Games Played 2022 Edition

Well my friends it is time once again for me to drag out the spreadsheet porn and share with you my gaming habits from the last year. Since this post is likely going to see some fresh eyeballs who have never experienced this level of nonsense before let me give you a high level of this project. One of the cool things about daily blogging is that it gives me a pretty solid record of what I was doing at any given point since April of 2013 when I embarked upon my first daily blogging journey. I also take fairly meticulous care of saving my screenshots and have a collection sorted by game and genre that makes up well over 50,000 individual files and takes up around 140 GB. This has allowed me to more or less reconstruct my playing habits back to 2012.

For years I used a service called Raptr, but when it died I lost something that I considered to be a relatively valuable resource. I knew that trying to keep track of hours played was a fool’s errand and for Steam games that interface did a relatively good job of that. Instead what I wanted to track was whether or not I played a game in a given month. This was a simple data point that allowed me to view how my tastes in gaming shifted over time. The pattern that emerges is that I have a dozen or so “forever games” that I shift back and forth between, and a number of games that I visit for a month or two. Since starting this nonsense I have logged 374 different games that I have spent time playing and of those 236 have only been played for a single month.

Exploring Games PLayed in 2022

This was very much a year of forever games for me it seems. I spent a lot of time visiting old favorites, and this is also the year that I finally “groked” Path of Exile and allowed it to start dominating my life. The above list is every game that I spent time playing for more than three months. Some of these are going to be terribly deceiving because for example, you would think this year is dominated by Final Fantasy XIV and that would be a lie. What I did throughout the year was log in every 4-5 days and either go house shopping or retrieve my money because I failed to win a house in the lottery. Similarly, I played Guild Wars 2 quite a bit for several months in a row, and then have fallen into a routine of logging in and farming the guild halls for resources or doing the occasional world event, but not really spending a massive amount of time there.

Fallout 76 has been something I have quietly played off and on whenever the mood hit me, and it wasn’t really that I started actively talking about it until the rest of AggroChat got into it. New World was a major force in my year because I was either playing in maintenance mode for the first few months, playing on the PTR for the middle of the year and hit rerolling and hitting the game extremely hard for the last few months of the year. I decided to track World of Warcraft Dragonflight Alpha/Beta separate from World of Warcraft as a whole because I very much approached the game from a more clinical tester mindset. I’ve not actively played World of Warcraft legitimately since December 2020 and as such have not paid for a subscription either. Basically, my time in Dragonflight did not really feel like I was truly playing the game because I was playing a series of disposable characters for each testing session.

The game that sort of surprised me for how long I actually spent playing it is Torchlight Infinite. The weird thing about that is that I don’t really particularly like the game. I got into it from a testing standpoint and between mobile testing and PC testing, I dipped my toes into the water for six separate months. It isn’t a bad game necessarily but it isn’t exactly a game that compels me either. Similarly, I kept trying to play Monster Hunter Rise and never really attached to it. Whatever magic that kept me glued to Monster Hunter World for as long as it did seems to have passed because from what I can tell Rise is essentially a spiritual successor but I am just not finding it nearly as enjoyable. Lost Ark is similarly a game that I kept trying to enjoy, finally giving up on it and moving on with life. I am not entirely certain what it is about that game that I don’t enjoy but it is very much “not for me”.

Something that I started doing last year is adding a bunch of graphs to this shindig. There seems to be a weird ebb and flow pattern arising from the number of games I played in a given year. There are years where I churn through a lot of games, and then years that I play significantly fewer. Considering the number of “forever” games that I engaged with, I would have thought this was going to be a low-count year I did have an exceptionally frantic few months in the beginning. January, February, and some of March I was a game-finishing machine. I was all about the single-player lifestyle and seemingly catching up for so much lost time. I thought that trend would carry forward but apparently, that did not, and starting in March I was diving hardcore into Guild Wars 2 and really finding a place for it properly in my life. Basically, I approached it with the level of gusto that I had Final Fantasy XIV several times in the past. Once that trend started it seemed to reignite my play of shared world games where admittedly I still mostly play like a single-player murder hobo.

Another thing that I like to do is compare the top games that I played this year against the top list of last year. The first thing I noticed as a trend is that this is the year that I effectively stopped playing mobile games. There is a period of time when lay in bed attempting to let sleep claim me, and that previously had been a time I played random mobile games. I would play a game for a few months, then when I got to the point where it started needing a financial investment I would bounce and move to another one. Instead, I have spent more time sifting through things like Instagram and Tumblr rather than playing a game. I have to be honest, the mobile gaming experience is fairly miserable in general on Android and I don’t really find that I am missing it.

I played an awful lot of Action RPGs, and while I had distanced myself from Diablo 3 in 2021… it made me miserable doing it. So this year saw a bit of a resurgence as I allowed myself to play it once more. I also branched out and played a lot of other games from Path of Exile to Undecember. Last Epoch is actually shaping up now to be a game worth playing and I am actively looking forward to the multiplayer client testing. Elder Scrolls Online and Destiny both fell by the wayside further and Guild Wars 2 really moved into the forefront of games I care deeply about. GW2 had been a title I had struggled to really understand for the better part of a decade and finally for whatever reason this past year it clicked for me. New World continues to be a major force in both years and while I was very much in a depressed state about the future of that game at this time last year, this year gave it a brand new lease on life.

Games Played Since the Start of This Project

I am shifting things up a bit differently this year. In the past, I had posted a snippet of the larger chart and it didn’t really mean anything. Instead, I am looking specifically at the total months played counts at the end of this year s contrasted with where we were at the end of last year. World of Warcraft has finally been dethroned, but admittedly this is only due to some trickery and me not counting my time spent testing Dragonflight as me playing World of Warcraft. If you added the 4 months that I tested Dragonflight to the Warcraft totals, then you end up with Final Fantasy XIV finally tying it. For me, my “truth” is that I was not actually playing World of Warcraft but instead focused on rigorous testing and writing bug notes, so that is ultimately how I logged it but I could see the argument the other way around.

Destiny fell to third, and I found it funny that Diablo 3, Elder Scrolls Online, and Rift all held their relative positions at Third, Fourth, and Fifth. I technically did log into Rift and play for a little bit but not terribly munch. I was feeling nostalgic and trying to figure out what the hell I was doing the last time I played largely drove any of those feelings from me. Guild Wars 2 and New World shuffled the order as did Minecraft. You are not reading that wrong… I did in fact play Wildstar this year admittedly with the emulator server client that is deeply incomplete but I will be keeping tabs on that as it progresses. I do feel a bit bad because if trends continue to follow by this time next year Everquest II will have most likely been pushed off the list.

Something that I started last year is charting all of the games that I have played for longer than six months in total. You can really see that there are six games that have dominated my landscape for the last decade and that is Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft, Destiny, Diablo 3, Elder Scrolls Online, and Rift. Of those I am no longer really playing World of Warcraft or Rift, so their influence will continue to be diminished while games like Guild Wars 2, New World, and Path of Exile are starting to gain ground. It will be interesting to see what this looks like in another decade if I keep up with this nonsense. I had been fairly regularly playing Magic the Gathering Arena but I largely stopped that. I am not entirely certain what led to me not playing it, but it has been ages since I have even booted it up to claim free cards, let alone sit down to play an actual game.

Another thing that I started last year is keeping track of my longest streaks. What I mean by that is the most months in a row that I have played at least some of the game. This list changes a lot more slowly because while I may shift through several games in a year, it is very rare that I keep at them for more than a few months at a time. New World is gaining ground as a serious contender at twenty-three months so far, and Path of Exile while much further back in the pack is gaining ground with seven months. It is going to be very hard for something to top the salad days of Destiny and how active I was in that game. Thirty-Three months is going to be extremely hard to top and even Diablo 3 had its streak broken last year.

Another Year in the Books

Sometimes I roll into this post with thoughts about what might be on the horizon for me as a gamer or blogger, but this time I really don’t know what the next year might hold. I thought last year that I would be focused more on single-player games, and while the first few months were definitely that… I quickly fell back into my shared environment gamer ways. I am so far removed at this point from regularly gaming with others, that I wonder if I will ever get back to my “pugging” for hours at a time sort of ways of my past. I’ve not raided in any form since 2016 and even then I was not the most serious raider. I think I might have largely closed that chapter in my life and instead, find comfort in having other people around… but doing my own thing.

For those who might want to go back in time and see how this series has evolved, I finally actually created a proper category on my blog for it. I know it only took me seven years to get around to doing this. I think one side goal is to do a better job of charting this data as the year is going on, rather than having a flurry of activity in the last few months trying to catch everything up. Another thing that I want to do is dive back into Guild Wars 2 and finally finish up my Skyscale so I can fly like a proper player of that game. Maybe even finish my Epic Weapon that I started and then largely walked away from. I would love to be able to dive back into Final Fantasy XIV but I wonder if that game is “finished” for me. I am feeling about it much like I felt about World of Warcraft at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. The narrative was wrapped up in a clean and satisfying manner and it is going to take a lot to really engage me in quite the same way as I had been for the last ten years.

What are your goals for the coming year? Do you think this whole game-tracking project that I keep doing is pure nonsense? Feel free to drop me a line below. I hope you all have had a great holiday season and that you have a phenomenal start to the new year.