Ask Lemmy

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

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.

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

Old School RuneScape. I don't know what it is, but it's like crack. I cannot stop playing it.

Anno 1404, Hades, the recent Hitman series, and now also Satisfactory. Help.

At different times:

Luanti (AKA Minetest)

0AD

Sauerbraten

Battle for Wesnoth

Shattered Pixel Dungeon

and further back:

Action Quake 2

WipeOut 2097 (AKA XL)

Gemcraft, I always have to make it to the end... even if it takes forever

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

Dungeon Master on the Amiga 500 was probably the first, followed by the SSI silver-box Krynn series. Moving over to IBM-compatibles, Sim City ate a ton of my time. SC2k, various AD&D games, and eventually FPS games (especially Team-Fortress-Likes) came to eat up wayyyy too much of my time. My first MMO was FFXI and it ate about every waking moment I was not otherwise occupied. At work, I was looking up gear locations, mobs spawns, etc. and talking on forums. I would later go on to work in the MMO space and played a lot of them for work. Rift: Planes of Telara from alpha until the (first?) major revamp was the last game to really do that to me. Ever since, I will get briefly addicated to games, but nothing lasts... and that's probably good with everything else I have going on. I do get super into Skyrim once ever couple years, though, and put an unhealthy amount of time into it.

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.

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.

Operation Harsh Doorstop multiplayer - I can't get enough of Project Reality style semirealistic battlefield games.

Motortown: Behind The Wheel - the driving just feels so damn good...

Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead - specifically Sky Islands mod to give the game a more "run based" focused feel. This game has passed an event horizon of environmental richness no other adventure game comes close to, the landscape truly feels alive and it is very addictive in a good way.

Call Of Duty Mobile & Other Battle Royale Mobile Games - such as (now defunct) Apex Legends Mobile or Farlight 84, never spent money on it in addictive way I just find higher level competitive battle royale gameplay fascinating.

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.

Barotrauma, I checked it out on a free to play weekend a few months back and have been hooked since

Lots of tinkering and the modding community is extensive, best played with friends but the single player is good too

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Splintercell. All. Of. Them.

Hitman: Codename 47

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.

Team Fortress 2 and Splatoon

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