I've been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don't mind so much the fact that it's different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I'm bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Helldivers 2 is a blast but somehow still so bug-ridden that I've quit like 3 separate times.
Then stop fighting Terminids /s
It's a little glitchy at times, but I haven't noticed any major issues since the "terminal stuck in the ground" bug.
My characters arm still occasionally goes stiff on the ship. Some enemies might spaghettify to 100 feet tall. But that's just the beauty of Super Earth engineering.
I mean the whole mechanic of throwing a stratagem and having no idea what's going to happen when it his the ground is infuriating. Throwing an SOS and having NO ONE drop in is infuriating. Conversely joining a open lobby and immediately being kicked for no reason is infuriating. Getting stuck underground or in a random corner and having to kill yourself to get out of it is infuriating. The seemingly random difficulty of any particular mission is infuriating.
Stratagem bounce and "mashing stim key and the stim key does nothing, even hearing the sound, but no heals" are two bugs that have been in the game since launch; and the latter has become such a sore point for me that the moment it happens in a game and I die because of it, I just close the game for the rest of the day. Game wants to be a fuck today, it can go be a fuck to someone else, maybe see how it's behaving tomorrow. They say they recently "fixed" that one, but I'm positive this still happens.
When I saw their recent "you asked for a fairer fight" post about clamping down on super credit hacking, I just about did a spit take. Really, Arrowhead? We asked for this? I'd really like them to cite their sources, because I -- and almost every other player -- have been asking for these two specific bugs, in the game since launch, to be fixed since launch (to say nothing of other common player requests that have gone largely ignored or paid mere lip service to). And since launch, and in over 900 hours of playing, I have heard not one single fucking complaint from another player about getting free super credits. So again -- "we asked for this"? When? Where? How? I gotta know, so that I can use the same method to ask them to fix the fucking bugs we've all been begging them to fix for years, and maybe then they'll actually get fixed.
/rant
The utter absurdity of this game makes it fun regardless of the bugs and balance gymnastics. I've never felt as satisfied to reign down absolute madness on friends and foes alike as I have playing this game.
this is the really tragic part to me, you can tell there's all the bones, all the structure for a genuinely amazing game; and I believe this is why so many people picked it up and made it a hit and stayed for so long through all the bullshit, hoping it was just growing pains. The only thing truly holding it back is the developers constantly stepping on rakes. (Frequntly, rakes they themselves set down in their path!)
Like, it's still fun, but it could be so much better than it is.
Arrowhead has lost a lot of respect due to the way they run Helldivers 2 and I say it's quite deserved. Every time you get a new piece of kit it comes pre-nerfed. New enemies are often so intensely frustrating to play against that people will simply stop fighting them. Old bugs keep returning CONSTANTLY, telling me that their internal version control and review process is not working. If something is fun, they will stealth nerf it and hope we don't notice.
I have largely stopped playing.