One thing I have struggled with lately is finding good games to play. I bounce around from game to game trying to enjoy it but it just doesn’t scratch the itch like it used to. For example, one of my favorites was old school RuneScape, but it hasn’t really been giving me the same enjoyment that it used to. So then I would open up World of Warcraft, Destiny 2, just playing a little bit of each game. Think maybe I need some new games to play but it’s tough to find them these days.
So what are your favorite 1000+ hour games?
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Minecraft FTL Destiny 2
I am Not even close to 1000h but devinetively Factorio. Be aware, this game is a massive time sink and makes you play for way longer than you want. Especially with the new expansion you can spend enormous amounts of time in this game.
Dark age of Camelot. 6000 hours on my main character. I prefer not to think about how could life be different now if I had not started this game…
I prefer not to think about how could life be different now if I had not started this game…
I used to think like this. It took me a while to realize it wouldn’t be different at all. You gotta take care of yourself in life and that includes your mental health and well-being. Sometimes that’s playing a game you love
Elite Dangerous. Well over 1,000 hours, especially with friends to explore the black with. Hard to get into, but it has so much stuff to do. It made me passionate about space! (And it’s always fun reading articles about a far-flung star and thinking “hey! I’ve been there!”)
Per my steam library:
Factorio: 3,375.4 hours
Dyson Sphere Program: 2,505.9 h
Stellaris: 2,236.6 h
Terraria 2,629.9h
Skyrim: 1,239.5 h
Dungeon Defenders only has 600 hours on Steam, but I’m well over 2000 hours between Steam and PS3/4
I’ve also got a few thousand hours in Just Cause 2&3, as well as several Gran Turismo games and Forza Motorsport games. Morrowind probably has 2-3000 hours, oh and I’m not allowed near Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri anymore.
Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger are probably up there as well since I’ll replay them every decade or so.
That’s a lot of gaming
I’m 44 years old, and have been gaming practically since I was born. My parents played D&D, and video games with us kids.
Also a lot of those totals are artificially inflated because I can leave the game running to finish a long task, especially Factorio and DSP
That’s awesome.
Factorio: 2344
Path of Exile: 2736
Rimworld: 2191
Kerbal Space Program: 1071
I have a bunch of honorable mentions in the several hundred hours ranges that are only not 1k+ because I have severe ADHD and something else became a hyperfocus before they hit that point:
Backpack Hero
Ark
The Last Spell
Timberborn
Factory Town
Dyson Sphere Program
Loop Hero
Brotato
Satisfactory
Path of Achra
Against the Storm
Desynced
Commas, please.
Honestly, I had it all with line breaks, but it didn’t take. I will fix.
I’ve had that same issue before.
Thank you for fixing it!
Have you tried modded Minecraft ?
cracktorio
First at least make sure the poor sod does not have a family!
Dota 2.
I’ve played Dwarf Fortress, Stellaris, yet I still find Dota to be the most complex game ever.
It sucks that it’s a multiplayer game, and you need people to play it well with you, but when it works, it’s amazing.
Everything in it has layers of usability, usually componded by the everything else in the game - hero abilities, items, map, neutrals, even the stupid trees play a large role in the game.
I’ve spent hundreds of hours studying the mechanics, and I still don’t grasp everything.
I played a lot of DotA too, but that doesn’t have a playtime counter. But I have over 3000 hours in Dota 2.
My second favourite game is OpenTTD. It’s just so satisfying to optimize the train network and add another 100 trains to it. I’ve tried Factorio, but for some reason that did not scratch that itch.
Or some roguelites, like Slay the Spire (or the Touhou: Lost Branch of Legend), Synthetik (haven’t tried second one yet), they are always fun.
Great list! I’ve tried Dota 2 as well, it’s definitely extremely complex and addictive but not my kind of game, I just cannot thrive and enjoy that sort of game. Same goes with League of Legends. Just not my cup of tea.
I am a little curious about Stellaris though. That game seems so incredibly complex, like, what about it is The draw for people? I’ve heard so many people talk about it and has so many freezy steam reviews but when I first tried it as a demo, it seemed so absurdly complex That my head was spinning. Like I had no idea what the heck was going on. I’m not sure how to enjoy it I guess
LoL sucks, it’s like a shallow copy of DotA. I’ve played around 300 hours, it’s very silly in comparison.
Stellaris is kinda easy once you figure out that expanding is the No1 priority for the entire game. Expand, build ships - nobody will be able to stop you.
There was always a need for a ‘tall’ empire - so you don’t expand, but focus on your small part of the galaxy - but so far it’s always crushed by the expanding ones.
Once you get stargate tech, it’s 24/7 war. For even more territory.
Right now I remembered a game that never was really finished, Stardrive, where you could design your own ships down to the electrical wiring. It had layouts with sections, and you could fill it up to your liking. It was a shame that ground troops could finish the game in minutes.
Sometimes I feel like 4X games are usually more suited for roleplaying than actual challenge of micromanagement.
Anyway, I have a huge jam on my main line in OpenTTD, gotta fix my intersection again.
It’s a mix of strategy and role-playing. Sure if you want to survive on higher difficulties, you probably need a build that is meta. But on medium difficulties or lower you can pretty much roleplay your empire as you like and there’s many mechanics in the game that help with this. Your empire can be a democratic haven for all, a mega corporation, a machine hivemind forcefully assimilating organics into its network…and much more.
There’s also a great exploration aspect of the game. Your exploration vessels regularly find anomalies that tell a neat little story and provide bonuses to your empire (which can range from a small resource bonus to making one of your leaders immortal).
Of course, there’s also the power fantasy. You start with just one planet, but you will quickly expand throughout the galaxy. You can then wage war against other empires, build a federation together with them or convince the galactic community to crown you as Emperor of the entire galaxy. But the game also regularly throws adversaries at you if the AI empires are starting to become no match for you, may it be one of the space fauna suddenly becoming extremely hostile or a Great Khan uniting a marauder horde and demanding everyone to become their vassal.
It is also rare that a bad outcome leads to a straight loss. Losing a war (usually) does not doom your empire but you only lose a bit of territory or get vassalized, both giving you ample opportunities to build up your strength again or make allies to stand together against an enemy.
Empirically, Final Fantasy 14. Also my only 1000 hour game since games services started logging playtimes in a more durable way. Only other games I can think that might have touched that time are Diablo II and UT99, but both of those playtimes are lost to the sands of time.
Kerbal Space Program
I’m well above a thousand hours on the first game. Then all my flying sims (MSFS, Xplane, DCS, Elite Dangerous) also have a very high hour count. But for civilian airliners most of those hours are spent AFK in cruise.
I’ve been playing Tf2 for over 1.5k hours now. I recommend you to try it out There’s a reason why that game from 2007 is still not dead.
The best war themed hat simulator out there
Elite Dangerous is my go-to lately.
It’s different to most other games, by not being goal-oriented except for the goals you set for yourself. No main quest line dictating progress. No mandatory tasks. No win condition. Instead, it drops you into a simulation of our entire galaxy roughly 1300 years in the future, where humanity has mastered hyperspace travel and spread through hundreds of star systems.
(To give an idea of the simulation’s scope: Around 85 million systems have been recorded by players so far, and those are a vanishingly small fraction of what’s out there. Space is big.)
I like that it offers a variety of activities to fit whatever mood I might be in on a given day. I can hunt pirates, mine asteroids, engage in a bit of piracy myself, find and collect bio samples, infiltrate rival settlements, venture into vast unexplored areas of space, discover Earth-like worlds that nobody has ever encountered before, defend humanity against hostile forces, photograph beautiful stellar phenomena, rescue stranded survivors, customize and finely tune my ship to perform beyond its original specs, team up with friends, pledge to a political power and expand their influence, or chill out as a space trucker and haul cargo to earn enough money for my next upgrade. It can occupy all my attention, or just be relaxing entertainment while I listen to music or an audiobook.
It’s an MMO in the sense of having a large game world (galaxy) shared by all players in real time, but PvP is optional. One mode exposes you to other players, while another limits you to NPC encounters. You can switch between them at will.
One warning: A space ship has more than a few controls to learn, and they’re better suited to a game controller or HOTAS than a keyboard and mouse. I use button combinations for almost everything beyond basic flight controls, since there aren’t enough buttons on a controller for everything.
hmmmmmm you’re tempting me to get back into this one. I think I have 60 or so hours on it? Not enough to try everything yet, but definitely enjoyed chilling in space.
Seems like a lot of people step away for a while only to return to it. I had hundreds of hours before taking a break, came back with new hardware, and have been playing hundreds of hours more. At this rate, it might end up overtaking Civilization as my most played game.
No Man’s Sky. A foot deep but a mile wide.
Minecraft. Probably have around 5000+ hours I think. Playing since I was 10(now 17). So, many wasted hours on Anarchy Servers and Ranked Bedwars.
I just started playing in the last few months. I bought it for my son and didn’t expect to be that interested in it and now I can’t stop playing.
If you’re a Destiny refugee, the most obvious answer is Warframe, which just keeps on getting better and better.
Does it have multiplayer or is it single player only? Destiny 2 was only really playable because I had a community/clan that I played with actively for the social aspect of it. Horribly boring playing it solo
The core story content is single player only. The rest is multiplayer, but unlike Destiny there’s nothing that requires you to form your own group outside of the game, and all the gameplay is designed in such a way that you really don’t need to communicate. You can basically just turn on public matchmaking and get a bunch of humans who might as well be bots for all you’ll have to actually interact with them.
You can play all the content solo if you want to, but the difficulty might get a bit much, especially starting out (there are also certain game modes / mission types that really lean on having a full group).
Warframe is a bit similar to Destiny in that it’s built around multiplayer, but most of the main content can be solo’d if you wanted. But that said, the Warframe community is still thriving, so it should be pretty easy to find a group to play with if you want to avoid the in-game matchmaking.
You’ll almost always end up doing missions with other people other than when you intentionally want to do certain tasks solo.
A lot of the game is built around guilds and player to player interactions.
PvP sucks and it’s almost all PvE content vs Destiny though.
A lot of the game is built around guilds and player to player interactions.
For a while that was true. But that entire design direction has basically been abandoned. Clans are more or less a vestigial organ at this point. Literally the only interaction I have ever had with a member of my clan was when I asked for an invite.
In many cases yes (though I’ve been in good ones when playing off and on, usually the smaller the more there’s actual group activities).
But they are essential to be a part of for blueprints and trading, which are very core parts of the game.
Sure, but again the amount of actual player to player interaction involved in that is minimal. Like I said, I’m in a clan, and outside of obtaining my initial invite (which basically went “Clan plz” in chat followed by clicking accept) I’ve had literally zero social interaction with my current clan. Trading has been effectively automated by Warframe market. You copy and paste something into chat, and the rest of the interaction consists of a pro forma exchange of "ty"s. Also, you don’t actually need a clan to trade, because anyone you’re trading with will inevitably invite you to theirs, so they’re only really important when selling.
This is absolutely nothing like the way that raiding and guilds are core to World of Warcraft. Clans play an almost purely mechanical role in Warframe, they’re not remotely the same thing, and do not have remotely the same requirement of social interaction.
There are a few sections restricted to solo only, but it’s not the default, the matchmaking is pretty quick for a random group and there’s a variety of people always looking to form groups for different tasks. One word of warning, people move fast, until you get parkour down, you might just end up running from the start to end of a level if you join groups, they’ll have completed the objectives and be waiting for you to extract.
Clans exist, and each have their own space station called a dojo that’s customized by them (cost is based on size of the clan, as a solo I was able to build up and level a clan on my own).
