No Man's Sky. Game was a disaster when it came out. For most games, a bad launch would have ended the game. But with NMS, the devs kept at it and constantly added new content over many years. I believe it's still actively developed.
That's what got me to play it. I only played it maybe half a year ago. I wouldn't have bothered if not for the fact that people were mentioning how much the game had improved. I wrote the game off after the bad press when it launched, but fortunately I was wrong and they did make something good out of it.
I finally gave up last week after 1000 hours.
I was a support main, but they made support so op I need 20min to find a game. Tank is literally unplayable.
I'm back to paladin like in 2019, it's bad but less frustating.
Mods are where it's at. The AI isn't competitive when you play fair (the vanilla game's idea of difficulty is just a multiplier to the crisis faction's strength). The only way for the AI to truly be challenging is for the AI to have an overwhelming resource advantage and mods do that best. I played with the Gigastructures mod and it was amazing. I was really skeptical of that mod before I tried it. I thought it'd just be power creep.
And it does have power creep. But it also introduces really well made, unique, and unbalanced challenges. Like, the blokkats are an enemy that is impossibly strong at first. First time around, they devoured half the galaxy before I could catch up to them. It was the first time in Stellaris where I was genuinely afraid I was gonna lose the game.
Similarly, other mods keep the game feeling fresh with more events and special planets and the likes.
Yeah Tarkov just keeps getting more broken every update. Why do I do this to myself? Light Keeper already told me I can't escape Tarkov. I should have listened to him.
"Meet your match" was the absolute worst update to a game I've ever seen. The outcry was so bad Valve even bothered to reply to comments on reddit and other forums for once.
Instead of rolling it back and actually talking to and listening to the community like they should have done and trying again later, they doubled down and tried to fix the multiple bugs they introduced and didn't revert any of the unpopular gameplay changes.
TF2 is still just about good enough that it's an enjoyable game, but it's dying a slow death due to all the bots, cheaters, and the absurdity that is "random crits"
CS was quite shitty for quite a while before I quit. Now it looks like it's recovering, the CS2 launch went well (apart from server issues) so there's definitely a reason to have hope. At least with valve.
Titanfall 2 also recovered, but that was always a good game. I'll even say it's the best shooter ever made period.
Lots more than just server issues with CS2 unfortunately haha. (No workshop support, no community server tools, VaCLives been a meme, busted map collision, etc.) But im sure valve will get it fixed up sooner than later... i hope...
It's just not a good game, the leveling system is stale and broken and basically p2w if you want to make a cool build without spending hours upon hours grinding. Not specific to the 1st update, tho even with customer complaints they still managed to fuck the game up worse, just a complete shit game through and through. It was unplayable before the 1st update even got there.
I love the people who still play RS3 more than they love themselves, which is not at all. OSRS has zero MTX outside of bonds and it's all bankrolled by Jagex's income from the paypigs who keep "RuneScape" on life support.
I used to play Apex legends a lot, last I played - the queue times were much longer and the game would crash after I'm 5 minutes in. So I kinda stopped playing the game. Funnily enough I got my first ever Heirloom in the game after I stopped playing.
These days I'm playing a bit of Battlebit Remastered with some friends when I get some time.