Which games made you go into an "addiction phase"?
-
Even the first one ?
wrote last edited by [email protected]It's amazing how much those games improved with sequels, but the first one on the OG X-Box was still an incredible experience, especially for the time!
Still a worthy experience I'd say! I could listen to the voice work of that game all day.
I even really liked the much more action-oriented Conviction. Never played Double-Agent though. Still have Blacklist on my list.
I miss when the "Tom Clancy's" monicker was representative of plausible tactical experiences. Sadly I don't think we'll ever see intense thinker-games with Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, or Rainbow Six again.
-
Ha, I met my now-wife on WoW so long ago :D.
I guess I consider myself lucky I never really got addicted to that point, as in, I never even maxed a single character. (I had a bunch of them in various race/class/faction/server combos though...later found out I had ADHD lmao)
I mostly treated WoW like a chatroom with a game attached hahaha.
I totally understand the draw though, like, I LOVE MMOs as a concept but I hate how difficult it is to make an ethical one that doesn't waste players' precious time, or incentivize addiction. I feel like there's an answer buried in how some MUDs operate(d), somehow... before casino psychology was introduced.
Reconciling the desire to pop into a "meta-verse" (screw you, facebook, that's our word.) to socialize and cooperate with others, against our finite time constraints on various scales, is a difficult challenge.
I could ramble on and on, but linear level systems definitely exacerbate this. I never played as much as my always-online friends so we'd all start characters and suddenly by next week they're all level 30 and I'm still like 13 and I'm like "K nvm."
But it's a very human thing to enjoy a sense of progression. Hm...
I'm glad you were able to break free though! We're similar in our gaming lives. Instead of one monolithic game, we pass the controller on single player games or play co-op stuff, and get a wide variety of experiences.
That's sweet you found a partner through an MMO.
Our issue is MMO drama. You always end up in a guild because all MMOs push guild/group content. Most guilds have leaders and leaders are just human. People are of course flawed. We all have our quirks and that creates friction. The friction brings drama.
You need organizers to coordinate and lead activities. A good leader will organize parties and help with strategy.
In every single game I end up in a leadership position because I'm really good at it. Which brings more drama to me directly.
That and it does suck to run a raid and finally drop the piece you want only for it to go to someone else...
FF14 has that token system which is nice though.
-
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.
League was one of those global phenomenons that felt so fun to be a part of and try to get good at... Sometimes .
But we'd often just bot-stomp because we'd usually get rekt in matchmaking.
Once they declared their kernel-level spyware, that was the real kicker that helped us quit for good. Ha
-
For me it was Terraria, Satisfactory, Tetris Effect Master Mode, Minecraft with Mekanism mod & CSGO / CS2 (almost 2000 hours in CS alone).
Edit: There are so many answers that I might only reply if I have something interesting to say. I will read all of your answers though.
Edit 2: It has become too much for me and I have to disable notifications. Thank you for the massive response and please continue to discuss with everyone here.
️ 🫡DOTA 2, man. Once you get past the massive learning curve, there is just so much to do in-game. Every match is entirely unique, with constant updates, tournaments, battle passes, and what have you. When I feel like disappearing, I disappear into DOTA.
-
For me it was Terraria, Satisfactory, Tetris Effect Master Mode, Minecraft with Mekanism mod & CSGO / CS2 (almost 2000 hours in CS alone).
Edit: There are so many answers that I might only reply if I have something interesting to say. I will read all of your answers though.
Edit 2: It has become too much for me and I have to disable notifications. Thank you for the massive response and please continue to discuss with everyone here.
️ 🫡wrote last edited by [email protected]I once calculated my Minecraft hours across all platforms I've played on and it's over HALF A YEAR. I was like mega addicted in middle school, I still play often.
servers SUCK now though, they're all pay to win and have custom texture packs that look horrible
the best one I've found (that isn't private) is UltraVanilla, and I actually found it from firefoxes "Minecraft Indy wiki redirect" plugin which crashed once and there was a little box on the side which mentioned the server bc the person that made the plugin is an admin of the server. When I joined the discord I had already interacted with several members from other modding discords.
As far as I know im the ONLY person that checked it out due to that popup lolI don't play on that server because some friends made a different (private) server.
-
For me it was Terraria, Satisfactory, Tetris Effect Master Mode, Minecraft with Mekanism mod & CSGO / CS2 (almost 2000 hours in CS alone).
Edit: There are so many answers that I might only reply if I have something interesting to say. I will read all of your answers though.
Edit 2: It has become too much for me and I have to disable notifications. Thank you for the massive response and please continue to discuss with everyone here.
️ 🫡wrote last edited by [email protected]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.
-
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.
It is a truly a digital esport if there ever has been one.
-
RTS games for me, particularly WarZone-2100 & Earth-2150.
The fact that you get a base of operations to return to & has Picture-in-picture mode is a unique thing
Have you tried Beyond All Reason?
-
Crash bandicoot 3 was my first heperfocus game. I played that game until I finished all levels, first time I did that my entire life. Second one was Skyrim. I played it so much!! I clocked over a thousand hours on the vanilla game, and I played more modded than vanilla, I can't tell how much I played in total because steam didn't track my modded playthrough. Then there was super Mario Galaxy (I got every star except the stupid thrash bombing one and I'm still so fucking mad about it). My most recent ones are monster hunter world (plus DLC) and current is monster hunter wilds, I've already 100% it and am in the process of crafting every single armour and weapons
Monster Hunter World is a superb game!
-
Project Zomboid. I have over 1000 hours of playtime. I always come back to this game.
have you tried Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead?
-
Quake (any), Dyson Sphere Program, Path of Exile. Those are the big three, many others had smaller but intense addiction phases.
-
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.
That was my crack as well. Before that FTL. Played both even secretly at work, because I couldn't help it.
-
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.Vanilla factorio had me at “just one last thing” until dawn numerous times.
I had an old housemate who lost his very lenient student job due to being late and missing work multiple times due to the game.
It’s great
-
It's amazing how much those games improved with sequels, but the first one on the OG X-Box was still an incredible experience, especially for the time!
Still a worthy experience I'd say! I could listen to the voice work of that game all day.
I even really liked the much more action-oriented Conviction. Never played Double-Agent though. Still have Blacklist on my list.
I miss when the "Tom Clancy's" monicker was representative of plausible tactical experiences. Sadly I don't think we'll ever see intense thinker-games with Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, or Rainbow Six again.
I miss when the "Tom Clancy's" monicker was representative of plausible tactical experiences. Sadly I don't think we'll ever see intense thinker-games with Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, or Rainbow Six again.
Check Out
https://store.steampowered.com/app/16900/GROUND_BRANCH -
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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I am awful at Don't Starve Together, but other than the trash multiplayer hit detection I have to say I think it is one of the most mechanically sound realtime survival games ever.
It makes the gameplay loop of 99% of other survival games feel shallow, unfocused, gimmicky and mechanically uninteresting.
I struggle massively with executive function and staying on task so DST kicks my ass though lol.
-
You're right, the modding community is probably why Minecraft continues to be so popular. Without mods, Minecraft is kind of boring. At least, in my opinion.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Minecraft's core gameplay sucks, it is only the genius and freedom of the general design coupled with mod support that sustains it.
I have played countless hours of minecraft but these days I don't see the point when I can play Vintage Story or Luanti.
https://content.luanti.org/packages/wuzzy/mineclone2/
(Luanti works on Android too!)
The engines of both games are far more capable than java minecraft.
-
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.
Halo 1-3 are some of the best games ever. I played so much of those games and don't regret a moment of it.
-
They are indeed. (
Here's the discord server for the game world where we play: https://discord.gg/ms37NPu8 (But there are around 50-100 of varying sizes and activity out there, so lots of variety and play styles to suit different players.)
DM sessions are in the 'Events' tab, but usually take place on Wednesdays or Fridays.
Damn, lemmy is cool af, so many interesting windows into worlds I would have never had otherwise!
-
Slay the Spire
There are a bunch of games that I'll get super into, play for a while, then be finished with.
Slay the Spire taps perfectly into every compulsive center of my brain to make me keep playing. Like, we talk about 'addictive' games usually just as ones you like a lot... this is the first time I started to see it closer to actual addictive (though not actually a serious thing for me). It's such a sweetspot for my habits, I feel like I'd just keep saying 'one more run' so consistently, hours, days would evaporate. It kept me busy, to the detriment of doing other things.
You get on a good run, better keep going. You lose a run, might as well just start a new one and see if you have good opening luck. There's rarely a point that feels like "I should stop", until some IRL obligation comes up.
I still go back to it often when I just want an enjoyable way to kill time, or do something while I watch videos/tv on the side.
Other games with roguelike elements tap into this feeling too, like Balatro, Vampire Surviors, or Hades. But STS is where it felt strongest to me.
I respect STS but I LOVE Monster Train (haven't played the second).
-
For me it was Terraria, Satisfactory, Tetris Effect Master Mode, Minecraft with Mekanism mod & CSGO / CS2 (almost 2000 hours in CS alone).
Edit: There are so many answers that I might only reply if I have something interesting to say. I will read all of your answers though.
Edit 2: It has become too much for me and I have to disable notifications. Thank you for the massive response and please continue to discuss with everyone here.
️ 🫡Payday 2 probably takes the gold medal for me. I was once playing casually with a friend of me after work, chatting about the day, and when we were about to finish the level we noticed that we damn near broke the world record for that level, a record made by 4 players.
