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Turns out we have played a lot of Guild Wars 2.
Find all previous editions of the PCG Q&A here. Some highlights:
– How much free storage space have you got on your PC?
– What’s the worst internet connection you’ve had?
– Do you vote in the Steam Awards?
The cycle of videogame discourse loops around again, an ouroboros chewing its own tail and pausing only to vomit up one of the same half-dozen topics we must apparently discuss again and again, until the world’s ending. This time, the cyclical serpent has barfed out the subject of how long a videogame should be. Do your best to ignore it. Let’s talk about something else instead. Let’s simply peruse our libraries, look over our save files, and take note of those games we’ve decided are worth dedicating, say, to pick an entirely arbitrary number at random, 500 hours to.
What game have you spent the most hours in?
Here are our answers, plus some from our forum.
Wes Fenlon, Senior Editor: Tragically all my League of Legends stats have been erased since I played, but in the span of roughly one year, mostly in 2011, I played something like 800 matches. At an average of 40 minutes a match, that comes out to more than 500 hours that year. I played so much it literally haunted my dreams.
Halo 2 and 3 got more of my time on Xbox, though. According to the Halo site’s surviving stats, I played 2,969 matches of Halo 2 and 2,905 matches of Halo 3. At an average of 15 minutes a match, that’s about 1,500 hours between the two. Not so bad, considering that took place over about five years!
I’ve spent a lot of the last decade hoping something, anything else would overtake it as my most played game. I imagined it’d be Splatoon 2 for a minute, racking up a whopping 720 over the course of the pandemic, but considering I put 700 of my 800+ hours into Apex Legends in the last 7 months alone, I reckon it’ll take the podium sooner or later. I’m also completely ignoring my World of Warcraft playtime which, having been an on-again off-again subscriber for over 16 years, must easily overshadow everything mentioned above. I finally cut the habit in 2019, and I’m not going back now just to check my hours.
But a quick check of Steam shows my most-played version of the game was Football Manager 2019 with a hefty 1,107.7 hours, a little over the 1,062.7 hours I spent with FM2018 the year before, or the 1,007.1 hours of FM2017.
The series is, however, a stark reminder about just how much having children affects the time you can spend gaming. FM2020 has but 841.5 hours of my life, FM2021 a paltry 393.1 hours, and FM2022 just 113 minutes.
The lesson for everyone here is a simple one: don’t have kids, they ruin everything.
Those 324.9 hours are but a fragment of the true time spent hunkering down in mountainsides with my pawns, though. Another 20 hours flew by straight off the bat, the first time my friend ever showed it to me. He went to bed and woke up the next morning to me, red-eyed, and hunched over his PC like «I built a base, look.»
I clocked up another hundred hours or so on my boyfriend’s PC during the year between uni and finding gainful employment, so it’s safe to assume the number is closer to 450 hrs. Basically, I’ve been training in colony management for some time. Can I put that on my CV?
Aside from that, Valheim comes in second at 603 hours played. Errr… go big or go home?
As I’ve gotten older I think it’s only natural that you lean away from games that require skill maintenance to keep up with, partly because the friends around you are doing the same. The other factor is the mindset that our job at PC Gamer instills: covering games creates a pressure to be playing a breadth of different things, to be diving into what everyone’s talking about. I’d love to know what future game will supplant the shooters at the top of my permanent record.
Over on Steam, it’s The Elder Scrolls Online, though it only reports 503 hours while my real total from the standalone ZOS launcher is probably double that. MMOs seem like such obvious winners though. My top-played singleplayer game is Dragon Age Inquisition with 337 hours.
450 hours in Oblivion felt like a lot until I saw almost everyone else at PCG has over a thousand hours on their most-played lists. Sometimes way over that. Now I’m suddenly wondering: have I just never found a game I really, truly loved? Damn.
All of these hour counts would be surprising if I went back in time and told my younger self what kind of curious decisions I’d make in the future, but the real shocker to me even now is my Overwatch hours. I remember scoffing at Blizzard making a first-person shooter when it was announced and reluctantly buying it on launch day (which is also my birthday) to join my friends. Now I have over 3,500 hours in it across several accounts. At this point I know too much about the game and its history. I never thought I’d spend so much time in a game that it’s infiltrated all parts of my brain, but here I am.
It’s another MMO that takes the win: I played WoW for many, many years, and racked up the kind of play hours that puts all of these to shame (we’re talking many thousands of hours here). Which makes it a bit strange that I haven’t touched it in almost a year and yet don’t miss it at all.
I played 219 hours of the first Total War: Warhammer, which is I guess one campaign less? We’ll see if the third game knocks it off the perch.
mjs warlord: I can’t prove I did this but I started using Warframe when it first came out and at the point where I stopped using it I had just over 2,800 hours , I stopped using it because one day I logged in and everything I had bought or fought for had gone! Somehow my account had got hacked.
Frindis: Next to my almost 11K hours in Rust , I got around 3K hours in WoW. That is the most I have ever played in a game. I’m not sure why, but when I look at my WoW transaction history, it does not show anything older than my Diablo 3 purchase from 19.07.12. It might have something to do with the redesign of the BlizzAccount.
I’ve never really stuck with any game for very long, so I doubt there are non-Steam games that vastly surpass 500+ hours, though there’s probably some that at least come close.
Withywarlock: I don’t have the specifics because this was on the Xbox 360, but The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion will easily be in the thousands of hours, as I’d played it religiously for years on end. On the PC version, including Morroblivion I have 177 hours clocked. On Steam however, the most hours I’ve put into a game is with Total War: Warhammer II for the obvious reasons of it being grand strategy with hugely diverse armies and lots of army-fantasy. Might play that in a bit, tbh.
WoodenSaucer: The most for me is 221 hours in Skyrim. I usually play shorter games, and I really don’t have that much gaming time. I know a guy on another forum who has over 19,000 hours on Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen. Don’t ask me how. He’s not lying about it because I just now looked at his Steam profile, and he’s currently up to 19,864 hours on that game.
Johnway: Path of Exile by a country mile. Just under 1,450 hours.
The leagues just breathe life into the game every time and are quite significant features so it’s in my best interest to play it. The end game is strangely addictive. Never beat it mind, but enough to keep me occupied each time. Generally it’s probably the challenges of each league with a chance of loot that keeps me going. But if there isn’t any good loot or the league is a bit naff, I quit sooner rather then later.
In the last 10 years anyway, before I really used Steam no way to know and I had more time when I was younger. Pretty sure nothing would be near 11k hours though.
Ryzengang: I could try to check my lifetime Runescape/Old School Runescape play time across all my accounts but I would probably be deeply disturbed so I will refrain from doing that . Let’s just say it is well over 5,000 hours and leave it at that. World of Warcraft is roughly 1,000 hours if I only count my main. Other than those two I really don’t have a great idea. Some of my most played games were (mostly) on console (e.g., Borderlands 2, Halo 3, OG Modern Warfare).
ZedClampet: I’ve got 3,550 hours in Warframe. At some point I got exhausted by how grindy some of the new content was (to get this one item, I calculated that the best case scenario had me doing the 15-minute mission 107 times–but that was the absolute best case scenario) and just quit playing.
They have a great community, but I ended up playing by myself most of the time mainly because I was doing things other people didn’t want to do and doing them in ways they would have scoffed at. For instance, when people wanted to level a weapon, there was one map they grouped up and went to, and it would take approximately forever to level your weapon to max (they were efficient at killing things, but not at earning weapon XP). Also, you were expected to play a certain frame and fulfil certain duties. But meanwhile I had a way of leveling my weapons by myself in 10 to 12 minutes, and I could play any frame I wanted. Pretty much every goal was like that. Players thought there was a right way and a wrong way to approach everything, and they expected you to follow along, but their methods were actually not the best.
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