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.
If Rockstar made a fully-fledged open world Crazy Taxi game with the scale and quality of Red Dead or GTA, that is quite indisputably deserving of the “triple A” label. Putting aside where you draw the line for it to be considered AAA, they clearly mean that their goal is an AAA experience. It’s not that deep.