Years In Review Archives - Page 2 of 3

Games Played 2019 Edition

December 30, 2022December 31, 2019 by Belghast

For those who have been reading this blog for some time you will know I have a yearly tradition of doing a rundown of the games that I played during the year and comparing them to the same periods over previous years. I have this weird habit of keeping track of what I am playing in a given month and tracking this in spreadsheet form. I started doing this in 2013 and thanks to my other habit of keeping track of spreadsheets I have gone back as far as 2012 with some level of accuracy. I could likely go back further… but that is a job for another time. Essentially based on screenshots, what I am blogging about and what I am talking about on the podcast I can create a fairly accurate record of the games played during a given year. For those who are prepared to descend into madness you can view the entire spreadsheet here.

The Top 10 of 2019

The rules are simple… if I played a game in a given month I fill in a box and then tabulate the number of filled in boxes giving me how many months in a given year I played a game. This is not nearly as granular as I would have liked, but trying to keep a journal of every game I played on a specific day truly would be madness. From this we can see some trends about my tastes during a given year and how these have changed over time. The games I played over the most months are as follows.

Diablo 3 – PC and Switch – Played All 12 Months
Dragalia Lost – Android – Played All 12 Months
MTG Arena – PC – Played All 12 Months
Destiny 2 – 10 Total Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 9 Total Months
World of Warcraft Classic – 7 Total Months (counting beta time)
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – 6 Total Months (counting beta time)
Elder Scrolls Online – 6 Total Months
Anthem – 5 Total Months
Pokemon Go – 5 Total Months

Now lets take a look to see how this compares to last year, as there are several changes that are worth talking about.

First off there are some significant games that are completely missing from the list. World of Warcraft for example which still reigns as the game I have played for the most months total is completely missing from the top ten. Additionally Monster Hunter World which came on with a vengeance last year is also missing from the list because I more or less have been waiting for the PC release of Iceborne given that I have little to no interest in playing on the console release. I took a break in Destiny 2 for a few months and because of fun seasonal events and the switch release I have played Diablo 3 significantly more often this year. The release of an excellent expansion in the form of Shadowbringers also leapfrogged Final Fantasy XIV several positions. Dragalia Lost had not quite launched early enough to make the list for last year but was a nearly daily fixture in my life in this past year. Both Elder Scrolls Online and Pokemon Go have been on the decline in my free time, so both dropped significantly in the numbers.

The Top 15 of All Time

Now we are getting into the territory of the images being impossible to read, but the above sheet snippet shows the top 15 games of all time. However for sake of sanity I am going to bullet point the list so you can see it more clearly.

World of Warcraft – 60 Months
Destiny / Destiny 2 – 55 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 55 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 44 Months
Diablo 3 – 41 Months
Rift – 39 Months
Pokemon Go – 25 Months
MTG Arena – 21 Months
Dragalia Lost – 16 Months
Monster Hunter World – 16 Months
Guild Wars 2 – 14 Months
Minecraft – 14 Months
ArcheAge – 13 Months
Fallout 4 – 13 Months
Wildstar – 13 Months

World of Warcraft continues to reign at the top of the list, but its lead on the other options is shrinking because I am continuing to play that game less. Destiny and FFXIV are now tied for second place, and I fully expect that the Destiny Franchise will have potentially knocked Warcraft out of that top spot. Elder Scrolls knocked Rift out of the previous 4th place but didn’t gain as much ground this year as I didn’t play it nearly as often. Diablo 3 has risen up to claim the 5th spot and gained significant ground considering there was a big gap before between 5 and 6. Rift continues to descend the list because I am not actively playing it and also did not spend much time playing it last year either. What I find most interesting is the last three on the list because if you had asked me to guess as to what this list would like like ArcheAge, Fallout 4 and Wildstar would not have been still hanging on after all of this time. For reference you can check out last years post where I am pulling the comparisons from.

Other Interesting Data

Some other interesting data worth noting. In 2018 I played 70 unique games and this year I played considerably fewer, only racking up 48 games. That is still a lot of games but I felt like for a large chunk of the year I had a pretty stable list of titles that I kept bouncing back and forth between. The weirdest thing is… that if you look where I spent a lot of my time they are not on the same titles that I listed in my top games of 2019 post. I am a sucker for “comfort gaming” and there are a lot of times I keep playing games that present familiar patterns. I’ve spent a huge chunk of my vacation playing The Witcher 3 and I have loved it, and I guess my hope for this new year is to spend more time playing single player games since my multiplayer communities have been waning.

In 2018 I played 33 games that I would describe as a “Singleton” or a game that I only poked my head into for a single month. In 2019 that only represented 19 total games and it feels like that is really where the difference between the years comes into play. I was seemingly more adventurous in 2018 than I was in 2019 and I hope I can capture that spirit for 2020 and get out of my comfort zone a bit more often. For those interested in more trending information along this topic you can see a number of my posts since starting this tradition.

Games Played 2018
Games Played 2017
Games Played 2016
Games Played 2015 – I hadn’t quite figured out the format yet

And with that… I wish you all the happiest of New Years after sharing my past year with you.

Games Played 2018 Edition

December 30, 2022December 27, 2018 by Belghast

Over the years I have developed two habits that help me keep track of what games I am playing in a given month. The first is that I take a lot of screenshots and archive them on network attached storage so that I can reach out and get one for this blog when I need it. The second is that since April of 2013 I have been blogging at a minimum every weekday… and for the first three years and some change… every single day. This gives me a pretty good record to know what I happened to be playing in a given stretch of time. Years ago I used to use the Raptr gaming service to track what games I happened to be playing, but as that got sold and my game time fragmented between multiple console platforms as well… it became harder for me to get a high level view of what I happened to be doing at a given period of time. As such I crawled back through my screenshots and my blog posts and started piecing together a map of what games I played in a given month. Now this is not necessarily tracking the length of time played… but instead that I played a given game during a specific month.

This is going to look like nonsense to my viewers but this image represents the top 25 games played since May of 2012… that I had either written or screenshot proof that I was playing at the time. Essentially I question the reliability of this record any further back than April of 2013, but I decided to extend it out as far as I could just for sake of tracking patterns. There are years when I play an awful lot of games… and then there are years when I don’t play many at all. This year for example I played seventy two different games throughout the year and eight of them I played for more than five months. On the other side of that coin 32 of the games that I played were singletons… where they were only played in a single month. Now some of these were new games that failed to gain traction like State of Decay 2 that I had been looking forward to greatly… and others are games like Horizon Zero Dawn where I booted it back up to return briefly to a game that I had played an awful lot more in the previous year. If you are curious enough to dig into the madness you can see the full google sheet that I maintain here. The biggest trend you will notice is that I am one of those people that revisits old territory quite often, especially when it comes to booting up an older MMO and spending a weekend or two exploring it again.

The problem with this concept is that it is really hard to keep track of a nice clean “Top 25” list as there are ultimately a lot of games that end up being tied for the same number of months. As such for this specific year if we set the benchmark at three months played… because there were thirteen games that spanned two months sorta skewing the results a bit. For games that I played three or more months however we end up with a list of twenty three games. So as a result lets run them down. One thing that I have done since last year is combined time played in Destiny 1 with time played in Destiny 2 since there was effectively a clean cut-over there with no real overlap.

Destiny/Destiny 2 – 12 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 12 Months
Pokemon Go – 12 Months
Monster Hunter World – 12 Months
World of Warcraft – 10 Months
Magic the Gathering Arena – 9 Months
Diablo 3 – 6 Months
Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate – 5 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 4 Months
Neverwinter – 4 Months
Dauntless – 4 Months
Dragalia Lost – 4 Months
Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor Martyr – 4 Months
Fallout 4 – 3 Months
Minecraft – 3 Months
The Division – 3 Months
No Man’s Sky – 3 Months
Assassin’s Creed Origins – 3 Months
Path of Exile – 3 Months
Warframe – 3 Months
Fallout 76 – 3 Months
God of War – 3 Months
Hollow Knight – 3 Months

So if we look at just 2017 against 2018 there are some interesting things at work here. Firstly mobile games played way more of a presence in my gaming diet than they have ever before with Pokemon go effectively being played at least once a month since it released in July of 2017 for a grand total of 18 months of it being on my radar. Dragalia Lost similarly has been played every single month since release, and in many cases almost every night before I fall asleep to at a minimum do the dailies. Another thing that happened this year was that Final Fantasy XIV seemingly feel completely off my radar with playing it only 4 months instead of the previous years 7 months. Destiny looks a little bit weird because there were two months of overlap between the games so 2017 shows it as “14” months because I didn’t have a great way of accounting for that… but during the last two years there has not been a month that I did not play the Destiny franchise and in truth that reaches all the way back to September of 2016 in contiguous play. Elder Scrolls Online held way more of a presence this year as being another one of those games that I played at least once a month all year long going up from 2 months the previous year. The real story of the year however is Monster Hunter World that sort of came out from nowhere and then was the game that I probably played the most throughout the entire year, and also inspired me to latch onto Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate when it released in August. Similar to Destiny 2 this is a game that I started on the Playstation 4 and then moved to PC when the staggered release for it happened… so my time accounts for leveling essentially twice.

This year also made a bunch of changes in the months played all time list, but considering how entrenched World of Warcraft is it is highly unlikely that anyone will dethrone it until I just completely quit cold turkey. Thankfully I can create a nice clean top 15 list here so lets review the “All Time” list.

World of Warcraft – 57 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 46 Months
Destiny/Destiny 2 – 45 Months
Rift – 39 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 38 Months
Diablo 3 – 29 Months
Pokemon Go – 20 Months
ArcheAge – 13 Months
Fallout 4 – 13 Months
Guild Wars 2 – 13 Months
Wildstar – 13 Months
Monster Hunter World – 12 Months
Everquest II – 11 Months
Minecraft – 10 Months
Star Wars the Old Republic – 10 Months

This list is going to continue to shift over time, but with the selling of Trion Worlds to Gamigo… I have a feeling that ArcheAge and Rift are frozen in time and will likely not be gaining any more months played. Similarly Wildstar has officially shuttered and it is equally frozen on the list and will eventually work its way out of the top. Monster Hunter World and Pokemon Go are both climbing significantly and I feel like there is a good chance Destiny franchise will climb into the second place at some point in the future as I am playing it way more regularly than I am Final Fantasy XIV. Elder Scrolls Online is going to seize the third spot early next year as well. Diablo 3 is sort of the little engine that could and it will probably always be on the list, but the sporadic nature in which I play that game keeps it from really gaining ground. Fallout 4 is the one that sort of shocked me… but I guess I keep returning to it much the same way as I did Fallout 3 or New Vegas before. If you are curious you can see last years list on the Games Played 2017 Edition post.

This is largely a thing that I do for myself, but I guess the question is… does anyone find it interesting? What games did you play the most often this year and why? I would love to hear your answers in the comments.

Games Played 2017 Edition

December 30, 2022December 29, 2017 by Belghast

Year End Review

One of the weird things that I do is that I attempt to keep track of the games I have played during a given calendar year. I started this madness I believe in 2015 and then have slowly been back populating that list based on a few methods. Essentially I am tracking things on a month by month basis and if I have written about a game or taken screenshots of a game… I log it as having been played during that month. The end result is this weird history of the games I have played over the course of a given calendar year. Seeing as this is the last “weekday” that I will be making a post until the beginning of 2018… I figured it was the perfect time to break out my post talking about the various things I played this year. Without further stalling… here is the data.

Click on the image or here to see the full google sheet.

During the course of the year I played a grand total of 41 different games, which is from 57 last year and 67 the year before that. Basically the key difference is that I mostly played MMOs which tend to hold my attention for larger periods of time than burning through a bunch of single player titles. Lets take a swath of the top ten titles and look at them a little closer.

World of Warcraft – 10 months
Destiny – 8 months
Diablo 3 – 7 months
Final Fantasy XIV – 7 months
Horizon Zero Dawn – 7 months
Destiny 2 – 6 months
Pokemon Go – 6 months
Fallout 4 – 5 months
Guild Wars 2 – 4 months
Zelda: Breath of the Wild – 4 months

At first glance the clear king is World of Warcraft with 10 months of play, but if you look back at past years this tends to be the one game that I am almost always at least playing a few days a month. However you notice that I largely took a complete break from the game in March and April and I feel like it is largely due to a few games coming out around the same time… Mass Effect Andromeda, Horizon Zero Dawn and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I feel like the true winner is Destiny and Destiny 2 because if you include those as one game… then I played them every month of the year with some overlap between of two months when I was technically playing both. Granted I am including the time I spent playing various betas of the game but still… I feel like this was the year of Destiny for me personally. I spent significantly less time playing Final Fantasy XIV as I played rabidly during the launch of Stormblood and sorta bounced off otherwise. Another anomaly this year is that Rift did not make the top 10, and similarly odd is how much of a return Pokemon Go has had…. but I largely chock this up to getting a new phone that handles it better. The weirdest part about this years top ten list is that it includes several single player titles: Fallout 4, Horizon Zero Dawn and Zelda: Breath of the Wild. All three of these are games that I keep being able to return to and play again and again in short bursts.

Click on the image or here to see the full google sheet.

Multi-Year View

Now if we expand out even further… here is the list of everything I have played since 2012. Things get a little spottier the further you go back. Essentially I have back populated this last by going through all of my old blog posts and jotting down which games I talked about playing. Additionally I have scanned all of the screenshots that I happen to have and divided them up by the month the file was created as an attempt to create a somewhat accurate picture of what I had been playing. Generally speaking if I am playing a game I am taking screenshots because I always need images for my blog. I may or may not have almost 30,000 screenshots sitting on network attached storage… and a stack of every hard drive from every machine I have owned waiting for a day when I feel like going spelunking for more screenshots. I am not even sure why I started down this path but now that I am on it… it has become another obsession of mine. Basically from here on we are going to largely talk about the top fifteen games I have played since 2012.

World of Warcraft – 47 months
Final Fantasy XIV – 42 months
Rift – 37 months
Destiny – 27 months (including D2 31 months)
Elder Scrolls Online – 26 months
Diablo 3 – 23 months
ArcheAge – 13 months
Guild Wars 2 – 13 months
Wildstar – 13 months
Everquest II – 11 months
Fallout 4 – 10 months
Star Wars the Old Republic – 10 months
Trove – 9 months
Pokemon Go – 8 months
The Secret World – 8 months

First interesting pattern is that there is only one non-mmo on this list and that is Fallout 4. I am not entirely certain why I keep returning to that game but there are so many nights I will fire it up on the laptop while doing other things and just roam around. Once again Rift has fallen a bit in the rankings as this time last year it was tied with Final Fantasy XIV for the second place slot. Destiny slides up into number three eclipsing Elder Scrolls Online, especially if you include Destiny 2 playtime which I denoted in quotes. Guild Wars 2 and my resurgence into that game caused it to leapfrog Wildstar a bit, and then the tail end of the list is either new because I expanded things out to top 15 or in a similar position. There are some games on this list that are likely to eventually fall out of the ranking. I am not really playing Everquest II anymore in part because the management since the swap to Daybreak has just been pitiful. Its a torn community and just not the environment I remember loving. Trove may or may not see me returning to it, because I have a friend who is super into that game right now… but also playing on the PS4 and not PC which makes the return to play with him more unlikely. Additionally that game has changed so much since I last played it that I would almost need to start fresh to really get back into it. Similarly I am not sure how much more time I will be devoting to ArcheAge because I just don’t find the game nearly as compelling as I once did. As I leveled in the game it felt like the things I wanted to be doing narrowed rather than broadened given that I have no interest in PVP nonsense. I left shortly before they split the servers into veteran and new player experiences, and I am not even sure what the game looks like right now.

Looking Forward

As far as the calendar year of 2018… I am not really sure what I will be playing. It is a forgone conclusion that I will be playing World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth. In spite of me not really liking the more PVP centric focus, I would be lying if I said I would not be playing it at launch. I predict that I will be playing some more SWTOR in the near future because the release of a Star Wars movie always brings out the nostalgia for all things Star Wars. On top of that with Disney pulling the license for Marvel Heroes… I want to make sure I experience the story content in SWTOR just in case they for some reason decide to do the same thing they did with SWG. I know at some point I will make a return to Final Fantasy XIV and more than likely when they patch in the next step of the Palace of the Dead. As far as new games go… there really isn’t much on the horizon that really interests me. I am not enthralled by Crowfall or Camelot Unchained, because they seem to be creating games that don’t really stoke my interests.

Brad McQuaid will likely bring us some sort of version of Pantheon: Rise and Repeat as I heard someone call it the other day (I believe Wilhelm but not 100% sure). I played Everquest, and Vanguard… and Pantheon seems like more of the same just yet another slightly higher fidelity version of the same game Brad has kept trying to create since the 90s. I don’t have near as much nostalgia as some do for the “you must have a group with you at all times and death must be frustrating and painful” genre. Ashes of Creation looks mildly interesting… but what I have seen of the community tells me it is going to be a game I am not going to enjoy much in the same way that I didn’t enjoy ArcheAge at launch. Monster Hunter World is definitely something I am looking forward to giving a shot, in spite of the fact that I am horrible at Monster Hunter games. Anthem also seems really interesting, but the gameplay footage we have seen reminded me a bit too much of the promises Division made but never quite delivered on. In truth in the 2018 calendar year… I expect to keep playing a lot of the same games I played during the past several years because those MMOs just keep getting better with age.

Games Played 2016 Edition

December 30, 2022December 30, 2016 by Belghast

First I want to take a quick moment to talk about the awesome avatar adorning the right side of this paragraph. Some time ago I talked about doing the Icecrown Challenge and to the best of my knowledge most of the folks I challenged have since completed their own and donated some money to the cause. I still feel slightly sorry for Mort who ended up taking almost 50 minutes to get through the raid because had apparently never actually raided during Wrath of the Lich King. I did the challenge because one… I end up doing Icecrown Citadel almost every week anyways, and two because of the weird connection that Ratsel and I just found out that we have. Then of course there is always the part that it is a good cause. Of all of the reasons however… none of them was to win any prizes but apparently I did. The prize I happened to win was the amazing Faebelina doing an avatar, and instead of my character I chose to have her do a “Me”. So I supplied her some images and set her loose in a specific direction… and largely wanted to see what she came up with on her own. The end result is something really interesting that so far everyone has said “yup, that looks like you”. In the end though I really need to get the hat, hoodie and shirt so I can cosplay myself. I am mostly using it on my “real life” accounts but I wanted to show it off nonetheless because I think it is really cool.

Full Spreadsheet Link

Last year I realized that with the whole daily blogging thing that I had a decent way of telling exactly what games I had played during the year. Like I often do I took to Google Sheets and started a spreadsheet trying to track what games I played during what months. This year I went sorta overboard with that concept and you see the image above as a result. Essentially if I talked about a game during a given month… I put a 1 in that square and ultimately colored it it. Then in the last column I did a calculation that added up all of the months that a given game appeared in… and as a result you have the sort above… by number of months played and then alphabetically. The first thing we can take away from this graphic is that there is no denying the fact that I am an online and MMO gamer. Based on the data above I played the following MMOs…

World of Warcraft – All Twelve Months
Destiny – 10 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 10 Months
Rift – 8 Months
Diablo 3 – 6 Months
The Division – 5 Months
Guild Wars 2 – 4 Months
Overwatch – 4 Months
ArcheAge – 3 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 3 Months

As far as non-online games that I played… you end up dropping down significantly into single digit territory with only a handful of games like Fallout 4, Skyrim, and No Man’s Sky making that repeat list. The big shocker for me is always seeing all the various singlets I end up playing throughout the year that I completely forget about. All told I played 57 different games during the year… which seems like a lot but is a bit down from last year and it’s 67 unique games. So I feel like the real tale of the year is just how much World of Warcraft and Destiny I wound up playing. Sure FFXIV is up there at 10 months but some of that is a technicality while I was subbed but only logging in once a week or every few weeks. Destiny and World of Warcraft really were constant things throughout the course of the year. This was the year I feel like I really learned to love WoW again, more than just a passing fancy that let me play with my friends. With the launch of Legion I was legitimately and unabashedly happy to be playing the game for the first time since the launch of Cataclysm. In fact Destiny dropped off the Radar only for the blip around the launch of Legion because I was just playing that game so damned much.

Even More Madness

Full Spreadsheet Link

The problem with spreadsheets is that they crave more data… and once I start down a path I tend to go into really insane territory. I had data that I had collected for 2015, and now data that I had collected for 2016. I wondered what would happen if I went all the way back to 2013, the year I first started the daily blogging experiment. Now of note… the 2013 data is super spotty given that I did not officially start the daily blogging thing until April. However I managed to piece together some data based on my archive of screenshots mixed with actual data from the blog. The end result is a view of the games I have played since 2013 copied into my weird google sheets format. Once again you can see that I really am an MMO Gamer overall. The top ten games played in total number of months is as follows…

World of Warcraft – 37 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 35 Months
Rift – 35 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 24 Months
Destiny – 19 Months
Diablo 3 – 16 Months
ArcheAge – 13 Months
Wildstar – 12 Months
Everquest II – 11 Months
Guild Wars 2 – 9 Months
Trove – 9 Months

Of note… Trove and Guild Wars 2 are technically tied for 10th place with the same number of months. The only one that gets a little weird is Elder Scrolls Online, because I am counting time spent playing in the Alpha and Beta process which I could not of course talk about on my blog. However I entered that process in February of 2013 and we had one or two events a month through launch. During that four year period I played 172 different unique games. Again however if you look at the distribution of titles played… you have to go pretty far on the list until you get into single player territory with Minecraft, Fallout 4 and Final Fantasy V leading there. Minecraft technically can be a multiplayer game, but generally speaking I go on single player building binges. Final Fantasy V pretty much accounts for all of the years I have gotten talked into participating in the Four Job Fiesta thanks to Ashgar.

At some point I want to true up the data even further by going through my screenshot archive and sorting it by dates. I have literally every screenshot I have taken over the last several years archived and sorted by game sitting on a network attached storage device. I am maybe a little obsessive about such things, especially since screenshots tend to play such a large role in my blog. I like having a deep archive of things that I can go back to for getting reference material. From that I should be able to get a few more games that maybe I played but didn’t actually write about. However I think for the most part this represents a pretty true picture of my gameplay for the last four years. It took awhile to compile, but much of it was done while hanging out downstairs on the laptop as we watched something on television. The end result gives me a really interesting tool to use going forward, and I plan on keeping the spreadsheet up to date as I go through 2017. The biggest thing we can take away from this however is that… firstly I am a creature of habit and keep returning to the same games over and over. Secondly I tend to be one of those players that keeps returning to MMOs that I have played in the past to see how they are getting along. Lastly… I really do not play the number of single player games that I would like to play, mostly because while playing them I get lonely. It feels strange to roam around a world without lots of other people sharing it with me.