Battlefield 2042. 5k hours.

CK2

I should probably take a picture, but at least 1500 hours on Project Cars 2 on PS4 / 5.

Edit: I just looked and it's actually 2,897 hours.

me with 100 hours in the HASTE broken worlds demo

Terraria

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

Nuby's Number Factory 🙈

Tarkov. 16k hours. More time than most streamers.

When I was in college it was WOW. I have soooo many hours in that game. But it also helped fix a lot of issues I had with social anxiety. I went from basically never interacting with people in that game to being elected to run a 60 person guild. I didn't even campaign they just nominated me for it when the previous GM left. It did a lot to help me feel like I could be normal. Then I got a job and a GF and didn't have time to play as much anymore.

These days it's Warframe but I don't have enough free time to really get into video games like I used to anymore.

PlanetSide 2 for me, easily 8k hours into that game. Around 5k on my steam account alone.

So sad to see it's still slowly collapsing, but I've not been on since the AU servers shut down years ago and the hackers took over the Asia server.

EVE Online?

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.

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.)

JUST CUZ I GRINDED SMOKEYS FOR A CAT HEADBAND FOR 400 HOURS AND NEVER GOT ONE AND HAD TO BUY IT FOR MYSELF WITH MY DEAD BRANCH PROCEEDS IN RAGNAROK IN LIKE 2003 DOESNT MEAN I’M

oh