What makes a game’s flaws forgivable to you?

I’ve heard it said that no game is perfect — even great games, nearly universally beloved ones like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom or Red Dead Redemption 2 have aspects that annoy even the most staunch apologists. I’m playing a lot of Starfield lately, and as much as I’m digging it, I am aware that Bethesda has never been the best at making faces that don’t quite look human and there’s a lot of stuff in the UI that I think should have been changed before release. Like, say, the inventory system.

Plus, despite there being far fewer bugs than in Fallout 76, there have been a few really weird ones — because while Bethesda spent a lot of time improving their engine, making it the Creation Engine mark 2, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still built on the bones of the same engine that gave us Skyrim and Fallout 4. And that engine was itself a fork from their previous engine, Gamebryo, so some of the code in Starfield is code that was used to make The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. And at times, you can tell.

But I’m having a ball with the story so far, loving some of the quests, and in general I find Bethesda’s slightly more grounded space opera a welcome change from games that propose we’ll be in half of the galaxy in less than a hundred years. In Starfield we’re 300 years down the road and we’ve barely made it out of our galactic ‘neighborhood’ so to speak. And I can forgive it some weird quirks for that.

So what about you guys? Do you love games like WoW or Diablo 4 not despite their flaws, but even sometimes because of them? Do the little weirdnesses and inconsistencies of a game make it feel unique, and more a product of a specific development vision, or do they just annoy you? Why do you forgive your favorite games for what they do wrong?