


World of Warcraft with over 11k hours. Guild wars 2 is probably 2nd with over 6k. The highest on Steam is Warframe with 2329.
For WoW and GW2, it’s basically the same reason. I loved MMO games and the huge world you can explore. I found guilds in both that I vibed with, and still talk with some of those folks today.
For Warframe, the gameplay is top notch IMO. I didn’t mind the grind (I was a MMO player, after all) and the selection of warframes and loadouts kept things from getting too stale. I mainly played with one of my friends I met through WoW, and we roped some friends into playing with us from time to time.
I still get the itch from time to time to get into a new MMO to try and relive the experiences I had from previous games, but those days are most likely behind me.


I’ve been contending with this as of late, as well. I had been searching for the types of games I used to like, but not being happy when I tried new ones in those genres. It turns out I’ve been getting bored of gaming in general, and the games that do hold my attention aren’t quite the same as genres I used to like.


I’m currently playing through it with a gamer buddy. The gameplay isn’t challenging, but it’s definitely fun. I was talking to someone else who tried playing with their non-gamer wife, but they had to stop because she was getting frustrated with things.
I agree about the writing and it being the weakest point. Then there’s the part with the elephant:
What the fuck, that was really dark and gruesome. These parents are pretty shitty people.
The level design and environments are excellent, though. Between these and the gameplay, the game is still a joy to play through, even if the writing sours the experience a bit. Split Fiction is definitely on my watchlist, and I plan on picking it up during a sale.


There was another actual event at the end of Burning Crusade with similar mechanics to this. Plagued grain barrels spawned in cities, and players who interacted with them would die and spawn as an infected zombie. They were able to attack other players and spread the infection in doing so. My memory is pretty hazy since it happened so long ago, but in Shattrath (a high level neutral city), the zombies weren’t able to be attacked (probably due to pvp flags being forced off within the city limits), but in the faction cities, they were. This led to mobs of zombies roving around in Shattrath, pouncing on any unfortunate player they could find, where players in the faction cities formed subjugation squads and would patrol around, exterminating any zombies in sight.
Something else interesting was zombies gained access to another language (Zombie), and since Shattrath accommodated both player factions, you were able to speak to zombified members of the opposing faction.


Skyrim.
I tried it for 25ish hours with around 30 mods, mostly QoL stuff with a few other tweaks thrown in. I don’t like 1st person melee combat (and the 3rd person camera sucks), so I went magic. I had a magic overhaul mod, but the best spell I found was just double fireball. Every time I tried other spells, I would think “this kinda works, I guess, or I could just kill them with double fireball.” Combat got pretty boring, since every engagement boiled down to double fireball until out of mana, then use bow and arrow until everything was dead.
Side note: I evidently was bitten by a vampire at some point and didn’t realize I had turned into one myself until several hours later when I received the message that my vampire powers had been fully realized. I was confused as to why guards kept asking me if I was sick and commenting on how I looked so pale.


Some of these groups have dozens or hundreds of people on them, no way I’ll get even a fraction of them to. I don’t have the time or desire to start a new community from scratch.
As much as I hate it, people join Discord because that’s where all the communities are and they stay because all their other communities are there.


Check out the Youtube channel Let’s Game It Out. Josh is very creative in finding ways to torment the NPCs of various simulator and tycoon games.


I quit the game more than once during the slog that is the post-ARR questline. I got to the point where I was just skipping all dialogue, then started paying attention again when I noticed new characters being introduced. Getting to Heavensward was great, both storywise and just to be in new areas.
I heard later that they pruned that section of the questline down, and it really needed it.


Probably more floundering. An EA exec told them at one point that their demo was crap (and based on word from other devs, he was probably right), so they reintroduced flight, which IMO was one of the best aspects of the game. EA didn’t force a new story or concept on Bioware, though. All that was Bioware’s own fault between lack of leadership and staff burnout.
A long read, but this article goes pretty in-depth on what happened during the development of Anthem: https://kotaku.com/how-biowares-anthem-went-wrong-1833731964


“Anthem actually had the code for local servers running in a dev environment right up until a few months before launch,” Darrah continued. “I don’t know that they still work, but the code is there to be salvaged and recovered. The reason you do this, it pulls away the costs of maintaining this game. So rather than having dedicated servers that are required for the game to run, you let the server run on one of the machines that’s playing the game.” This, he added, could have worked alongside an additional move to add AI party members to the game, allowing people to play it like a single-player game.
Ok, this is even more heartbreaking now. I loved the concept of Anthem and had a fair bit of fun with the game in its current (prior to shutdown) state and was hopeful that the “Next” project would overhaul it into something great. I still don’t blame EA for their decisions in this case; Bioware fucked around for way too long during development and the overhaul project was most likely seen as too little, too late… or too expensive.


This looks a lot more practical (but less amusing) than his previous iteration, which shocked his arm muscles into aiming at the correct spot.
FFXIV is one of those games that I liked, but wished I could like more. I wasn’t into progression raiding or crafting, so it was always a matter of time before my interest would fizzle out once the current MSQ was done.
Your character looks nice, btw.