I’m talking about games that you still like but you had no idea were criticized so much.
The perfect example for me is Sonic Unleashed.
I admit that the game has its bad things, but I would have never imagined that it was so hated at the time… Although, that could be extended to the entire Sonic franchise, since for many years I was not aware at all of that “Sonic was never good”, “Sonic had a rough transition to 3D” nonsense.
Path of Exile
Good fun game, but online communities are committing to min/max the fun out out of it. I like blowing up monsters, I don’t care about optimising my chaos-per-hour rate.
Unfortunately the game is specifically designed to waste your time if you want to see everything it has to offer. So it’s not really the communities fault for pushing to maximize that time spent. Just a consequence of a deliberately slowed down system
But the point isn’t to see everything. The feeling of FOMO is what’s seems to drive people to madness. For a game that’s been developed for over a decade with multiple cycles of content release every year; I’m not surprised that people don’t get a chance to see everything. I see that as a positive and not a negative.
Other games do similar things. I play a lot of Dead Cells and can’t get beyond 4BC. Most people will never get to end game content to see all bosses or unlock all items. Who cares. As long as the game is fun.
My first play through of PoE was with no guides. I made it up as I went along. Had a terrible “build”. I enjoyed taking weeks to get through the campaign slowly and reading all the lore. Every league I played, I got deeper and deeper into the content…learning to make tons of currency, getting a character to lvl 100, etc. It has been great playing it off and on. The game is fun without experiencing “everything”. But if I ever engaged with the online community, all I would hear is “I’ve played 3000 hours and this game is shit”.
Yeah it bothers me when the community for a game is like “{skill} is TRASH never use it” and when you do some digging you find it’s like 2% less damage per second. Or it doesn’t work well in NG+7. Some people are really obsessive about this stuff.
A lot of games like that end up min/maxed like that, it sucks even more when developers start exclusively catering to the min/maxers forcing everyone min/max or gtfo.