Games

terraria for me. i keep managing to find new stuff over a thousand hours later.

"Has this item always been here?! no way. REALLY?"

Team Fortress 2

Monster Hunter: Not all at once of course, but it's a game I keep coming back to. A friend in college introduced me to it on the psp and I was invested. I've had some version of it somewhere since, and I don't think I've ever removed it from my psp either.

Overwatch: This is from before the change, but it became a comfort game. There were no chats, and I didn't have to be in voice chat. I was low level (bronze), but I was content. I still play here and there, but I may get a match or two in before I leave out. Back in the day I could play for hours.

Team Fortress 2. There's just so many different ways to play the game with its combination of classes, weapons and game modes!

Oxygen Not Included- very detailed colony sim where scientific things like heat exchange, air pressure, etc. are essential for survival. I swear, my next file will be perfect...

If you like space games, X3 and X4 can probably eat up lots and lots of your time. Space Engineers if you're less interested in flying, space economics and creating a supply chain (which X lets you) and more in gathering materials and creating all sorts of weird, funny or actually amazing stuff. SE is probably better played with at least 1 other person, possibly more, while X is exclusively single player.

Grand Strategy games can also obliterate your free time. Civilization 5, any Total War game. Hell, Age of Empires 2 can have very long matches if you play on huge maps and people have loved that game for over 20 years.

You can also go for Fallout 4 or Skyrim with extra content mods, like dungeons, quests or areas.

Personally, I'm just past 400h on Palworld, so I'd recommend it as well. I've played from start to "finish" some 4 times by now. Official servers will be wiped sometime in December, possibly with a new patch arriving, but you can always play single player and even invite a friend to play on your local save and never lose progress (unless the save gets corrupted, which can happen).

Civ 6, Fallout 4

Rocket League

Rimworld, and Football Manager (although they last one I played is 2020)

Guild Wars 2, so far I put 4,800+ hours into it.

I like that it has so many kinds of solo and group content that I can just do whatever I'm in the mood for that day.

A long time ago now I spent over 10,000 hours on world of warcraft. I wouldn't really recommend getting into it now though, I think the magic is gone.

Kerbal Space Program

I’m well above a thousand hours on the first game. Then all my flying sims (MSFS, Xplane, DCS, Elite Dangerous) also have a very high hour count. But for civilian airliners most of those hours are spent AFK in cruise.

I've also mostly enjoyed online multiplayer games, but I play a bit of everything. I think these are the games I've played most in order it must be:

World of WarCraft - Been at it since a year or so after it originally launched. Played a lot of Guild Wars 1 before that, and also lots of other MMO games before and in between, but WoW is the one I always keep coming back to. Longest break must've been like 6-7 years around the Cataclysm expansion, and then back at it at the end of Legion. It's on the back burner now again because of another mediocre expansion, but I still check it out occasionally. I think I must've sank at least 5000+ hours (probably way more) into this game over the past 20 years.

Elite Dangerous - Been backing it since Kickstarter, had high hoped for the game and it was fun while it lasted. But I lost all hope in Frontier in managing this game. They're only focusing heavily on microtransactions, currencies and paid early access content now. Must've been about 1500-2500 hours or something, but I've been out of this one for a couple of years now. I had high hopes for the future of this game, but Frontier is a master of promising glory and delivering disappointment.

Squad - Last, but certainly not least for me, around 1400 hours playtime (including the testing branch client). Got into this game right when it launched into early access on Steam. Was very tired of the themepark rides that Battlefield and CoD were turning into, but didn't want to commit to Arma's milsim style either. Squad fits in between perfectly. Also one of the greatest game communities I've got the pleasure to be playing with, never had so much fun with completely random strangers. The mandatory voice-chat really ties it together to create amazing and fun moments. This game really taught me that voice chat in games can actually be good, and not just kids spitting insults.

That said, I have a lot of games on multiple platforms, that I usually won't ever hit a 1000+ hour mark on most of them anyway. Like I played Witcher 3 twice (and a half I think). But that's like only 150 hours or so total. And this year's favorite has been Helldivers 2 by far, but that's only been almost 300 hours so far.

Right now I can't recommend it because streamers and reddit made the game kinda trash, but Path of Exile. On steam I have 3k hours and I played on original launcher 5-10 more times longer.

I hope poe2 will make Poe great again.

FIFA.

Elder Scrolls Online, as long as you find a good group of friends.

I also nearly have 1000 hours in MGSV Phantom Pain.

Would be arma 3, dayz and stalker series. My currently favourite is stalker Anomaly.

Somehow ctrl+f failed to find this one, but Path of Exile is probably my drug of choice there. While I raked in 1k hrs with Dota2, I'm not sure I"d recommend it unless you really want to sell your soul to MOBA life. And it's not quite to 1k yet, but honorable mention must go to Satisfactory as it's well on its way to being game #3 in the 1k+ list with me.

Deep Rock Galactic

The only two games I have that I've put more than 1000 hours in are Factorio and Rimworld. I'd highly recommend both.

Warframe. Inching closer to 3.000h currently.

It does come in waves, but every once in a while I go all in again and lose myself in the infinite things you can do.

Dayz.

Just hit 3.5k hours and it's still the most exciting game I've ever played. Nothing else gives the same adrenaline kick as a good encounter or a fight in Dayz. Also a great game for meeting new people as talking to others in this game is a must.

Minecraft. Probably have around 5000+ hours I think. Playing since I was 10(now 17). So, many wasted hours on Anarchy Servers and Ranked Bedwars.

Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord with some mods took long enough to give up for me.

Morrowind. Although it's more like play a few hundred hours every five years for me.

Factorio, it's fun from the first minute but you'll still be learning new things after 1000 hours.

Trackmania 2020. Great example of a game that is simple in concept but super deep in skills that you can both play super casually at your own pace or super competitively. Plus there is a great community and endless content to play.

Factorio, Warframe, Minecraft, Dota 2. However, the only two I'd still recommend are Factorio and Minecraft. Warframe's grind seems to have finally burned me out for good, Dota 2 is bad. You're not gonna have fun with Dota 2. The game concept is good, but like most competitive online games, the community fucking sucks.

In addition to Factorio and Minecraft, try Voices of the Void, The Long Drive, WEBFISHING, and Balatro.

Edit: oh yeah, and personally I have both Sims 2 and Sims 4 w/ all DLC (yeah, I toootally bought all the dlc) installed on my steam deck. Both fun games with their own ups and downs. Sims 2 is great vanilla, Sims 4 is great when heavily modded. Don't bother downloading the F2P version of Sims 4 from Origin if you're wanting to mod it with stuff like sacrificial's mods. Those'll break with every major update (and sometimes minor updates too!) and you can't pause updates anymore. So, you'll have to find alternative methods.

I'm amazed nobody has mentioned Kerbal Space Program (first one). That and TF2 are my most played

Monster Hunter. The first one I played, MH4U back in the 3DS days, I put 1,000 hours into. That was nearly 10 years ago, and I'm still playing the franchise to this day. Currently finally going through the Sunbreak expansion of Monster Hunter Rise on the PC, and noticing a marked improvement in my mental health over playing other games.

Elite Dangerous is my go-to lately.

It's different to most other games, by not being goal-oriented except for the goals you set for yourself. No main quest line dictating progress. No mandatory tasks. No win condition. Instead, it drops you into a simulation of our entire galaxy roughly 1300 years in the future, where humanity has mastered hyperspace travel and spread through hundreds of star systems.

(To give an idea of the simulation's scope: Around 85 million systems have been recorded by players so far, and those are a vanishingly small fraction of what's out there. Space is big.)

I like that it offers a variety of activities to fit whatever mood I might be in on a given day. I can hunt pirates, mine asteroids, engage in a bit of piracy myself, find and collect bio samples, infiltrate rival settlements, venture into vast unexplored areas of space, discover Earth-like worlds that nobody has ever encountered before, defend humanity against hostile forces, photograph beautiful stellar phenomena, rescue stranded survivors, customize and finely tune my ship to perform beyond its original specs, team up with friends, pledge to a political power and expand their influence, or chill out as a space trucker and haul cargo to earn enough money for my next upgrade. It can occupy all my attention, or just be relaxing entertainment while I listen to music or an audiobook.

It's an MMO in the sense of having a large game world (galaxy) shared by all players in real time, but PvP is optional. One mode exposes you to other players, while another limits you to NPC encounters. You can switch between them at will.

One warning: A space ship has more than a few controls to learn, and they're better suited to a game controller or HOTAS than a keyboard and mouse. I use button combinations for almost everything beyond basic flight controls, since there aren't enough buttons on a controller for everything.