Years In Review Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Games Played 2023 Edition

December 29, 2023 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! It is that time of year when I drag out my spreadsheets and present an increasingly difficult-to-read picture of the games that I have played since 2012. I keep scaling down the browser zoom so that I can capture a screenshot representing the spreadsheet’s totality each year. What you are looking at is a representation of the games that I have played each month and I started this nonsense in 2013… but backfilled some information that I happened to have on hand for 2012. Essentially I am a fairly rabid screenshotter when it comes to video games, in large part because I need something to break up the massive chunks of prose that appear on my blog. So I have cataloged and kept careful tabs on the games that I play during a given year and stored them away in my “Gameshots” vault which as of the time of writing this post is roughly 550,000 files and roughly 180 Gigabytes worth of storage space. This “paper trail” gives me a fairly accurate accounting of what I happened to be playing during a given month, but does nothing to tell me exactly how much I played a given game.

For years I used a service called Raptr, and I always like looking back to see what all I had played in a given year and more importantly how many hours. When I started tracking this manually I decided that trying to determine an hour count was going to be a bit onerous, so instead I made do with a simple binary count of whether or not I played a game in a given month. The black squares that you see scattered across the above screenshot represent a macro that I run that shades in any square with the number 1 in it… I then tally in the final column giving me a total count of how many months I have played at least enough of a game to take screenshots. Patterns emerge where I have a handful of “forever games” that I return to over and over, and then a wide variety of games that I have played for a few months at a time. Since starting this process I have logged 396 games that I have played at the time of writing this post, but by this evening that number may be larger.

Exploring the Games Played in 2023

We will talk about specific trends a bit later, but I tend to have years where I play a wide variety of games and then years where I entrench more into “forever games”. This was absolutely a year for forever games, but I have to admit the data tells a few lies. For example, this would give you the impression that I played a lot of Final Fantasy XIV and Fallout 76… when in truth it was more a few hours each week poking my head in to check out things and do a few daily “chores”. Guild Wars 2 however gets an honest place at the top of this list because it has been my most reliable MMORPG since I finally reached a point of acceptance for the type of game it was trying to be rather than constantly attempting to push it into the World of Warcraft mold.

The game that I spent the most time playing this year however is Path of Exile. I stole this screenshot from my Steam Year in Review that shows I had a grand total of 1246 gameplay sessions with the longest streak being 71 days in a row that I played the game. This does not shock me in the least because I have over 2100 hours on record in Steam for this game. Granted there were several attempts at playing it made from 2014 onwards, but when it finally grabbed ahold of me in 2021 and 2022… I’ve never really let go of it. My happy place this year has been playing some Path of Exile while listening to an Audiobook, and as a result, I have wiled away many hours doing this sitting on the sofa with a cat beside me and another on my legs.

The one that surprised me the most is Wayfinder because I had not even really been tracking my play of this game until the Steam Year in Review happened. This was in large part due to the fact that I was under a pretty nasty NDA regarding my playtime and was following the rules… and not taking any screenshots. I participated in several months worth of playtests before the game “launched” or at least started charging exorbitant fees to keep testing it. It is a bit of a bummer honestly because I thought this game had a lot of promise, but what I played was not worthy of spending cash on yet and needed a heck of a lot more work before it was ready for primetime.

I am also surprised that I spent more time playing Diablo IV than I did Diablo III. Though to be fair… once I dove into Path of Exile head first… Diablo III took a backseat as my ARPG of choice. For Diablo IV… I just keep poking at its corpse trying to make it be a fun game. I will admit though that Season 2 was really fun until I got to level 70. I managed to grind my way up to 90 and then lost all interest in finishing the grind to 100. I think there is hope for this game, and the team seems to be making some fairly rapid changes… but cannot seem to turn fast enough to keep the players engaged fully. The best thing that ever happened to Path of Exile was the launch of Diablo IV full stop. I’ve seen more players discover POE than players who really seemed to love D4.

As I said earlier, I tend to move in a rhythm where I have a year where I play a large variety of games… and then a year where I retreat into forever games. This was a retreating year which tells me that coming up in 2024 it will be a year where I catch up on all of the games that I missed while focusing on “comfort gaming”. I am sure at some point I will tire of Path of Exile, and one of the things that I am looking forward to spending a bit more time in is World of Warcraft. I had been hesitant to engage much with Blizzard games while Bobby Kotick was at the helm of ActiBlizz… but with him leaving the company and his official last day being yesterday… I am planning on diving into Dragonflight and giving that game a proper shot. I enjoyed the testing that I did of the game prior to the expansion launch, so I am looking forward to diving back into playing the ACTUAL Belghast character, my Human Warrior on Argent Dawn. I’ve been gone long enough that NONE of the Belghast’s on the WoW Armory are actually me anymore.

This is the point where I compare the top played games of 2023 to the top played games of 2022. Again there is some lying happening here specifically with Final Fantasy XIV and Fallout 76, so you can pretty much ignore those. I felt like I had to count them by the rules of this process but I have not spent a ton of time actually playing either of them… mostly doing “wizard chores”. Guild Wars 2 saw quite a bit more regular play with me pretty consistently spending several hours a week playing it. I got completely caught up with the expansions and started working on a second character that is now doing Secrets of the Obscure. Path of Exile absolutely saw a ton more play… Torchlight Infinite dropped to almost no play… and Destiny and Elder Scrolls Online left the list.

Diablo 3 and Diablo 4 both saw considerable play as did Last Epoch and Grim Dawn as I seem to be going through a heavy ARPG phase. Honkai Star Rail grabbed my heart for quite a bit but I have fallen off playing the game over the last several months. New World has continued to be a comfort game for me that I keep returning to, and there have been some truly shocking improvements in the game as a whole making it a really great experience. I had actually gotten back to playing some Final Fantasy XIV and had begun working a little each day to level new jobs having gotten five of them to 90. However, Affliction League in Path of Exile and our “Bel League” private league happened and completely threw me out of the rhythm of playing anything but it for a while.

Games Played Since the Start of this Project

This is the point where I attempt to tackle the totality of the list and make the massive grid of checkboxes make some semblance of sense. It is here that we can start to see some of the trends in how my gaming has changed over the years. I cut off this year at 14 months total played with a game, which makes the cut-off around EQ2 and Wildstar. Last year was the first year where Final Fantasy XIV took the lead spot away from World of Warcraft, and the thing is position on this list takes several years to shift as there are a lot of games that I played for a very long time that are still extremely entrenched in the list. For example, Rift has been a game I have not played in any form since October of 2018… but it still holds on tentatively to the sixth slot in the list. Given how much I have been enjoying Guild Wars 2 I fully expect by this time next year that Rift will have fallen to seventh and GW2 will have moved up to sixth.

Path of Exile is rapidly moving up the lower half of the list as is Fallout 76 and New World. Destiny sits high on the list but I am not playing the game at all and have not for this entire last year… so it will begin to sink down slowly. I am somewhat sad to say that I only played Elder Scrolls Online for a single month last year which means it is likely going to keep slipping down as well. It makes me happy that Everquest II holds a position on the list still since most of my time playing that game predates the start of this project. I’ve returned to it several times but I just can’t jive with its combat systems and as much as I want to love it… because I love the world and the way it was created… I just can’t go back. That is one thing I have noticed about myself is that I have a really hard time diving back into hotbar combat games. I greatly prefer the more action-oriented combat of Guild Wars 2 or New World, and I keep hoping someone will give me a new World of Warcraft or Everquest but with action combat.

This next chart shows only the games that I have played for at least six months. This really whittles down the massive list given that there really have only been so many “forever games” that end up holding my attention for the long haul. Rift had held as a bit of a rampart against the lower tier with a big drop off last year of 58 months for Rift and 30 months for its nearest competitor Guild Wars 2. However, that wall has fallen a bit with Guild Wars 2, New World, and Fallout 76 all starting to climb that slope. Considering that Path of Exile has now hit 24 months of play if it can hold my attention going into 2024 it will start to rapidly pass a number of games in the middle ground. There are a number of games on the list that are just not going to get any more progress… Dragalia Lost fore example was really strong for awhile but given that the game is now dead and closed… it will never gain more months. Similarly, Horizon Zero Dawn is a game that I have played multiple times… but is unlikely to really draw more attention. I know the story very well at this point so when the sequel comes out on PC it is very unlikely I will play through it again.

I think what is probably more telling though is the “Streak” chart. This shows the longest number of months unbroken that I have played a game. Destiny still holds the top of this chart but there are several other games that are starting to chip away at its lead now that I have effectively stopped playing it. Specifically, Final Fantasy XIV will absolutely topple it next year and take the top position with Diablo III probably also eclipsing it pending I play a similar amount next year as I did this past year. I think what is more telling though is how quickly Path of Exile has climbed the list from being only at 7 months unbroken last year at this time to 19 months. New World is holding pretty strong with 24, but it is very unlikely that I will ever hit a streak like that again with the game. Dragalia Lost like I said above is a dead game so it will sit there much like Rift… waiting for someone to push it down the list. There is no way that Guild Wars 2 does not move up in the list and will honestly probably be sitting up around Destiny by this time next year.

Another Year Down

More than anything… this was the year of books for me and they were more of my focus than necessarily the games that I happened to be playing. As far as games go… it was the year of the Righteous Fire Juggernaut as I played one as my main character in Sanctum, Crucible, and Ancestor leagues in Path of Exile… and now mourn the death of the character in Affliction. Right now I am trying to find a character that I enjoy even half as much as I did the RF Juggernaut. Currently, I am working on an RF Chieftain… but there is no way it is ever going to feel as tanky and comfy as the Juggeranut did. I am hoping maybe we see some changes that make the class viable again.

I’ve said this numerous times, but I would really like to get back into doing things as a group. I’ve been a solo-only murder hobo for far too long, and I would like to get back to doing things with other players. I am not even sure if that is a Guild Wars 2 thing or a Final Fantasy XIV thing… or even maybe a World of Warcraft thing. I am not sure I ever want to get back to playing on a hard schedule and the raiding life… but I would like to actually do things with someone other than myself going into the new year. I have a catmander tag… I just need to get over my anxiety and start using it. That wall of anxiety has been what has been holding me back from doing things with strangers for years and I am getting somewhat sick of it.

To be fair… group with other players was a goal from last year as well. I did at least finish up my Skyscale which was a goal I talked about last year so there is that. I am not sure what the next year is going to hold and as a result, I am hesitant to make too many predictions. It was a hard year for reasons that were not necessarily manifest in this blog or the games that I played. So next year I really want to work on myself a bit. I’ve still not really recovered from the massive changes we all went through at the start of the pandemic… and I feel like I need to do some drastic things in order to carve myself out a new “normal” or at least one that I am willing to accept. I’ve become a bit of a hermit and I need to change that because I have effectively given up doing a lot of things that used to bring me joy.

I hope you all have a wonderful 2024, and I am sure I will keep this tradition going for at least one more year… so I will see you next December to see what fate has in store for me. Thanks as always for reading my nonsense and if you have made it this far I love you all.

Games Played 2022 Edition

December 30, 2022 by Belghast

The Grand Experiment – Tracking Games Played Since 2012

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

Games Played Longer than 3 Months 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.

Apparently, I played Torchlight Infinite More than I thought

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”.

Total Number of Games Played in Each Year

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

Comparing my Top Games of All Time from Last Year and This Year

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.

Games Played 2021 Edition

December 30, 2022December 30, 2021 by Belghast

Well friends it is that time once again to do my “Games Played” post for the year. Each year this image becomes significantly less readable as I am slowly expanding the width of what is shown in frame. For those who are completely new to the blog or might not have experienced one of these posts before I have a strange obsession. Back in 2015 I started keeping track of the games that I played during the year and have since then expanded my spreadsheet to included 2013 and most of 2012 all the way through the current year. Why do I do this? I honestly am not even sure at this point other than I enjoy making data points.

The truth is that I used to use a service called Raptr and it was a great way of keeping track of what I had been playing at any given time. Once I moved away from it I lacked any meaningful way to collect the same sort of data for producing any sort of long term trends. In 2015 I started keeping track of things in a very simple format. If I played a game during a month, it got a tick mark regardless of how much time I spent playing that game. This allowed me to tabulate how many months during a year was I actually engaged with a specific title. There are ways to track things at a more granular level, but for me it was enough knowing what I happened to be playing at a specific time. This has allowed me to go back and see when I have dipped in and out of games like World of Warcraft or Rift, and when I actually started playing a new game for the first time.

Since I started this officially in 2015, you might be wondering exactly how I was able to back populate up through 2012. The first way is that I am pretty prolific when it comes to taking screenshots in video games, in part because I need a constantly flow of them to break out the walls of text in these blog posts. At the time of writing this I have roughly 120 GB of screenshots in cold storage representing roughly 34,000 individual screenshots. I have an unknown number of active screenshots sitting in various directories on my machine that I have yet to file away properly but they represent roughly another 20 GB. On top of this my blog itself acts as a pretty great journal because if I am playing a game regularly, I am likely going to be talking about it. Combined this has given me a pretty good view of what I was doing at any point forward from 2013 when I first started the whole daily blogging thing.

Top Games Played of 2021

The rules for this whole experiment are pretty straight forward. If I play a game at all during a given month I fill in a box, and then tabulate the number of filled boxes to give me a number of months I played a game during the calendar year. There are going to be specific “forever games” that game a regular showing and then a bunch of games that I only play for one or two months at a time. The biggest difference this year is that I made an attempt to keep better track of the mobile games that I happened to be playing. As such you see games like Mitrasphere, Tales of the Wind, and Undead World: Hero Survival consuming a few months. When it comes to mobile games I have this pattern of installing one, playing for a few months out of boredom before I fall asleep at night and then never playing it again.

A new feature this year is that I actually got my shit together and started keeping proper track of the total number of games that I have played in each of the years. Notice there is this sorta trend where I dip back and forth between 70ish game years and 40ish game years. I think more than anything this denotes just how involved I was with any specific games that ate up all of my time, or if I was floundering a bit and trying to find something to really sink my teeth into… but failing miserably. This was very much a year dominated by only a handful of games, but you can see how it ranks against other years in the above bar chart. Let’s specifically look at only the games that I spent more than three months playing.

New World – 11 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 7 Months
Outriders – 6 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 5 Months
Destiny 2 – 4 Months

This is a year where I played an excessive amount of New World. While the game only launched in September I was pretty active in alpha/beta testing all the way through from February onwards when I got into the permanent testing group. I also had a massive resurgence of Final Fantasy XIV this year starting in June and continuing on through the release of Endwalker in early December. Outriders was a pretty significant game for me as well with it taking up four months in a row and then my recent revisiting in November and December. In January of the year I got deeply involved with Elder Scrolls Online again and spent several months hanging out with friends there and leveling some of my very first alts in the game.

If we compare this year to last year… you are going to see a few games that are conspicuously missing. The year of 2021 was a year without Blizzard games almost entirely. This started as me simply being disillusioned with Shadowlands and being unhappy with the way that expansion rolled out. By January of 2021 I had entirely bounced off of that game. Then when the news about the awful working conditions and allegations of abuse hit, I decided that I wanted nothing to do with that company. This put an immediate halt to my reoccurring Diablo 3 plans and lead me to ignore the launch of Diablo 2 Resurrection. So when you take away a game that I played 12 months in 2020 and another that I played 9 months… the entire picture starts to look significantly different.

Top 15 of All Time

Another thing that I find interesting is how the games that I have played the most number of months shifts over time. The above graphic is sorted by total months played and shows 2019, 2020, and 2021. Now one thing that I need to talk about quickly is that some of the previous numbers were off significantly. When working on this years data I noticed that the numbers being tabulated were completely missing some of the past years, which means that some numbers went up a bit as compared to last years numbers. For example I did not play World of Warcraft at all this year but it is going to show that it went up to 75 over the 69 I listed last year. So with this correction in mind this is what the top 15 list looks like now.

World of Warcraft – 75 Total Months
Destiny 1/2 – 69 Total Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 67 Total Months
Diablo 3 – 55 Total Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 50 Total Months
Rift – 47 Total Months
Pokemon Go – 25 Total Months
MTG Arena – 21 Total Months
Guild Wars 2 – 19 Total Months
Minecraft – 17 Total Months
Dragalia Lost – 16 Total Months
Monster Hunter World – 16 Months
The Division 1/2 – 16 Months
Everquest II – 14 Months
New World – 14 Months

Something I have never really done previously but decided to this year, was to create another chart that shows every game that I have played over 6 months in bar chart form. Here is what that looks like.

For the most part the top six have held their places relative to each other for another year. World of Warcraft continues to hold onto that top spot, but having lost 12 months of play time… it is suffering. Destiny is also suffering a bit only having gained 4 months total as compared to Final Fantasy XIV with its 7 months of new play time. Diablo 3 only got 2 months worth of play time before I shut the door on all Blizzard games so it is going to suffer a bit in the future. Elder Scrolls continues to see regular revisits from me, but Rift is largely an artifact of a past era and now is standing there as a testament to what might have been. There is a significant drop down to Pokemon Go and MTG Arena, neither of which saw much play last year but still hold strong.

What surprised me was that Guild Wars 2 is gaining traction, and I figure with the new expansion on its way I will spend some more time playing that. Minecraft gained a few months which honestly I always thought it deserved to be higher on the list given how emotionally important the game is to me. The real surprise is New World and how much I have spent playing it through all of the testing phases and now after launch. I really hope that game can make the necessary changes in order to be something that I want to revisit over time. I fully expect to stop playing it once the holiday event is over and I stop getting free easy expertise increases.

Longest Streaks

Most Number of Months Played Sequentially

This is something new that started last year based on a conversation that I had with my friend Tam. We were curious which games I had played the most number of months in a row without pause. This year I have expanded this a bit and added a bar chart to show games and length of a given streak. For the most part there is not a lot of change here, but we did add a new game to the “more than six months” list and technically there would have been two but I already had a much longer FFXIV streak. New World was added to the list with its eleven months, which is pretty solid to be honest as streaks go.

Another Year of Gaming

This year saw a significant number of changes to the format of this post. More than anything I just expanded upon some footnotes that I used to talk about in this final section and turned them into proper charts. As I said before this game was marked by a handful of games that I spent a lot of time playing, but that does not mean that I also did not have several one off experiences. For example I had twenty five games that I only booted up and played during one month, and among these were games like Dragon Age Inquisition that I played through to completion.

I think more than anything we are all entering the third year of this pandemic and have had significant changes in the way we exist in life as a result. I know I did not expect most of the changes that have occurred in my own life, and would have had a hard time predicting any of them. I know for me at least I want to spend way less time in my office upstairs… where my gaming consoles and primary gaming rig are… because it also represents my work from home office. I play almost exclusively through Parsec now playing remote from my laptop downstairs and even most of my console gaming is done through a remote play app as well. It will be interesting to see what changes unfold during 2022, but for now I am not making any predictions.

If you are curious about the past gaming trends since I have started this experiment you can find my posts dating back to 2015 below. The format for the 2015 post is not quite following what ultimately ended up as my standard going forward.

If you are even more curious, you can check out the raw list of data that I have shared freely for years. I am still not certain why I started doing this, but it does make for an interesting tradition at the end of each year.

Games Played 2020 Edition

December 30, 2022December 31, 2020 by Belghast

This was one hell of a weird year, I think for pretty much everyone involved. Traditionally on the last day of the year (or as close as I can actually manage to it) I have had this tradition since 2015 of attempting to talk about the games that I played during the last year. I am not entirely certain why I started doing this thing, but if you have been around for awhile you will recognize this sort of post. I do this thing where I keep track of what games I played during what months of the year. I think in part this has been my way of keeping track of when exactly I played something now that tools that I used to use such as Raptr no longer really exist, or at least I am not really using them.

The challenge as well is that so many games are spread out across so many different platforms. I consume content from Steam, GOG, Epic Games, PlayStation Network, Nintendo Online or Xbox Game Pass. So instead of relying on a single source of information… I started keeping track of things in spreadsheet form and then collecting what games I actually touched during a given month based on what I had been talking about on my blog and what games I was taking screenshots of from my massive archive of past screenshots. The end is a compiled list of games that I chart in spreadsheet form… which is by no means as complete as tracking hours (which would be impossible) but does give me an idea of what my year looked like.

The Top 10 of 2020

The rules of this experiment are pretty straight forward. If I play a game in a given month I fill in a box and then tabulate the number of filled in boxes giving me the number of months in a given year I actually played a specific game. There are always going to be a number of “Forever Games” that eat up a lot of my time, but throughout the year I ended up spending at least some time in seventy different games. Here is the list of games that I played the most months during the year of 2020.

Diablo 3 – PC and Switch – Played all 12 Months
Destiny 2 – PC – Played 10 Months
World of Warcraft – PC – Played 9 Months
Ghost of Tsushima – PS4/PS5 – Played 6 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – PC – Played 5 Months
Phantasy Star Online – PC/Xbox One – Played 5 Months
Genshin Impact – PC/Android – Played 4 Months
Hades – PC/Switch – Played 4 Months
New World – PC – Played 3 Months
The Division 2 – PC – Played 3 Months

Another thing that I find interesting is comparing my top ten list from the previous year. First up it is zero shock that I am still playing a lot of Diablo 3. This game is comfort food for me and especially with the option of playing it on the Switch I spend a lot of time just tinkering around in it between seasons. My ultimate wish is still that I can just play my PC characters on the switch. Completely gone is Dragalia Lost and honestly… I have yet to replace it with a Mobile Phone game. Also gone is MTG Arena which I weirdly just sort of stopped playing out of the blue. Destiny 2 I probably played less, but I poked at it pretty often and World of Warcraft came back with the pandemic and my need to play something that I could ultimately shut my mind off while playing.

I played significantly less Final Fantasy XIV and for whatever reason I am finding it harder and harder to attach to that game. WoW Classic, Bloodstained, ESO, Anthem and Pokemon Go all ranked high in 2019 but are all completely absent. Replacing them would be Genshin Impact and PSO2 which I spent quite a bit of dedicated time playing… but have sort of petered out in both cases. Hades is another bedtime gaming experience that I continue to poke at… and while I spent a lot of months playing Ghost of Tsushima I never really was able to play for a very long time due to my lack of stamina when playing with a controller. Division 2 and New World both surprised me because I did not realize I had played for as many months as I ultimately did.

The Top 15 Of All Time

Top Games by Month Since Beginning Tracking

Another thing that I like doing is keeping track of the total number of months I have spent playing a game since starting this. I have data reaching back to 2012 and that gives me an eight year view of my gaming habits and trends. Since that image above is way too small to reasonably read, going to once again break it out into a text list.

World of Warcraft – 69 Total Months
Destiny / Destiny 2 – 65 Total Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 60 Total Months
Diablo 3 – 53 Total Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 45 Total Months
Rift – 39 Total Months
Pokemon Go – 25 Total Months
MTG Arena – 21 Total Months
Dragalia Lost – 16 Total Months
Monster Hunter World – 16 Total Months
Guild Wars 2 – 15 Total Months
Division 1 and 2 – 15 Total Months
Minecraft – 14 Total Months
ArcheAge – 13 Total Months
Fallout 4 – 13 Total Months
Wildstar – 13 Total Months

As you can see from the list… this is mostly consumed by what I earlier referred to as “Forever Games” There are a good number of MMORPG/Live Service as well as some evergreen games like Fallout 4 and Minecraft. Diablo 3 and Elder Scrolls Online swapped spots in the list, which makes sense because I did not really spend much time in ESO this past year. Given my continued disinterest in FFXIV, Diablo may be able to lap that game by this time next year. Rift continues to hold solid even though I am not playing it because that 39 month seems like a hard plateau to cross with new games. Weirdly from that point down all of the games remained the same… because they are not games I was actively playing nor has anything else had the staying power to really compete with them.

Longest Streaks

While working on this post, I had a random conversation with my friend Tam about this process and that I was going through pulling together this post. To this he posed the interesting question of which game has the longest streak of unbroken months. I didn’t have an answer to this at all, which lead me to quickly compile a list of the longest streak for all of the games on the above list. It was around this time that I realized that if I did a longest streaks list… I would end up with a completely different top 15. Several of those games are played in short bursts over a large period of time which add up to a big number in the end. The end result is a bit surprising.

Destiny – 33 Months in a Row
Diablo 3 – 28 Months in a Row
MTG Arena – 23 Months in a Row
Pokemon Go – 23 Months in a Row
Rift – 22 Months in a Row
World of Warcraft – 21 Months in a Row
Elder Scrolls Online – 20 Months in a Row
Final Fantasy XIV – 20 Months in a Row
Dragalia Lost – 16 Months in a Row
Monster Hunter World – 15 Months in a Row
World of Warcraft: Classic – 7 Months in a Row
Anthem – 6 Months in a Row
ArcheAge – 6 Months in a Row
Bloodstained Ritual of the Night – 6 Months in a Row
Ghost of Tsushima – 6 Months in a Row

Other Interesting Data

In 2018 I played 70 unique games, which fell to only 48 in 2019. However with 2020 I returned to 70 games which means I seemed to be extremely restless as it comes to gaming. In 2019 I played 19 games that I considered to be “singletons”, or games that I only played for a single month and then walked away from usually meaning I bounced. During 2020 I played 44 of these Singletons so I wound up bouncing around quite a bit. I would like to play more single player narrative adventures, because I seem to really enjoy them when I allow myself to play them. However I still find myself being drawn back into the usual titles that I find familiar and comforting, which was something that I needed quite a bit during this year of Pandemic.

If you are curious about past gaming trends since starting this experiment, you can find my posts going back to 2015.

Games Played 2019
Games Played 2018
Games Played 2017
Games Played 2016
Games Played 2015 – The format is kinda wonky with this one

If you are terribly curious, you can even check out my raw list of data that I share freely. I am not exactly sure why I started this tradition, but I do find it interesting to reflect back each year on the past years games and the trends that occurred.