, Stellaris, Genshin Impact. The love-hate relationship I have with these is that I love the games themself, but hate the corporations behind them.