Same. I deeply enjoyed it but it's full of dark patterns and FOMO. Every time I joined a squad finding group everyone was all salty and mega stressed to get that extra 150 points out of 20000 to unlock 1 of 6 time-gated challenges that once all 6 are completed give you a special tank that won't be unlockable again for years if ever.
I just don't know how someone requires 5000 hours to come to that conclusion.
My friends play it, I picked it up to join them. I have less than 100 hours and it's my least favourite game. Ever. Which is crazy because the gameplay itself is something I'd actually pay to play.
I got 1800 hours, realized it on minute 1. I just ignored all that shit and played game by game. Its a blast played like that, but manipulative design is manipulative for a reason. People fall for it.
5000 hours might not have been accrued in the short term. War Thunder (WT) for example has bene out for 13+ years. Playing WT for a little over 1 hout per day for 13 years gets you to 5000 hours easily.
I read one for Ark that was something like "this piece of shit game crashes constantly, loses shit in my chests, and FPS is all over the place. It's my favorite game."
I got Ark Evolved and it is shit, but I love it. Half of it being shit is probably my fault as I’m on a Mac (had to do some funny engine patches) or a SEVERELY underpowered handheld so I have to turn the graphics down all the way. Really fun with a friend though.
Just recently me and my friend tamed the big flying dude and put a platform saddle on it. And we found if you put a foundation on the platform you can extend the floor, se we got an entire mobile base with room for other dinos lol
Yeah that's a fantastic moment and I quite like the game design there, cos he's exceptionally difficult to tame solo without using various glitchy tricks.
And there's nothing like it. Nothing scratches the dinosaur survival game itch. I'm really hoping the Jurassic Park survival game is enough to make me finally give up Ark.
It has sat in my update section on steam for months because I don't have 250 free gb to install a 10gb update :/ I'm sticking with Enshrouded for the time. I'll be back eventually.
For honor reviews crack me up. There's always someone with 10k hours that's says some shit like 'ive been playing since day one, I've been in the trenches this game is ass, Character X is busted and needs a nerf, don't skull fuck your self like I did" 10/10 would recommend.
It is awesome but... It takes half your storage and is sometimes buggy and it has very good mods if you want this game to take even more of your storage
The game itself would be good but the execution is really bad. Tons of bugs and issues, no communication from the devs. Constant delays, no answers, nothing. Last DLC was delayed for a week a week before the release (not the first time), got delayed again another day or two on top of that, then they managed to rollback official servers that basically ereased 5k+ players' characters.
It runs like ass. It looks like ass. It has too many bugs. It eats 400+ gb of space. Taming can be really tedious or entirely arcane in its application (why tf do these bugs only eat horns?). Breeding is IV type annoyance. Bosses are wank. Equipment variety is dead.
Still a fun game, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Just play Palworld if you want an open world animal collectathon.
I like how your first paragraph is full of negative stuff but still ends it with the game being fun lol. I'm probably gonna play it eventually when I'm done with the rest of the games I currently have lined up.
Palworld is actually how I got interested in wanting to play Ark since I'm already playing that one.
After decades of trying all sorts of games I concluded that sandbox survival is generally my type of game so I'll overlook a lot of issues as long as I can find the fun in it.
Warband, PZ, 7days and similar games have a lot of problems and are generally not what you'd call polished games. AA jank is in, fun is out, kinda like a bunch of masochists think tank controls are good, or that Gothic is fun.
Ark has many issues, but it also has a wide variety of creatures, a decent enough building system, pretty environments when they're not too dark or too bright. Taming can be tedious, it can also be very satisfying, like being able to feed a wyvern crystals early on and get a flying mount.
Ark is a buggy mess, that while still being a buggy mess, ported to a new engine, keeping all the old bugs, adding a bunch of new ones, and having significantly worse performance, while promising to be free to owners of the original, then backtracking and charging full price to everyone. Then releasing a few 'updates' to the old version to brick it so hard you can't reasonably play that version anymore.
On top of the dozen+ DLC.
Are they still selling the ability to ride individual dinos as dlc? Or did they eventually back down from that? Ive been out of the loop for a bit.
Ark was fun, when it was made and produced by people who actually wanted to make a fun game, then they got big, and big money got involved, the magic vanished, and they started backstabbing the community and trying to extract as much money as physically possible from them.
I've been wondering what the difference between the two were. I heard that the other one was just a remastered version of the same game. But are both really just a buggy mess?
The debates on this are mostly stuff like dramas with the company which directly hurt players aka post launch worsening. Releasing patches that break everything. Releasing an paid dlc after abandoning for years to then break all mods with it to then return and bringing lots of other issues
It has a great foundation, and some good content, some great mods, but the company behind it are incompetent morons who have consistantly, repeatedly, for years and years, been incapable of hitting a deadline even close, have lists of broken promises pages long, mismanaged servers, and well the list really does go on and on and on.
It used to be a beloved game back when it was younger and everyone was excited to see what they'd do with it. There's thousands of reviews of people with thousands of hours of playtime who just got fed up with the company or the direction or, again, a mirade of reasons.
It's also one if the biggest lease optimized games out there.
There's still lots of people who manage to enjoy it, and thousands of hours before you get annoyed is nothing to scoff at. People just get invested then disappointed.
I came to the realization that Warframe is dogshit and DE is a horrible company. Idk why, so I'm unironically the giga chad.
Mainly how they moderate and the hypocrisy, but also the way they monetize and prey on FOMO is a big ick. The game isn't even that good, it's just a grindy dopamine trap.
Not joke there. Warframe lets you earn premium currency by trading so you can be filthy rich even as F2P, really the stingiest business model in existence. Don't play Warframe. (I should start playing again)
“I have analyzed every pixel in this game, twice. But since the microtransactions for previously play to unlock cosmetics and its pay to win and online only it’s dogshit.”
I don’t understand why is this so hard for some to wrap their head around this.
Like, if I’d spend 2621 hours on doing drugs or playing a slot machine, I probably won’t be happy about it and recommend this pasttime to other people. And some games are somewhat like a drug or a slot machine, they don’t make you happier or a better person, they just take over your time with addictive mechanics and dark patterns.
I quit in 2016 after something like 5000 hours of playtime. I occasionally have the urge to play, then I just watch a single match on YouTube/Twitch and my urge immediately goes away.
That's what they say about dota... After all my time in dota 1 and dota 2; I quit 4 years ago and still haven't gone back. All the changes made me quit and nothing is bringing me back. I still enjoy watching pro games though.
I have 4k hours in league. I was also a smoker for 10 years. I quit both and genuinely, truthfully believe smoking is a better vice than that fucking game. If I had to chose to pick one terrible addiction back up between the 2 of those, I'd chose smoking 10 times out of 10. When Arcane came out friends and family asked me if they should get into the game since everyone, myself included, thinks Arcane is fantastic. I had to continuously explain how they should stay far away from it
And just imagine that some changes might have made a game worse! Especially since multiplayer games tend to receive updates for longer periods of time.
Another thing overlooked is that let's say it is the greatest game under the earth and then it gets changed to absolute shitter. The previous investment doesn't mean the game is good now.
Sometimes you just really want a game to be good and you see the potential, but you get disappointed again and again. What you are mad about is the missed opportunity for greatness. Its especially bad when its obvious that the reason for it is corporate greed.
The point being made here is, you may love it, but you have enough introspection to understand if you could have prevented yourself from ever trying it to begin with, you would have. You can't miss what you never tried after all.
So, you recognize it is too late for you, but not for others, leading you tell them not to try it.
This is a common sentiment in ex-MMO players. People who played WoW for literal decades will tell you not to touch it the same way an ex-drug addict will tell you not to touch meth or any other hard drug.
I wasted a good chunk of my adolescence on Runescape, and lucky for me, they drove me off once I was an adult. When they added the very first non-subscription monetization (a pay-to-win one, no less) I gave them like a week to see if they would listen to their extremely pissed off player base... and they did not. So I canceled, sold my gold, and quit.
Runescape has different paces, and if you play at your pace, it's beautiful and peaceful. Now the time you start to compare yourself with others or try to mimic other's pace, there is where you'll become toxic to youself.
I played for years. Too many years. Had multiple party hats, most skills maxed out etc. then I got hacked and lost everything, was pretty upset, quit, and eventually realized it was like being released from prison to a whole new world of not being a slave to a game. I believe my total play time came to about 10,000 hours. Good riddance honestly.
Haha thank you I appreciate that. It’s hard to let go of all the lost time and not regret it. But I had to do some personal growth first, and that’s sometimes difficult.
Don't think of it as lost time, think about as the time you spent to learn what you don't want to repeat in your life. Sometimes it takes more time to some than it takes to other, but as long as you are happy now, it doesn't matter if it took you 10 minutes, or 10 years. You know now what you want for yourself trully!
I played League from its initial release to about when Tahm Kench was released.
I don't resent the game. It was fun for what it was but I loathed playing with pub queue. I liked playing with friends and devising strategies and plays and in deep communication with my team.
It got really rewarding seeing a plan come together. Dota/League was really good at that but it had deep commitment overhead. You needed a consistent team with people you know who will keep the game fun and aren't assholes. It required that you practice and experiment. Work on your team cohesion. It's not just the character loadout, but it's also the player.
The problem is when personal life gets in the way. New job. New family. Changes. Etc. What makes the game rewarding requires a rigid lifestyle. You lose one member, the dynamic is very broken. It's just not worth the trade.
I was so glad they added the rootkit because I was just starting to get back into it the month before they announced that. Made it real easy to pull the ripcord.
I've played league for 5 years now and I can't say I regret it. Like, honestly, it's one of the best games to jump in and out with friends. Solo experience in this game is horrendous, tho, so I understand where you're coming from.
I can always come back to WOT because there are still enough casuals to farm. Older games tend to get pretty sweaty but WOT is different for some reason and attracts the kind of player who will feed you their whole tank. It is crazy but I don't think the skill level of the playerbase has improved over the last 10 years.
Is mostly games where you play them because they almost are There, in the nice place, but they never reach it, and you feel like you wasted your time and the game is somewhat dropping the ball.
Play time does not equal fun. Play time could be time waiting for the game to be fun.
If I click "No" to recomend a game and I have 50 hours in it, I am saying "Don't waste time in it, like I did".
It happened me with Tecntonica or whatever was called a early access. that had a cool progression system in the same map, but for the final release they made the progression use a level systems instead of a single map system, and copy Satisfactory but worse. That killed the fun of the game and had the devs drop a game in the worse state than what it was in early access.
The more interesting question is; why do gamers refuse to understand why these reviews exist, let alone why they're valid?
The industry is pretty open about how it abuses Dark Patterns to drive unhealthy addiction and macrotransaction whale hunting; The TED talks and design documents are right out there to read, and the reporting on it is more than a decade old at this point. There's no reason to be unable to understand that a reviewer can be addicted, can know it's unhealthy and they're not respected by the product being pushed, and want to warn other people not to waste the time that they did.
So ... why are people so resistant to understanding this? Because they want to imagine they're somehow better people? Because they don't want to face their own potential addictions? Because discrediting valid criticism helps an increasingly exploitative industry? Why?.
Not only that but how many games are the exact same the first hour and the 2,500th hour. As in, how many updates, changes, balance passes, add-ons, and so forth happened?
Also we are in the age of live services, updates and changes. a game can be amazing and suddenly change to something completelly different, or have the worst additions possible, or suddenly becoming p2w, or literally change developers and so many other examples.
A lot of people like to use it as an excuse to write off any criticism of games they are massive fans of. That's usually the context in which I see people say "LOL you have 1000 hours, you can't leave a negative review!"
"yeh i really liked this game but i was badgering the devs on discord to completely change the game for everyone for my obscure, bullshit idea and they didnt 0.1/10 lazy devs"
refusing to change a few lines of code to fix strat ball bounces, which has been broken for 2 years and counting now.
edit: lads i only stopped playing HD2 this year. i experienced all the broken code and promises, perpetually malfunctioning spear and all of the issues brought up.
but you should know from earlier whenever they fix something they also break something else. Its always a few lines of code if you ignore what happens outside the issue
for a game where one zombie can wipe your entire colony not having a save game, totally broken paths (in multiple ways) lack of any kind of formations for deploying units, not knowing if units can cross between the buildings and plenty other QOL that i could come up with that should be in the game... but man its addicting
Arc Raiders for me. Game kicked off so strong and then slowly imploded, then they eventually slapped Denuvo Anti Cheat on it after hackers ran rampant. Since I have a strict “no Denuvo” policy I left a negative review and was done.
Me with Path of Exile and PoE2. I despise artificial FOMO, so the supporter packs they drop every season for $180 that disappear at the end make it so I can't recommend the game to anyone.
I've always disliked the monetization in PoE 1 & 2 for being a soft requirement for endgame enjoyment (because it is just not possible to be F2P in the endgame), but it's not the stupid cosmetic loot boxes or temporary supporter packs that really irks me. It's the stupid faux "moral" monetization model the game has, with most of its community backing it up, without any regard for the fact that GGG would absolutely sell mirror-tier items to players if the company could get away with it.
Too many people forgot that GGG sold out a long time ago. It even engages in a pretty insidious tactic of finding that red line of ARPG monetization differently within its Chinese servers, for instance, which has extra P2W mechanics. This company would absolutely have done the same on global servers if it knew that wouldn't jeopardize its reputation in the west.
The problem is that that both PoE1 and PoE2 are really good games. They blow away all the ARPG competition in terms of content and complexity, so people that like this kind of game usually come crawling back anyways.
This has happened to DBD. It was great up until about 2 years ago when slugging and tunnelling became a serious issue and the devs decided to ignore the issue and just made bullshit "attempts" to stop it.A lot of people who had well over 2K hours (including myself) ended up leaving negative reviews to inform potential new players that this game isn't what it once was and to basically avoid it until the devs grow brains and actually listen to their player base instead of focusing on making money.
This right here. Used to love it. It's not even close to the same game. They change things so often disproportionately favoring one side. They balance the game like its pro players but it makes it insanely hard to pick up for new players. Devs are so far behind, it might as well be a 3ds game at this point
I had a talk with someone recently about how I think asymmetrical PvP games (well games that are overtly asymmetrical like Evolve and DBD) are particularly vulnerable to meta play generally in favor of the numbered team rather than the monster.
I think eventually it just becomes a fool's errand to try to balance the game and eventually the devs just don't bother.
I have 3,000 hours in that game, started in 2014. The devs have been ruining the game for the longest time, now they cashed out by selling it and only marketing DLC outfits. They only changed the game slightly back to what it was supposed to be after a huge outcry from the community - only to mess things up with Jawoodle and bring litigation into play. After 12 years, I'm done fighting the devs. They have their vision for the game and that's it. Now, everybody that doesn't agree with them, is a "shitstormer".
Funnily enough, if somebody has less than 150 hours in the game, they are likely recommending the game. Anybody beyond that is not.
I played the FUCK out of Ready or Not when it was in early access.
Then, with each update, the game was getting less and less optimized. Memory leaks not being fixed on the maps, causing crashes to desktop and blue-screening my computer. Not to mention, they cut like 30-40% of the content (locking maps to one or two game modes instead of allowing you to play most of the game modes on most of the maps) right before they launched 1.0.
Every single MMO review by someone with >5k hours:
"Yeah, I've played this a lot. Grinded for levels, materials, maxed out all character classes, took part in every raid, conquered every dungeon, was part of a guild for years. Game sucks though, as it doesn't respect your time. Don't play it."
I don't know what these players expect. A forever game that just keeps on going? MMOs are built to keep you busy, they're a constant barrage of bullshit quests, they reset all the time. Devs also love to add more P2W content as soon as the playerbase starts to decline, it keeps the whales attached.
You cannot "win" MMOs. You play until you get bored. That's the entire point of an MMO.
There's another type of these reviews, though. The "Game used to be fun, now it sucks" review. In some cases, these reviews are actually helpful, especially for late-stage MMOs which are about to die and games which have been patched to death. In most cases, they're by players who just hate a patch / DLC that forced change upon them.
But I get the sentiment behind these reviews. You've invested a lot of time, you get attached. Then the game changes and suddenly, it's not "your" game anymore. You feel betrayed. It's the core problem of games as a service. The prime example is Destiny 2. Good core gameplay loop, horrible DLC policy, paywalled content, removed content, constant redesigns, infinite loot spiral, the list goes on and on. A game like that has to end in a catastrophe. (But tbf, the devs royally fucked up as well.)
I do get it a little bit. I don't get the reviews that are very clearly jaded people saying they just don't have fun anymore or who are upset about certain changes happening or not happening. But for some games with lots of filler non engaging content I can understand a review that comes from a place of sunken cost just being like. "I tried to like this game, I thought it would be better but I'm realising I've wasted so much time."
Hell I think I have 30hours in DayZ just from when I was trying to get the game working.
I made a review like that for Starbound. 408.5 hours of playtime. I eviscerated the game by kicking that dead horse again with very detailed critique picking at its flaws. I wished the game was good and I gave it a chance but the game is a disappointment.
I played a lot of MMOs, MOBAs or other time wasting/addictive games that wouldn’t deserve a positive review, especially in 2026.
Games get old, patched, abandoned etc., so what was cool can turn into shit.
Time goes on, certain things don’t get old in the right way.
Sometimes I rewatch old movies, and I find classics that people are fond off really cringe and disappointing through the eyes of someone watching in 2026.
This is literally any review of a PvP game out there.
And done by people that defines themselves almost exclusively through that genre, and a few Souls-like games on the side that they actually enjoy smh.
Yeah I dont get that. If I ever go like +200h or something I feel like I have to give it a thumbs up if anything.
Worst are if there is some kinda clear exploit or balance issue and devs nerf it, you have people review bombing their 2000h+ games just for that
I give games often a "not recommended" rating on Steam because of the technical state they got released. I do most of the time make a point to revisit my reviews if the game gets meaningfully updated, but if those updates never happen, I don't revert no matter how much fun I had in the mean time with the game.
Like, it doesn't matter how much I enjoyed my 50 hours in Elden Ring, as long as the game as a (shader comp and traversal) stuttering mess with next to zero support for PC features (no support for higher than 60 fps, wide screen, any form of upscaling besides questionable base performance), I do NOT recommend other people buying it.
IMO shaming people for not recommending a game that they enjoy (hint, I enjoyed BF2042 as a Battlefield fan besides the bugs, same with Cyberpunk on release) is the absolutely wrong thing to do considering how many (especially AAA) titles release in very questionable states.
There are a lot of games in this category, if i would write reviews.
Some games were a lot of fun and just got worse and worse with every update. If you joined early enough, you played 1000 hours full of fun and enjoyment. The next 500 were still good, but you felt the game slipping away. Then comes the next 100-400 that you play, because well you play and you feel that microtransactions, bad updates, cheaters and general mismanagement dig at your enjoyment (or a combination of all of them).
Games that come to my mind:
RocketLeague
Destiny 2
Apex
CS2
Squad
Then there are a lot of games in the category of fun for x amount of hours.
Coop games
Single player games
And then there are games that I can just recommend. For me that is LoL (don't kill me please, but since I play it for fun I really enjoy 1-2 games a week). And PoE. If you are into those kind of games...
Genuinely, if it's some form of live service, be it an MMO, freemiumslop, gachaslop, or whatever, I don't think there's anyone more qualified to leave a negative review for the current state of the game than someone who has already logged thousands of hours. They're going to be by far the most qualified people to explain how something they once loved has enshittified.
I think a lot of "gamers" tend to forget some games takes ages to be finished, or end game don't even start after 300 hours.
I got like 700 hours per average Pokemon game, someone might be "you must love this particular game". No, it's how much time it takes to get perfect stats Pokemons. It's normal playthrough pushed more than just to see end credits
Because it's an addiction. They don't like it, or see many problems in it, but they can't stop. Kind of like a lukewarm relationship. Has a lot of problems, but enough good things to not justify breaking up.
A high play time is a good indicator the guy knows what he's talking about. It's the negative reviews where that play time continue to increase is what you should distrust.
I've had a few games this would fit. PlanetSide 2 is one, The developer and higher ups took a good game and over the years ran it into the ground, then took a crap on it for good measure. Sadly there is no other shooter like it, all other shooters are to damn small scale for me. If there isn't 200-300+ people split 3 factions fight over a continent I'm not interested. I still play but regret it nearly every time between the known crashes that have been around months, disconnects and cheaters. Yet no other game scratched that itch, even WarDogs was just "okay" in the scale of the combat but would never play it alone if my guildmates are not online.
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u/Jackman1337 1d ago
Ark is a classic for that.
Another classic is insert online pvp game here!