Games

Factorio.

Warthunder

In case someone would like to know: I took this screenshot from the leaf blower revolution's steam page

Just one more turn, man. That's all I need. Then Ghandi will pay. C'mon man I'll go to sleep right after, I promise.

Factorio

Path of exile? Never played it but seems right.

RimWorld, I have hundreds of hours of playtime, (not including my previous extralegal copy) and now I am obsessed with:

• human nuggets (not that kind) (not immediately, anyways)
• organ harvesting
• human leather cowboy hats (and dusters)
• greenhouses (for weed* and cocaine)
• how do I fit the new turrets in my existing killbox

*not actually true, it's all coke

Mabinogi.

Not many people have played it I'm sure, but imagine this:
You've just downloaded a new free MMO. You figure it's gonna be super pay to win, but it's free so why not give it a shot anyway.
For the first few minutes, after you stop being confused by the UI, you start to take everything in. There are no classes, you can do whatever you want. Want to be a mage AND a warrior? Totally doable. Want to be a bard playing in the town square for tips? Thanks to the robust music system, you can. In fact, you're having trouble finding anything you can't do.
A few months later, things are progressing nicely. You've mastered every skill, played thousands of songs by now, got some pretty good gear, and you haven't encountered even a hint of the p2w you expected. Life is great. However, you're going to need a bit of a gear upgrade before tackling this next dungeon. You check how much it'll cost you. 300 million.
You've never even seen more than 50 million in one place before. Nevertheless, you figure with hard work, you can achieve it. After a month, you've gathered about 100 mil by exploiting market bubbles to sell anything valuable as fast as possible and in as large of quantities as possible. It's still not enough though. The cash shop begins to beckon you. You could pay a little real money to buy a cash shop item, and sell it for gold.
But you realize that in order to get the 200 mil you need, you'd need to spend over 100 dollars. You rationalize to yourself that hey, the p2w isn't that bad if it's easier to make the gold in game than it is to make the real money to buy it. You continue on your quest, but you run into an issue. There just aren't any more bubbles to exploit. You've crashed the market in your quest to obtain all the gold you need without spending a penny. You cave, and buy just a couple cash shop items to sell and make up the difference. You get your shiny new equipment. You feel powerful. It's such a huge upgrade it's almost ridiculous. You feel like 20$ was worth it to have this much fun. Out of curiosity, you check to see how much your next upgrade will cost.

2 billion. It's too late. You're addicted. Sunk cost fallacy has kicked in. You've already invested in your character, and that next upgrade is gonna cost you 2000$.
You can't quit. You've tried. There's just no game like this anywhere else. You will spend that money eventually, no matter how hard you try to avoid it.

This is my story. I'm aiming to get that gold without spending a penny. It's been months. I'm half a percent if the way there. It's not gonna happen. Every day I have to pull myself away from that cash shop. It would be so easy, but so irresponsible.
But one day I will spend that money. The game is insidious like that. The only way to avoid it is to either not play the game in the first place or not give a shit about progressing. I am in neither camp.

Genuinely, I love the game, but every day I pray it gets shut down before I have the chance to pay in that much money. It's so hard to stop myself.

Minecraft. There's always another automatic farm to create, a new cave to explore and a new mod to try out! Not to mention the fun that multiplayer brings...

Clearly this is just Vim being launched through Steam.

Elite: Dangerous has lots of players that complain all day and play all night. Probably EVE too

Escape from Tarkov.... Fucking hate that game!! I'll be on tonight 7pm central if anyone wants to team up.

EVE Online

How has no one said WoW, so much time lost

Dwarf Fortress

Rimworld 12,000 hours later... I definitely need help

Starfield. People played for 700 hours then wrote a bad review then play for another 300 hours . Bro if you put 1000 hours into a game there was obviously something you liked about it.

satisfactory

Warframe

I've put in over 2,700 hours into Oxygen Not Included, so that's my vote.

Edit: Oh dip, I just looked it up and I'm slightly over 2,800 now :/

Ark. The original anyways, I refuse to buy 1.5. It was a poorly optimized piece of shit full of broken crap yet I couldn't stay away. That is, until, it became so bloated I couldn't fit it on my SSD anymore.

Space Engineers and Kerbal Space Program

Oldschool Runescape. Some 15000 hours down now...

Rimworld for me. I would only end a session when shit hit the fan.

That was ARK for me. Despite running on Linux like garbage I still put 3k hours in. They ruined a favorite mod after taking it over from the community dev. 3k hours more.

RuneScape, Ark, ... DOTA2 (especially with that cry for help).

Some people get lost for thousands of hours in grand-strategy games like Europa Universalis. Or MMOs like Eve Online.

But feeling like the game consumed you is grinder and MOBA territory.

That's a dota 2 position 5 support player.

Old School Runescape

Life.

Morrowind

It's one of my favorite games of all time. But choose a wrong setup and you're screwed. Don't get anything before heading out you're dead. Attack a peasant, dead. Go in that cave, dead. Get winded before doing anything, dead and frustrated.

On one hand, Vampire Survivor is super addictive and just extremely well made and feature rich. I recommend it to everyone.

On the other hand, please help me.

Dota 2

Crusader kings 3 for me. My playtime might be longer than the reigns of some real life medieval rulers.

Dota.

every single souls-like

Rimworld, Runescape, EVE, Factorio, Gmod, VR chat, Skyrim Modding, working with Lua, installing linux... wait...

Tbf though, after Planetside broke the record for largest in-game battle, I've never been able to switch to a new "fps mmorpg".

Edit: I just want throw this old clip out there:

https://youtu.be/Bbadyv1OKyY?si=dzp-I7Cm9fOb8Q-K&t=70

God I miss planetside

Minecraft with factory modkit for me