I have been playing video games for more than 25 years now, but I only started paying attention to my playtime for each game in recent years. A good portion of my gaming experience was before I had a Steam account, so tracking my time wasn’t as easy. But lately, I’ve been noticing and intrigued by the games I play for long durations.
These are games that are excellent at retaining players, and much of the player base consists of people with long playtimes, often well over 1000 hours. Some of these games I still play regularly. Some of them I play when the mood hits, and some I have moved on from, but still have many fond memories of. I wanted to try to see what qualities kept me playing these games, mostly as a guide for myself and other players with similar tastes to mine, so I can recognize other games with similar qualities in the future, and feel better about spending my money on a product that I would enjoy for many years to come.
World of Warcraft
One of my favorite games as a kid was Warcraft III. I don’t think I reached the 1000-hour mark in that game, but I played it a lot. I was in love with the lore and world design. The community-made custom maps and game modes were also a huge part of the game back then, which increased my playtime even more. When World of Warcraft was released, I was 10 years old. The idea of playing inside a huge, 3D world based on one of my favorite games of all time was a dream, but back then, buying and paying monthly subscriptions for a video game was not something my parents were willing to, or could perhaps afford to do.
When I was 20, I was finally in a position to pay for the game myself, making one of my childhood dreams come true. However, that was a year into arguably one of the worst expansions of the game, Warlords of Draenor. I still loved the experience, and I played multiple characters and leveled them up to max. Finally, the Legion expansion was released, and I dug deeper into the endgame of WoW with a couple of friends. We created a guild, and we would play well past midnight, clearing dungeons and raids, and would generally explore and live inside the virtual world of the MMO. I was beginning to discover the sense of community and adventure that made the game so popular, but I still felt like there was something missing. I would constantly hear from other players about the “good old times” of the vanilla experience, and I felt like I really missed out on something great when the game first came out.
A few years later, Blizzard announced World of Warcraft: Classic. I was done with college, with tons of free time, and I wasn’t going to miss my chance this time. I joined the server the moment it launched, enjoying the chaos of the first few days, finding a guild and making new friends, exploring the world and the fantastical journey, until I finally came face to face with the first iconic bosses of the game, Ragnaros and Onyxia. In the past 10 years, I played both retail and classic versions of WoW for more than 2000 hours, but I haven’t done so in a while, and I don’t see myself going back anytime soon.
While I enjoyed my time in the game, I realized a bit late that the thing I missed out on as a kid was no longer there in any version of the game. The sense of mystery, adventure, and community was gone. The internet and online guides solve the game for you, and for an online game, if you don’t follow the best builds and guides, you are viewed as playing the game wrong. And the social aspect that made MMORPGs popular back in the early 2000s was poisoned by years of internet toxicity and negativity. Every MMORPG fan is longing for the next big title that recaptures the magic of the genre’s early days, but we have to face it. I think that magic was the product of its time, and it would be very hard to recapture it.
Stardew Valley
Stardew Valley is the latest game to join my roster of 1000-hour games. I could not imagine spending this much time in the game when I first started playing it, but I was constantly surprised by the depth of gameplay and character interactions in the game. I played three saves of vanilla Stardew Valley over the years, discovering new secrets, unlocking new achievements, planning and decorating my farms in different ways, and taking different approaches to character interactions and romances. This alone was probably more than half my time in Stardew Valley, and I finally felt like I was done with the game. But then, I discovered the modding scene for it and was hooked right back in.
I’m currently playing a new save with a large mod collection that adds a ton of community-made content with new farm layouts, villages, characters, and new items to produce and collect. It’s a testament to the amazing game that CorneredApe has developed that players want to keep playing even when we have experienced every bit of content available. The world, the gameplay loop, and the overall atmosphere are so comforting that I want new reasons to play, and the modding community has managed to create some impressively high-quality content for the game.
What I think is at the core of my adoration for Stardew Valley is a combination of well-designed simulation gameplay and the cozy social aspect of the game. I like both genres, but I could never spend even a fraction of this time playing the Farming Simulator franchise or Coffee Talk. I like both games, but it’s the combination of the elements that makes Stardew Valley such a magical experience for me. I don’t know if any game can achieve the same level of coziness and gameplay engagement in the future, maybe if and when CorneredApe develops another game.
Project Zomboid
The best way that I’ve seen Project Zomboid explained is The Sims with zombies. It has an endless sandbox gameplay and character development similar to the Sims games, with the added challenge of Romero-style shambling (or sprinting, if you are brave enough) zombies hunting you at every corner. And the core of the game, as it says whenever you start a new game, is that “This is how you died”. You are going to die, learn from your mistakes, and try again and again.
The game has been in early access and in development since 2013. At the surface, it seems like an unsustainable development loop, but the constant updates and the gradual growth, I think, are one of the main reasons Project Zomboid has the ability to bring back players every so often. I started playing Project Zomboid very recently in its development timeline, back in build 41 of the game. And now I’ve been playing through the most recent build 42 updates. One of the things that makes the game replayable for me is the long-term survival, and funnily enough, it comes down to building a secure base, farming, gathering, and taking care of farm animals. But unlike Stardew Valley, the vibes are anything but cozy.
Project Zomboid is brutal. At first, I was struggling to survive for more than a few days. But after hundreds of hours of experience, when I could potentially survive indefinitely, a single mistake could be the end of my run. While not a roguelike game, the nature of the game demands replayability. You can customize every aspect of the game to your personal preference, and even if that’s not enough, it also has both a very active modding community and an active multiplayer community. I don’t know how long Project Zomboid is going to be in active development, or when the game is finally officially released, but as long as the developers add new content, I will come back to it to die again and again.
Baldur’s Gate 3
This is the most recent game in my library with more than 1000 hours played, close to 2000 hours in fact, and I can still see myself going back to it. Baldur’s Gate 3 is arguably one of the best games of all time, and the amount of praise and awards it garnered is a sign of its quality. A full, completionist playthrough of the game can take up to 150 hours, and the game’s choice-based narrative and character paths can offer maybe three or four unique and equally enjoyable playthroughs. However, I was still discovering new interactions and details beyond that.
There are a few things that make the game so replayable for me. First of all, it is the Dungeons & Dragons system implementation. I love D&D, but scheduling a game with friends is a nightmare, so Baldur’s Gate 3 has become a decent alternative when our D&D night is cancelled for whatever reason. The next one is again the modding community around the game. While somewhat more limited in terms of what modders can do, compared to some Bethesda games like Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or Fallout 4, they still add a lot of new content to explore, and it’s still growing more varied and impressive with each passing day. And finally, and most importantly for me, are the performances of the game’s cast. The acting quality has turned Baldur’s Gate 3 into some sort of comfort movie for me. I just feel better when I see the companions in action, listening to their dialogues, and interacting with them, even though I have seen every possible interaction by now.
I’ll probably come back to this game now and again for years to come, maybe until Larian releases their next title. In the meantime, I honestly don’t have the same confidence in any other AAA studio to create a new RPG game of the same caliber. But I remain cautiously optimistic. I love RPGs, and I have many of them in my library with hundreds of hours of playtime, but for one to keep me engaged for 1000s of hours like Baldur’s Gate 3, they have to be extraordinary.
I have a couple more games in my library that are close to 1000 hours, like Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, and there are game series that I have played collectively for more than 1000 hours, like Hades and Hades II, but these four are definitely my favorite games of all time. I don’t think any MMORPG can ever interest me as much as World of Warcraft did in its early days. But I am hopeful that we will someday get to play a new game made by CorneredApe, that Project Zomboid will be officially released out of Early Access, and there will be new genre-defining role-playing games that make me want to play them for thousands of hours.
