Published , by Shack Staff
Published , by Shack Staff
There's always that one game that keeps you coming back, somehow. As we head into 2020, the Shack Staff decided to do a bit of reflecting over the past several years to answer this week's burning question: What game have you played the most? If you've been a reader here at Shacknews long enough, then the answers probably won't surprise you all that much.
This was a very hard thing to narrow down for me. Each generation of console, there is a game that ends up consuming my time. On NES, it was The Legend of Zelda. On SNES, it was F-Zero. On N64, it was Star Fox 64 and F-Zero X. On Xbox, it was Halo 2. On Xbox 360, Gears of War 3 consumed 100s of hours of my time. I played that game over and over again. I unlocked the Unlimited Ammo mutator for Horde Mode, and that just made the experience even more addictive. I have beaten Horde Mode on Normal Difficulty by myself on Checkout. Sure, I have played over 500 hours of Rocket League in recent years, but I still think Gears of War 3 is my most played game. Those bastards killed Dom, and they still have to pay. I still play Gears of War 3 to this day, most recently streaming it during our Extra Life marathon stream last year.
This was certainly a milestone for Hearthstone to beat, wasn't it? To make it clear, Team Fortress 2 consumed the vast majority of my 20s. I had well over 3,000 hours logged into TF2. With nine different classes to master, all with their own quirks, and regular updates, I kept finding new reasons to log into TF2 every single night before bed.
Then the TF2 updates stopped coming, the game started to settle in, and I grew up seeking something a little more cerebral. So here comes a card game I had never heard of, set in the Warcraft universe, and the rest is history. It's not just that I'm playing Hearthstone regularly, but I'm also doing so both for fun and for research for Shacknews stories. I'm covering different corners of it, including the esports side (I'll be at Masters next week, btw), and experimenting with it frequently. And unlike TF2, I've even gotten somewhat good at it. I even made Legend a few times.
And yes, it's the grind to Legend that has made me all the more committed to trying to climb the mountain again. Oh, and don't get me started on Battlegrounds, which is a whole new kettle of fish. Over the past five years, I'm almost certain I have thousands of hours logged into Hearthstone and I don't think it's stopping anytime soon.
I don’t even wanna know how many hours I’ve spent overall playing Warframe, but last year alone I logged 168 hours fighting Grineer in the name of Space-Mom. And what’s not to like? It’s an epic journey across the cosmos where you fabricate fancy-pants space armors with special abilities then take them for a spin on missions and go all space-ninja on an army of evil cyborgs. In the last three years, they’ve introduced two open-world areas and added giant spaceships that you and your friends can pilot into massive shoot-outs. Add that on top of nearly a decade of pre-existing content and you’ve got a game where there’s always something to do. If you play Destiny then play Warframe you’ll wonder why you ever even bothered with Destiny in the first place. I wouldn’t be surprised if I logged more than 168 hours in 2020.
Between Destiny and Destiny 2, across the PS4 and PC, I’ve logged a total of 1,726 hours. I’ve put nearly 1,000 more hours into Destiny and Destiny 2 than my next closest game. It breaks down to a total of 854 hours into the original Destiny and 944 hours into Destiny 2 across PC and PS4. Doing some very loose math, that’s almost an hour of Destiny per day across the last five years, and I’ve taken several breaks that lasted a few months. That’s a lot of Destiny, folks, and I’m not sure how I feel about that these days. The only game that gets close, and you’d have to separate the time spent in each Destiny game, is The Long Dark at 729 hours, which is still 100 hours shy.
While I don’t have the hard data to back this up (because Steam did not start tracking playtime until somewhere around mid-2010), I’m fairly confident that Team Fortress 2 is my most played game. I was obsessed with it after launch and then following the initial Medic Update, my playtime still managed to increase. Steam says I only have 275 hours played, but I have my suspicions that it is actually in the 1500-hour neighborhood. pl_Goldrush is digital crack cocaine, folks.
Honorable mentions go to Age of Empires 2, NCAA Dynasty Mode (across multiple versions), Arma and its mods, and Forza Horizon ¾.
While I know I’ve got more than 1,500 hours recorded in Destiny 1, and likely over a thousand in Sea of Thieves, I know in my heart of hearts that I’ve got the most game time in Halo 2.
Unfortunately, the only stats I have from back then are the number of games players on Xbox Live. It didn’t record sitting in the lobby chatting, logging on to check messages (because at that time Xbox Live didn’t have a messaging system) or playing through the campaign for the 100th time. I also don’t have the stats for all the LAN parties I went to and hosted.
What I do know is that I played Halo 2 from the moment it was released in 2004 up to and after the release of Halo 3 in 2007. It’s got to be the game I’ve played the most. I can’t wait for it to hit the Master Chief Collection on PC.
When Pokemon Diamond released over a decade ago, I was in the 3rd grade. I spent an ungodly amount of time on my DS. When Pokemon kicked off its 4th generation with Diamond & Pearl, I was obsessed. My cousins and I would play from sunup to sundown, battling, trading, and hunting for rare pokemon together. I remember how determined I was to complete the Pokedex, along with the exciting rush I felt when I discovered my first shiny Pokemon. I’ve sunk plenty of hours into the Pokemon franchise, but nothing comes close to the time I spent with Diamond.
Really, I’m not sure if this is accurate or not. I’ve played Parappa the Rapper an equal amount of times, if not more. It’s hard to quantify, but I think I know the answer in my heart of hearts. I know I was just idly sitting by with my PSP Go a few days ago playing through the game for the billionth time after I had the urge to listen to MilkCan’s Make It Sweet! album while working. I know every song by heart, most of the button prompts, and everything else about it. I even have a Lammy tattoo. I’d say this is the one game (among several) I truly know like the back of my hand. I’m just glad I can play it wherever I want, and I’m no longer forced to be tied to my PlayStation at home like I was when I was a kid whenever the mood struck. “Now do you like munchies? I wonder where lunch is…”
While I’m sure there are quite a few games that I’ve managed to play for a while(Destiny and other titles come to mind), I think I’ve probably put the most time into Grand Theft Auto V, more specifically a modification of GTAV in the form of GTARP. Sure, I get that GTARP itself isn’t really a video game, I think that it’s well worth including here for a few reasons. First, GTARP builds off of the world that Rockstar created. To have lasted as long as it has, the world had to be strong and able to withstand whatever the players could come up with. GTAV does that perfectly.
On top of that, over the past three to four years, GTARP has seen its ups and downs. Slow times are followed by massive jumps in interest as streamers and other big-name players move on and return to the scene. It’s something that few games have managed to accomplish on such a wide scale, with the latest pulse forward bringing in people who hadn’t ever really roleplayed before in their lives.
I’ve personally put almost 3,000 hours into GTARP across two different servers, all in the matter of a few years. It’s by far the most time I’ve ever put into a game of any type—whether it be a mod, or a full-fledged developer released title. Still, despite this all, GTARP continues to pull me in, with my hours played counter steadily going up each passing week. It’s something that very few games have managed to accomplish over the course of the past 20 odd years I’ve been playing games.
Honestly, probably the closest I’ve come to playing another game this much is Destiny or Guild Wars 2. Aside from that, I don’t usually find myself breaking the thousand hours mark very often.
I have had a love/hate relationship with League of Legends for years. I love its universe. I hate its in-game toxicity. I love its esports. I hate Riot’s gross studio behavior that resulted in a $10 million lawsuit in late 2019. I love the idea of their new story-driven games made by studios outside Riot Games that will further explore the rich, yet mostly unexplored canon of the game. I hate that it elevated people like tyler1 into positions of popularity.
There’s just something about the game itself though. No matter how much I get disgusted with either something going on at Riot or in the LoL community, I sit down to the client on occasion, see what’s new, try a match to see what’s new, and then blink as 6 PM suddenly became 4 AM and I’ve been fine-tuning my character strategies for Ranked play… again. Maybe it’s a sickness in my head. Maybe League of Legends really is just good enough to make me forget about everything else for a bit. That said, I assure you I have never meant to sink the frankly disgusting among of time I have sunk into League of Legends…
Or have I? I need to play just one more match and think on this.
At first, I immediately wanted to write down “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim”. Even though I've put down hundreds of hours over multiple playthroughs, it sadly pales in comparison to the game I’ve actually played the most, World of Warcraft. I’ve been playing that game on and off since 2004. According to the game I’ve dumped more than 1,500 hours. Rookie numbers to loyal WoW Vets,, but that’s a lot of time for me to spend in a single game, considering I enjoy playing a bunch of different games on different platforms.
What about you? What game have you played the most over the course of the past several years? Are there any standout titles that you've managed to be pulled back into for hours upon hours? Let us know in the Chatty below!