Ask Lemmy

Darktide, once I finally got a good grasp of all the major mechanics, which it has a lot of.

Which is awesome because I got the game 2.5 years after its release, when it was finally in a playable and fun state where they finally implemented most of the features they promised and should have been in the game from the beginning, and because of the age I got it for only $20, probably one of my most successful Patient Gamer™ moves so far lol

Approaching 800 hours recently, and it looks like I'm still gonna be spending a LOT more time in it since the most recent major update introduced some noticable change to difficulty (mostly in ways I've always wanted) and I'm getting my rear end handed back to me repeatedly once again in the highest difficulty, like the good old days XD

Original World of Warcraft.

I put years into that game. Then I started a family and I just had to quit.

If my gf (now wife) played we'd probably never get anything done.

Hitman: Codename 47

Factorio. I blinked and a month went by the first time I played it. It ruins my sleep schedule like no other.

Absolutely love it

Team Fortress 2 and Splatoon

I have probably over 3k hours on Splatoon. I can't stop. I'm S+8 fwiw

For me, this only happens in story-based games. The most recent was Expedition 33. It’s also the first time a videogame has ever made me cry. What an incredible ride that was.

Dwarf Fortress. I think I have ten thousand hours in the classic game.

Oxygen Not Included for the same reasons. I really like games where you both design, and are affected by, complex ecosystems

Space Engineers right now. The Scrapyard scenario really gets me.

If we’re talking actual legit addiction, to the point of finding it hard to quit, Skyrim and Pokémon (first four generations). Any other game, no matter how much I love it or how many hours I’ve got, I could put away and not touch for a while. When I first got into Skyrim, I played it nonstop for about 3 or 4 years, hours a day every day. After around 5k hours I finally had a hard drive failure which corrupted a save file and I finally took that as a sign to stop playing. I actually stopped playing video games entirely for a while to make sure I didn’t go back to it. About a year ago I figured I’d reinstall it and play again for a bit, immediately sank 50 hours in and uninstalled it before I fell into that rabbit hole again.

Pokemon is similar, though not as bad. But any time I revisit a Pokemon game I have to go through all the games in the first four gens, get super into it with dozens of tabs on individual Pokemon and stats and such, and then I have to stop myself, otherwise I’d probably do the same thing as Skyrim. As a kid growing up I was properly addicted to that series, and as an adult it still hasn’t gone away.

There’s lots of other games I’ve had tons and tons of hours into, but I could hang them up and move on. Skyrim especially but Pokemon too are actual addictions for me.

Minecraft, holy shit, I have a singleplayer, creative world that I spent hours every day building on for 8 years or so.

That map is gigantic, and I even saved it from a hard disk crash

AuDHD means every game is part of an addiction phase. I will binge a game for like 100hrs then drop it out of nowhere. Then return right where I left off anywhere between 6 months and 4 years later.

Splintercell. All. Of. Them.

My latest addiction was Peripeteia but I beat it in about 40 hours so the high was short lived. I really fuckin loved that game and looking forward to additions as it moves through early access.

Stardew Valley. I have it on my computer and switch. I even made myself a perfection guide.

Factorio. At my worst, I was seeing conveyor belt patterns in my sleep.

Haha, yeah I have my eyes on Balatro, but have refrained from getting it, because of that.

I spent over a decade addicted to World of Warcraft. Like, I would come home from work and immediately jump on WoW and do nothing else until bedtime.

Thankfully, Activision buying out Blizzard and then ruining the game made me eventually quit. I've tried to go back, but I can't get into it anymore. It's just no fun.

The last few expansions, I've spent a week burning through the main questline, then I walk away until they announce another expansion. Endgame content is not interesting enough to keep me after the main story is over. I never even finished the last two expansions; I checked out partway into the story. I think I'm officially done buying expansions for WoW and hoping I can get back into it.

Other games that I've been addicted to in recent times have been Satisfactory and Enshrouded. Both base building games that have no end, but rely on your creativity to enjoy.

I have ADHD (the hyperfocus type) and Satisfactory really scratches that itch. Focusing on minute details, trying to make a seamless, efficient, organized factory to produce an end product. And the sky's the limit (literally). You can build hundreds of factories across a massive map and get really creative about style, design, efficiency, etc. it's a really fun creative game.

Enshrouded is the same, except instead of efficient factories, you're building homes, villages, castles, etc. in a fantasy medieval setting. With questing and monsters and magic too! It's been loads of fun and my friends and I have been super addicted to that game for a while now too. I actually just posted a review about it in !games@lemmy.world yesterday.

On a side note, I find it interesting to see Minecraft mentioned a lot in this thread. That game first came out when I was in my 20s (I'm in my 40s now) and it was pretty popular when it first dropped. I played it a bit, but besides running around and digging (mining?) a bit, there wasn't really any direction or goals or anything, so I kind of lost interest. I found out years later there's a whole endgame to it, but without any in-game directions, there was no way I would've ever progressed in that game without online help.

Decades later, Minecraft got a resurgence of popularity with younger generations and now it's suddenly the game of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. One of my baby nephews is addicted to that game now and speaks of almost nothing but Minecraft. Crazy how it can continue being so popular across multiple generations like that.

So many. To list some that aren't in the top comments:

Foxhole - This one gets to a point where it becomes an obligation. It feels like work that I'm not getting paid for. And still I'll easily get sucked into defending a town or advancing a front for days on end between periods of burnout, checking statuses at work and staying up way past my bedtime, decimating my sleep schedule and productivity in the process.

Don't Starve Together - My partner and I took a week off and were supposed to go camping but we ended up playing this too late the night before we were supposed to leave. We woke up really early to pack the car and it took about five minutes for us to go, "nope, this ain't happening". So instead we spent the entire week locked in our apartment playing DST from the moment we woke up to the early hours of the morning and living off of our camping provisions.

League of Legends - I played a lot of LoL back in its early days. My dorm had awful internet so when I came home for the summer it was pretty much all I would do all day every day. It brought out a bad side of me. Losing felt awful and winning was never satisfying enough. I've been clean from LoL for over 10 years now. Sometimes I still think about downloading it but I've so far kept the strength.

Elite. Lode Runner. Castles of Dr. Creep. Boulderdash.

Skyrim, Destiny, Destiny 2, Valheim

Hades, I spent like 6 months playing almost nothing else. Platinumed it and still couldn't get enough, and I'm not even that good at it!ಥ_ಥ I managed to get to 25 heat I think.

Well I'm old and don't really game anymore, but for me it was the original Halflife. The story sucked me in, not to mention the fact that I was running it on my brand new PC, which I believe was one of the first Pentium IIIs, so I could run it at the max resolution and the graphics were amazing!. I think it was 1024x768, on a huge 17" CRT monitor!

Short term: Dishonored and Far Cry 3. I beat Dishonored in a day and then turned around and beat it again. I played Far Cry 3 for like 22 hours straight, took a nap, and then beat it.

Long term: New Vegas. The same problem with Dishonored, where it was so good I had to turn around and beat it again as soon as I got done. The problem being, there's hundreds of ways to play through New Vegas. So I put about 11 full playthroughs with all DLC in on the PS3 version. Essentially back to back to back.

RuneScape: I can’t believe I played the game after the removal of free trade. It was such a poorly run game, and I’m can’t believe anyone still plays it anymore. It’s unbelievable how arrogant mod MacDonalds was, and that I only quit in 2011 after I got scammed trying to sell the account.

League of Legends: this is another case of really great game, but incredibly poorly managed. Having Phreak be the balance lead just feels like shit, and made me feel like shit because I kept playing thinking it’d get better. This is a very global, very competitive game that was balanced around competitive play and optimizing spectator happiness. You can guess just how fun it was to play a character that was deemed “unfun to watch in worlds” and get absolutely gutted by Phreak’s team. The opposite was also hilariously true… they buffed certain characters so they’d sell more skins or because spectators like watching them. I finally quit after having to swap my main because they nerfed or reworked it and left me playing something else several times.

RS, i bought prenium for 6 months then i started playing it all the time(right before the pandemic) then bought ingame bonds with ingame money for a couple years, until early last year i stopped doing prenium for members, only play maitenance mode on the account.

Fallout. I played 1 and 2 back when they first came out. Great games, great writing, seditious humour ad a real feel of a world.

But then came 3, FNV, and 4. Each of those I played through as my default 'helpful stealth archer' character, then a second time as 'evil melee' character, and then again to make sure I had maxed out each faction and got each ending. And then again, because I loved it, and again to collect all the bobbleheads, magazines, etc.

I'm in my late-50s. I'm already slowing down my career in preparation for retirement, and now I work as a freelance consultant which means I have some control over my working hours. I can't wait for Fallout 5. I will be probably take at least two weeks off work to binge the shit out of it.

Less so with Elder Scrolls 6, but I'll be taking at least a week off to play it when it drops.

Morrowind was my big single player addiction. Oblivion and Skyrim were cool but they just never hit quite right.

Multiplayer I was heavy into Halo and Rappelz (some Korean MMO). I woke my brother up by sleep-playing halo, sat in front of the TV wiggling my thumbs on air, and shouted "THEYVE GOT THE FLAG". And would frequently have dreams where the conversation is being held in a floating chat box from rappelz.

I bought No Man's Sky about a year ago. There's something comforting in the repeated tasks and exploring. I spend entire days just running around accomplishing nothing.

I used to play Tetris on my OG monochrome Gameboy obsessively. I would go through stages where I'd put a fresh set of batteries in and play until they went flat in one go. The only limiting factor on my game time was the availability of AA batteries in the vicinity. It got to the point where I'd be dreaming about playing it, and when putting things away I'd stack things Tetris style and get angry when things wouldn't fit together cleanly.

Then one day I just stopped and never felt the urge again. Thank goodness.

I have been consistently playing EverQuest for 26 years now. I'm not sure it's a phase.

I think most here are too generous with the term addiction.

I had to uninstall Hearthstone years ago, because I compulsively played it multiple hours every single day, despite not really having fun playing it anymore. It was either grinding to get cards or tilting on ladder. That's what I would call an addiction.

Edit: After Hearthstone I played a lot of Slay the Spire and after that Marvel Snap. Never more then I enjoyed it, so I wouldn't count those.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Spent years on that one.

Cracktorio