Ask Lemmy

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

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.

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.

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

Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Spent years on that one.

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.

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.

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.

Rocket league. Scrolled all the comments and slightly disappointed to not find this one :/

This was a game I was truly addicted. Uninstalled it many times recognising it as an addiction but kept coming back to it. I feel lucky that I could break out of it. It was THAT addictive. Around 1200-1300hrs on that game.

Nothing will ever hook me as badly as Kerbal Space Program did. If I wasn't at work, I was playing Kerbal for five years straight. No breaks, didn't play anything else during that time. Once I got RealSolarSystem and RealismOverhaul working, you couldn't pry me away from the computer. I put in aver 10,000 hours, easily.

At different times:

Luanti (AKA Minetest)

0AD

Sauerbraten

Battle for Wesnoth

Shattered Pixel Dungeon

and further back:

Action Quake 2

WipeOut 2097 (AKA XL)

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

The worst for me was elder scrolls: oblivion. I played it on xbox back when it came out. I played nothing else for about 18 months. I must have had thousands of hours by the time it got old.

Cracktorio

For a while it was Elite Dangerous. Reached triple Elite, then eventually Odyssey drops and I stopped playing. After Elite was Baldurs Gate 3. Bg3 was the fastest 1000+ hours I’ve ever dropped in a video game

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.

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.

Path of Exile. And by extension Path of Building.

I've only played like 8 leagues (each league is around 3 months long) and I have almost 5k hours :/.

Usually if I decide to play a league, i will make sure I have no obligations for an entire month and then I will take the first week of the league off work.

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.

Modded Factorio. I did 450 hours of pyAnodon's recently and it just broke me. I didn't win the game. I feel like I lost at it and life.

It seems impossible to manage the side products properly. Ridiculous amount of materials that are all interrelated means that if you are low on one thing, it is very hard to fix it because you need the thing to work to make anything.

Too many recipes means it is very difficult to make modular, adaptable designs to copy and paste. Advanced recipes seem better, but they end up just exacerbating the issue even more.

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.

Minecraft, on a server with friends. We still play it

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.

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.

It's a toss up between Hardspace: Shipbreaker, My time At Portia and Just Cause 3 for me. Three very different games. Floaty slicey boom, cute engineer mining and grapple fly shooty basically 🤣

Also very much in an "addiction phase" for the demo of G-Rebels which sadly goes away on Sunday 😥

Dota without question. CS along with some rts games like zero hour and CoH used to be up there but it's not even close. Got to a ranked immortal at my peak. Still, was a lot of fun playing with friends and family, so not like it was always a solo activity. Glad I quit though.

I wasted some 2-3 years of my life in CSGO too when I was younger. All my free time, down the drain basically. It wasn’t even fun after a while, just a hard, tiring grind. Attempted to compete on semi-pro level, somehow got it to my head that it was possible. Did compete ultimately, but none of my teams made it. Never got anywhere and the day I finally got off it was the best day of my adult life. It was bad.

I feel ashamed to admit this out loud. It’s just so cringeworthy. But it does some good to keep my head level and remember the shortcomings of my younger days.

Nowadays the closest I get to “addiction” level is bingeing a few months worth of evenings on the likes of Crusader Kings 3, M&B Bannerlord, Stellaris or Rimworld. Much more sane since it’s not as intensive, it can be paused at any moment, and ultimately there’s an end to it, so it just naturally withers away from my days eventually.

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

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.

Splintercell. All. Of. Them.

Dark Souls 1 and Hollow Knight

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

I was supposed to be working on a project the day terraria released on Steam. I ended up playing it for like 9 hours straight

Sadly, Fall Guys. Little did I know when I started playing it when it released for free on PSN that it would become my most played game of all time. Having 8 of us to make 2 complete teams with every night was a lot of fun. It was just an easy game to play, but not think while playing and just talk with friends for an hour or 2 a night. Some of the funniest conversations I've ever had was during this game. This month marks 5 years of playing this on average 5 times a week. Sadly this year we all finally drifted and I barely played the last few months but maybe once or twice a week and with 1 or 2 others on a good night. 5 years is crazy long for me, so I will be shocked if we find anything else that grabs us like this ever again, but im hoping.

Quake (any), Dyson Sphere Program, Path of Exile. Those are the big three, many others had smaller but intense addiction phases.

I probably have more hours in Diablo 2 than any other game.

I didn't buy the remaster because I value having a life now.

Dwarf Fortress.
I would constantly miss meals and sleep to keep playing. Sometimes multiple days at a time. Went like 36 hours without eating or sleeping until someone popped into vent and asked what I was up to and after hearing me talk about the Fortress the asked when the last time I ate was...

Battle pass shit aside, I really like Apex Legends. Probably has some dark patterns but still I really like their gunfights.

So many, it's generally how it goes for me as I mostly play one game at a time. But some that have REALLY made me dive deep and play many hours a day for long times: Halo 1, 2, 3 and Reach, Elder Scrolls Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, Minecraft, Terraria, Starbound, Satisfactory, Forza Horizon 4 and 5, Rocket League. There are many more, these are just what I thought of at the moment.
And the one I still play a ton and see no end in sight is Warframe, such a good game, and both the community and the devs are awesome so even after getting 1,200 hours in two years I'm still giddy about it and have so much fun.