Tarkov. 16k hours. More time than most streamers.
It’s either something dark and gritty like dark souls, or the cutest shit ever like animal crossing or stardew valley. I’m my case it’s both.
The meme says worst games. Dark Souls is one of the absolute best games.
My tism sometimes has me skip words when reading something with pixels in the double digits.
Destiny. I hate it but I can’t stop playing it.
Any game where you fight by picking stuff out of menus
I am not sure if I should feel insulted or thankful that I just gained a new perspective.
I spent a vast majority of my college years and mid 20s playing an MMO by the name of Puzzle Pirates. Honestly, if it had maintained a large enough player base for the content, I probably would’ve been addicted a lot longer. I’ve never come across another game quite like it and it’s a shame mismanagement of the company and shitty decisions about the direction of the game led it to a slow death.
For me it was Warcraft 3 custom maps. And I’d probably still be playing it if blizzard hadn’t fucking destroyed it. Fuck blizzard forever.
Elder Scrolls Oblivion.
Like I hate it, it was a disappointment when I got it (maybe even more than Skyrim). I wanted Morrowind 2, I got “oh, the LOTR series is popular because of the film, why not flatten our setting into generic medieval fantasy?” instead of my jungle city with dragons flying around the canals.
The main plot is stupid, most of the faction plot lines are stupid (Mannimarco is probably one of the most embarrassing bosses in a video game of all time). Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine showed that there were still some capable writers at Bethesda, but Horse Armor probably got a lot more profit for much less effort. (And now, they’ve figured that they don’t even have to do that and can just resell what modders do.)
Despite how much I hate the game, I’ve sank thousands of hours into it - not just playing it, but modding it. Installing the mods of others, making and releasing my own. I have a dream of someday making a total conversion mod which would fix all of the things I hate about the main story and the landmass and the dialogue and the lack of roleplaying opportunities… to the point where I’ve also spent hundreds of hours making small stabs at the project.
I listen to other people play the game and talk about the game and complain about the game all of the time. I watch more hours of people playing Oblivion than Morrowind - which is the game I actually like and think is good!
Edit: Plot of Morrowind - complicated political intrigue, analysis of colonialism, and subversion of the “Chosen One” narrative, where you could make a very strong argument that the main character is a government agent sent to “fulfill” an indigenous prophecy to destabilize the region politically and further centralize the Empire’s control over Tamriel.
Plot of Oblivion - Mehrunes Dagon is now basically the Christian Devil (flanderizing the very interesting morality of the Daedra in lore). Your job is to fight all the evil cultists who want to bring him back for basically no reason, like even in their “paradise” they’re getting tortured for funsies. No one has motivations other than being bad guys or good guys. (See also how the Mages Guild portrays necromancy as “the bad magic” which was a religious thing in Morrowind but canonically seen as morally neutral elsewhere before they became the generic baddies you slaughter in dungeons and caves.)
When I did my first play thru on Xbox 360, and I realized there was no levitation or jumping spells – I can still recall the disappointment. That simple thing was enough for me to not like it as much.
However, going into portals sickened and scared me. I never got over it before I moved on to Skyrim.
The way the game is designed relies on a lack of levitation and jumping spells. They needed to make everything run on console (and designed the UI entirely around that, it’s torment to use vanilla UI on PC). Cities have to be in separate worldspaces, and levitating could get you into the placeholder spots on the map. It would also make closing those Oblivion gates trivial if you just float up to the top of the tower. (Real men just use paintbrushes).
It just doesn’t make any lore sense though. Necromancy is illegal too, but it’s certainly still happening!
Fucking Mannimarco was SO disappointing. You’re chasing down this rouge faction of necromancers, corpses nailed to the walls, spooky as shit, rumors of The King of Worms fly, you finnally make it to him, and he’s an Altmer in a cave in a brown robe all ‘‘I’m an immortal who used to be in the Psyjic Order, was there when magic was first passed from Mer to Men, I single handedly invented enchanting, soul binding, and raising the dead, You have to fucking PRAY to me to make black soul gems!’’
And you lob an arrow at him from across the room and he says the same things ever Altmer in the game does and falls over dead. Like… really? I was expecting ANYTHING to happen in the fight at all.
They could have just made him a litch with some thralls and a health pool and damage output high enough to make it seem like a boss fight. I’ve had more trouble assassinatiing pirates.
The build up is ridiculous! Traven kills himself to give you that soul gem.
Mannimarco is supposed to be a god! How is he just a high elf in a shitty reskinned robe that needs a staff to reanimate a single corpse? Mannimarco in lore would use Mannimarco in game as fodder for experiments - getting merked by someone who might not even know how to cast a fireball. (Getting rid of faction requirements also annoys me, but if you’re so opposed to making people replay your game for all content and think it’s immersive that you can be the Grey Fox, Arch Mage, Listener, etc…, then at least acknowledge it somehow. Like, if you become Arch Mage before you do Thieves Guild, at one point you steal from yourself. I guess you also do become Sheogorath, maybe that insanity is why.)
They could have at least made a unique character mesh for him based on his Daggerfall design.
Despite all these shortcomings Oblivion is still my favorite TES game. The only thing that stops me from replaying it is the god-awful leveling system that requires loads of planning and min-maxing to make a character I am satisfied with. It’s just so gosh darned beautiful and relaxing…as long as one completely ignores Kvatch.
Try Oscuro’s Overhaul (FCOM was also a lot of fun back in the day, but less lore friendly and more wild and wacky). I’ve also had good times with Oblivion XP’s leveling system.
It’s funny how it’s easier to beat the game as a level one dork that doesn’t use any of their major skills than to play the game normally. (Morrowind’s difficulty curve is a log function, Oblivion’s is an exponential).
The most fun way to play vanilla is on max difficulty with a conjurer character that cheeses permanent quest companions and hides behind summons.
All I see are awesome game recommendations, thanks everyone! Except for Stardew Valley… that’s my game. I love it but I hate it for reasons mentioned already.
For me, HC WoW
I know right like regular WoW wasn’t already enough of a timesuck
Second Life. If you could call it a game.
I started “playing” it in 2006. Went through long periods of not playing it… but I always come back… and it’s always worse
This is RuneScape for me. I take very long breaks, but always end up playing it again after not thinking about it for like a year or two.
Holy shit is it still around? I remember playing that around the same period and going to all of the servers with free shit and occasionally coming across some weird sex server lmao.
when you say server, I think you’re talking about regions (colloquially called “sims or simulators” in game) while its true they do run on servers, usually 4-16 regions packed onto a single server… its easier to think of them as islands of virtual real estate, some are separate individual tiny islands of 256x256 meters, whereas others are joined to others of the same size. all of course, seperate from the continents which are owned by the company but land can be rented and such
privately owned land people can do whatever they want on it provided it isnt breaking law or TOS, and theres some weird shit that falls through the cracks.
the concept of SL is fascisnating, how it all works in the concept of a digital world, its been doing the metaverse 20 years before Mark Zuckerberg got the idea. the problem is, people are fucking freaks. and the metaverse is as freaky as they are.
Battlefield 2042. 5k hours.
Impressive. I didn’t know people exist with that many hours in this game but today I learned. As long as you had fun, that’s nice
Ehhhhhhhh. I had fun here and there primarily because I was playing with friends. I probably would have had more fun if I played something else though, sunk cost fallacy influenced me.
Did you know on the original FFX on PS2 if you play more than 9999 hours the hours played flips over to 0000 again?
PS I also checked how many hours 9999 is because I wasn’t sure if I was exaggerating how much I played the game, and it’s less than two full years worth of hours, and I did in fact play more than that, easily.
Did you like 100% the upgrade map?
Giving me Dick Tree vibes.
You can 100% the Sphere Grid in only a few hours, if you’re smart about it. My guess is they were going around using Clear Spheres to wipe unneeded spheres off the map and replace them. The default Sphere Grid doesn’t actually allow you to max your stats; You need to clear the existing +2 or +3 spheres, and replace them with +4 spheres instead.
Even then, maxing your stats doesn’t require 9999 hours. Unless OP was farming experience in Besaid Island (the starting area) it shouldn’t take that long to navigate the grid and farm enough replacement spheres.
Maybe we’ve found the one human being that likes Blitzball.
I honestly hadn’t considered Blitzball. I kind of forget it exists, since I only ever slogged through it to get Wakka’s ultimate weapon and overdrives.
No shade or anything but how does that work in a single player pretty linear game, what’s the draw after you finish it a few times?
People used to just play the endgame in single player games. I probably put more hours into Tales of Symphonia after I beat all the content than before.
Lots and lots of Blitzball, I guess.
Stardew Valley.
Megaten
My judgement will depend on which megaten game you no-lifed.
So I’m not autistic and these aren’t necessarily bad games, but for my partner this is definitely Dragon Age. She has put an insane number of hours into the first 3 games. She knew The Veilguard was going to be bad. She KNEW, she told me multiple times even the second before she told me she bought the game. She got 3/4 of the way through before having a crying, screaming meltdown over how bad it was.
but she was okay with Inquisition? I don’t get that at all. Dragon Age Origins is one of my favorite games of all time and I’ve beat it several times. Inquisition is straight trash by comparison. I beat it once and was immensely disappointed. Because of that experience, I haven’t even considered trying Veilguard. I just know it can only be worse.
It’s just disappointing to see how drastically the series has changed. It started as a top-down strategy RPG, and now it’s just a generic hack-n-slash game. Game publishers have shied away from games like the original Dragon Age, because they want to sell as many units as possible. And they think generic hack-n-slash games sell better. Games like Baldur’s Gate 3 have proved that there is still a large demand for more traditional RPGs, but the publishers simply don’t want to take the risk.
Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley. I have at least 10k hours between both.
Stardew Valley is not a bad game.
It is a good came I just got tired of it due to the constant inventory management and the rapid day night cycle making me feel like I had to speed run everything.
Besides that the art, music, controls, and, aesthetic are all wonderful.
I want to play AC so badly. Every time I pick it up my brain is hit with nostalgia from when I played it as a kid on my N64 and GC but now as an adult I enjoy it more watching my kids play it and talk to me about their villagers.
