Not displayed: the 5392 two hours long Hidden Object Games you secretly play every wake hours!
Here’s one that’ll really get Greta (rightfully) on me. The only times when my computer hasn’t been on in the past twenty years are about a dozen extreme electrical storms, however many power outages (usually tied to the first list item), or if it’s actively broken and undergoing repairs.
This just ain’t the case. For example, yes, I spent 140 hours in Fallout 4, but when I finished it I felt unsatisfied and disappointed with it. I played it so long because I love Fallout and I love open world RPGs, but Fallout 4’s poor writing and quest design brought my enjoyment down significantly.
The last ARPG I finished was Torchlight 1, which was ok but nothing groundbreaking; the last I really loved was Diablo 2 Lord of Destruction. After Torchlight I realized this genre is no longer for me, I much prefer “actual RPGs” that focus more on dialogue, player agency, choices and consequences rather than loot and killing monsters. Same reason why eventhough I finished Bloodborne and Dark Souls 1/2, they are nowhere near my TOP 10 eventhough I liked them.
Racing games…I love Forza Horizon 3/4, but not quite enough to put it above storydriven games.
And strategy? I am too lazy for them these days :) I loved classic Command and Conquer games, Age of Empires 2, Warcraft 3…and that’s where I stopped.
My time played stats tell you a lot about what my kids play.
Logistical and, further down, Tropico 4 are the only hours I’ve earned purely on my own. (Although I love a lot of those other games, and played them plenty.) I’m sure I left Logistical running on pause for a few afternoons, though.
This rings pretty true for me as well. I used to really enjoy the genre and those specific games as well, but later it just felt like too much work / too complicated and stressful?Not sure what exactly made me turn away from them. Perhaps the latter games were more tuned for competition / multiplayer and were tougher for casual players like myself?
If there’s any major gaming development this next decade, I hope it will be the final death of consoles. There’s just no reason for them anymore. PC has closed every possible gap and has long surpassed consoles in others. Consoles have zero advantages today and plenty of shortcomings.
The one and only thing consoles accomplish is exclusivity bullshit and split consumer bases.
While I would welcome the end of hardware exclusivity and the necessity to buy redundant hardware for artificially exclusive games, this will not happen as long as consoles are more convenient to use than PC and people have brand attachment to Sony/MS/Nintendo - and both of these are going the be the case for decades.
There’s nothing wrong with preferring games based on a stated criteria. But if you played a game that isn’t on your stated top 10 for 1,000 hours then you reveal you did prefer to play that game to any other for that 1,000 hours.
My top ten Steam games released last decade by Steam playtime:
Distance
RimWorld
Massive Chalice
Darkest Dungeon
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Polygod
Civilization VI
Terraria
Dragon Nest
FTL
So… some games are not on Steam, like Minecraft, and some games I purchased and played for a time on a different platform, like Hyper Light Drifter on PS4… however I have a couple reasons for not otherwise doing a straight transposition from hours played to ‘top ten’:
Sometimes it’s the way in which a game is experienced: Fez made the list in part because it’s among the very first games my son and I enjoyed together; he could barely hold the controller, sometimes upside down, yet it’s a very forgiving game with tons of interactivity including a day/night cycle, and the 2D/3D puzzles are intuitive and engaging.
An even bigger reason for my ordering are the impacts certain games have had on me; CS:GO isn’t a bad game, it’s an enjoyable way to pass some time, but I don’t personally gain any deeper insights into the world. Not that a game has to be this, but certain games really do leave me feeling changed for having played them, even if it’s for a couple hours only. To me, it’s a sign of having encountered a work of art, and I’ll rank a game much higher because of it.
Kairo is a game about exploring architecturally improbable, sometimes geometrically impossible spaces, yet it remains in memory as place that communicates some ineffable aspect of the human condition. Nothing is ever spelled out definitely, but it hints at some terrible aftermath and is at turns incomprehensible and beautiful. It’s Ozymandias, the computer game. I return to it quite frequently in mind compared to other games, although my playtime is short.
Certain games like Massive Chalice have both managed to take up a sizable amount of time, keeping me up past midnight, and also inspire deep, feeling thoughts about my time on Earth, ancestry, what it means to be a ruler, and coming face to face with mortality. It changed me as much as reading Neuromancer.
I don’t agree. There are what one might call distraction games or time wasters. I played a lot of Heroes of the Storm but I certainly don’t consider it a top 10 of the decade, it was just an easy distraction
Yeah - it’s like, imagine if you could sort all the media you’ve watched over the last decade by time spent watching. It might show that you’ve watched Love Island for far longer than the time you’ve spent watching the film Moonlight, but I don’t think it’s in any way dishonest to then rank the latter above the former when you’re judging the overall quality of the experience. It would be like judging books by page count.
God, I am so glad to see some of these play times. Makes me feel better about my own =) Many of these games don’t really reflect the correct times I’ve put into them. For instance, this is probably a small fraction of the hours I’ve actually played KSP because I typically launched from a separate folder, with CKAN and no Steam overlay. Also, the Conan numbers are inflated and Ark as well due to lots of idling here and there. The game on this list that surprises me is actually Origins. I forgot I played through every origin on that thing and did a revisit a few years later. I guess it is my favorite DA game of the series. Also, even with all those hours in KSP, I believe I have double that in Minecraft. It’s my space out and play game.
Some games are 300-hour experiences. Some are 1 hour experiences. You wouldn’t want the latter to try to be the former, or vice versa. In order to love World of Warcraft, you can’t have played it for 2 hours and set it aside–if you do, you haven’t gotten the real experience. On the other hand, Florence is one of the best games of the decade, but my passion for it doesn’t compel me to play it 400 times to rival the playtime of some inferior game.
Well put.
I did, but I play with a, a lot of mods, so I question how much of the actual released game I am enjoying versus the visions of others that were added to it. It’s like House Rules. If I play a card or board game with a lot of House Rules to make it fun for me and mine, I am still going to play it, but I’d have a hard time recommending it or putting it on a top list. As envisioned, it was clearly not enough for me. Or put another way, a notable flaw made it lower than others I played less often.
I may have done this wrong, I put all the games I’ve played over the last decade in a hat and then drew out 10 for my list.
Hey, it’s your list, man.
I got lucky, I even really like most of them. ;)
Where are you guys finding the list of total hours played for games on Steam? I can’t find the function to do that in Steam.
Regarding hours played, I kind of don’t understand how people don’t have hundreds of hours played in games they like. Strategy games and the like just take so long these days. I just started Oxygen not Included, and after my first game got to the point around cycle 100 where I’m having the cascading loss effect and my dudes are puking everywhere and dying, so it’s probably time to start another game.
That first game alone (plus a couple of very minor starts before that) took 30 hours of total time.
So I’m not sure how people play these games 15-20 times and don’t have hundreds of hours racked up.
In fact, I thought about starting another thread about this issue - I have a lot more free time than I used to, and I still don’t see a way to get through all of the games that are out there. When I look at things like Monster Hunter World (I have 150 hours into it, and haven’t even come close to finishing the Iceborne expansion), Dark Souls 3 (I suck at those games, it takes me a ton of time to get anywhere), things like that, it still doesn’t feel like I have much hope of finishing more than 5-6 games a year.