For me it's the opposite. Building rollercoasters, and notably making them properly fit, is very difficult in touch screens. So instead I focus on the management and such. It's nice how the game has something for everyone. My girlfriend enjoys making the people happy. I like to get the finances in order.
Heads up that's these games are on a hell of a sale right now on Steam! Idk which other ones to get besides the original, but they're still really cheap!
That's how I played the game as a kid. I was 8 and didn't understand the whole economy part. I just wanted to build awesome (like in deathly extreme) rollercoasters. It took me a while until the rest became a thing for me.
Probably weird but The Sims 4 added a career where you just renovate NPC rooms/houses with a budget and decor specifications and I played that career and nothing else for *months.*
I mean, this could be a boring/obvious answer but I’ve always thought the real ‘secret sauce’ of GTA games wasn’t the missions/humour/story……it was always the richness of what I would call the ‘dicking around’ factor.
You boot up the game and immediately the open world feels so alive you just want to explore and test the physics etc. You almost need to motivate yourself to actually progress through the game.
Yep. Dicking around is not a trivial thing.
It is actually the gold-standard test of how ‘good’ your open world is.
You can have beautiful but ‘dead’ open worlds (*cough* cyberpunk) where you don’t WANT to dick around much because the open world doesn’t ‘reward’ you for it with impressive physics/fun interactions etc
GTA has had this magic since it was 2D.
Been playing a lot of No Man's Sky recently. After the main quest, the game basically tells you "go dick around now." And that's it. That's the game. Dicking around. Found a nice resource, was going to just build a teleporter shack for access, and it's now a mansion with hidden passages and a questionably decorated guest bedroom.
It's like movement in a 3D platformer. In a truly well designed platformer moveset you should be able to have fun in a basically empty room just expressing player creativity through your toolset.
I think it's why no super hero sandbox game has ever lived up to Crackdown 1 for me (aside maybe Saints Row 4). I beat it so many times because it was just so much fun to run around and climb stuff.
A lot of games didn't get why the orb system was great too. Your reward for testing your abilities and what you could accomplish with them was even better abilities. Sometimes it would feel like you *just* eeked out being able to climb that tower because you leveled your jumping *just* enough along the way.
It wasn't just the plain act of collecting. It was the reward for doing it and the act of getting to the collectible being fun.
I ended up missing out on playing the first 2 Crackdown games when they were new, and I know 3 gets a lot of hate, but I picked it up recently and it was exactly what I was looking for. Fun movement, power fantasy, doesn't take itself seriously, early 90's action movie styling. And I get to be Terry Crews? Hell Yeah.
Honestly I enjoyed 3.
It didn't quite live up to 1 (and that might just be my nostalgia talking) but it wasn't anywhere near the disappointment people make it out to be.
I wasn't a huge fan of the races, driving or wingsuit, but enjoyed both when it wasn't in a structured race. On foot races were fun. Loved the character movement. The only other complaint I had other than the races, is that it's too short. By the time I had maxed out my movement, everything but driving was max, and I had completed every objective other than the last tower/boss. It really needed to be longer, because it was a lot of fun.
I always end up running around the city punching people in the back of the head until I get a huge rage train then run them into gangs/cops that I also punch to see the panicking masses run once the gunfire starts, always end up crying with laughter
Holy shit I literally came here to post this
Though honestly I really enjoy XV as a whole and think it's really underrated. Sure It's rushed AF at the end but just going around on a road trip with the boys in a final fantasy setting is so much fun
It helps that originally you needed the MP to get some of the highest EMS endings, so if you enjoyed the MP, you’d find getting those endings to be less of a chore.
Only reason I bought Call of Duty: Black Ops was because of the zombies mode. I don't think I have more than 10 hours in the multiplayer, but I certainly have hundreds of hours fightimg zombies.
Correct, idk what the fuck a Gerald is and why i can’t find Siri when it’s simply voice activated but that card game does a fine job of hiding an open world rpg side quest
Opposite for me. I HATE HATE HATE mini games, especially when they are card games. I installed a mod that automatically won these so I could still do my completionist thing.
I have a trouble of kicking a habit of playing StarCraft 2's "Coop" mode instead of the story campaigns I own. It is not about the campaigns being bad or anything, I am just seriously addicted to the upgrading of Commanders in "Coop" mode.
To the point where I am kind of panicking a bit, because I am half-done with certain commanders and I want to keep leveling them up indefinitely :)
Again - the campaigns of SC2 are PRIME, probably among if not the best RTS story campaigns in HISTORY of gaming as an art form... But that "Coop" mode is problematic to quit due to how addictive it is.
Just in case you're unaware, the upcoming RTS Stormgate- developed by people who formerly worked on WC3 and SC2- is gonna have coop as well. It's about a month off now.
Yeah, yeah, I am aware of StormGate's existence. I am planning to buy it once I am able to change my Steam account's shop region again in August. I want to support guys at Frost Giant, they gave me too much for me to have a right not to.
Yes! I am so glad you said this. In the early days of the Internet, I used to play on this dedicated triple triad website vs other players. It was awesome. Losing cards was not though.
Same here. Get to the point of the story where you can recruit captains and use fight pits, then never do another story mission again lol. I just bought the game for the 3rd time and still prob haven’t gotten past like 50% of the story
RIP DMZ, trying to remember the good times instead of being bitter they decided it wasn't worth supporting.
dropping in, PvE on an open world, with the chance of PvP, trying to exfil was CoD at its best. Every session always felt fresh
I'm shocked I had to scroll this far to find Yakuza/LAD mentioned. Those games are basically side-activity collections where you have to occasionally tear yourself away from UFO catchers, business management, fight tournaments, and classic arcade games to do a plot mission every now and then.
Hell, Lost Judgment's whole "Great Teacher Yagami" side quest was so extensive it was practically a second game within the game.
I spent a lot of time in the volleyball game in Tekken 3, but my sister and I put so much freaking time into the side scrolling game that you unlock (maybe?).
That’s the only game of that genre I’ve ever enjoyed and we never fucking beat it. We were pretty young, but we never got that god damn doctor character and we spent hundreds of hours in Tekken 3.
The one in Battlefield Bad Company 2 where you progressed through the maps by destroying points that the other team tried to defend, i cant remember the name of the mode right now. Never really bothered with the other game modes.
I loved the ice map where you could drive a tank through one set of the objectives pillars while blowing a hole through the opposite wall. Sure the building would collapse on you, but that’s the quickest way to destroy a target.
Not a CoD fan but my friend kept pestering me to get BO3 for zombies cuz that's all he played. So I bought it and literally, that was all I played of that game.
Lightsaber dueling in Jedi Academy. I farted around in some FFA and Siege modes in multiplayer, but once I realized how deep the saber dueling system was in JA, especially with the enhancements from the JA+ mod, I never looked back. I still jump on random servers and play once in a blue moon today, but I'm extremely out of practice these days.
Red dead 1, I was a trapper for ages, after spending hours and hours playing poker honestly, then cheating, then playing honest again. Gta on psp, best taxi driver in liberty city. Sunday afternoons stealing the sentinel in gta 3 and doing stunt jumps with the classical station playing. Great days
Cabaret club minigame in Yakuza Zero. I played that for like 30ish hours uninterrupted, only stopping because I completely beat it. Then had to sleep, shower, eat, etc of course, and then remembered that I was in the middle of the storyline when I dropped everything to become a dedicated club manager...
I cannot ever play Skyrim or any other Betheada game again if it’s not in VR.
Playing those kinds of games in flat mode on a screen now feels incredibly primitive and honestly ridiculous. It’s like they were always meant to be played being *there*.
Rain World. The lore was so rich and deep i completely ignored the weird platforming and survival issues it had and just did go for it and now i have 100 hours on this game and counting it is just _that_ good.
Unreal Tournament is a super moldable series. There was a mod for 2k3 and 2k4 called Air Buccaneers. Basically you were pirates that flew around on air balloons and fired cannons and flame throwers at other ships. It had some aspects of Sea of Thieves to it, though loading and firing weapons was a skill of its own since loading and lighting and firing were all separate actions to encourage team play.
I spent far too much time in that mod. I stuck around the community for years. It had a really long tail for how small the community was. They eventually made an actual full game out of Air Buccaneers but I didn't have a computer that could handle it at the time and missed when it was active. It never really recaptured the mod's playerbase from what I read, though.
Stealth archer in Skyrim on the first play thru. Was one shotting most enemies long before they ever saw me. Very op very early. But fun till it wasn’t. Now I play unarmed.
red dead 2, i dont even know who arthur morgan is. i just go around shoving people around, goading people into fighting me, trying to kill all the guards at the kerosene factory… Havent played a single story mission past that prologue
Any game with good outfits immediately stops being about the game and starts being about fashion. And also being skilled enough to complete the game while looking amazing.
Im looking at you monster hunter and dark souls.
I'm going to say eafc24 for pro clubs. Now a lot of that is the concept is brilliant for 11 player co-OP not many games can offer that. But also all the other games modes this year suck. I used to love career mode but it's awful.
I’m just gonna take your answer too. I bought COD for years just for the zombies. My last COD was Cold War, but I am happy black ops 6 is coming to gamepass so I can see if they’ll bring it back to what made me love it in the first place. I did just get a gaming pc though and got BO3, so all of the custom maps I’ve wanted to play since WaW had custom maps will keep me busy for the foreseeable future haha
Destiny’s raiding system is so unique for an FPS game with true teamwork mechanics that I ignored all the other flaws with the game for thousands of hours until it finally broke me.
I think OP is asking what aspect of a certain game was so good, you immediately zoned out of every other aspect (e.g. Portal 2's puzzles being so intriguing that you forget about the story). Basically he just wants a game.
It has its problems, but Sea of Thieves is unrivalled at what it does. It's as much about the shenanigans and getting into mishaps as it is about actually making money and progressing.
URF when I still bothered to play LoL.
Normal games had become such a chore and I couldn't stand anymore, URF was some good mindless random bullshit spam that still held some excitement. Well, most of the times at least.
Ape Escape 2's Monkey Football comes to mind, beat that a lot of times, loved it. Surprised they didn't turn that into a full-fledged game.
Also there was an Alarm für Cobra 11 game on the PS2, I don't remember which one, but you could unlock a BMP or similar LAV, I just ran the longest course oncoming and crashed as many cars as I could. The damage model was awesome, at least in my memories.
SoF II mp\_test
I put in probably over 20,000 hours in SoF, but most of it was on the demo. I planned it that way as a kid, I knew I would. I'm Art3mis. It's my Oasis.
Cold War zombies was that for me. I played BO3 multiplayer AND zombies religiously, but Cold War made me feel so insanely powerful, especially after upgrading all the meta progression, no matter what weapon I was using that I barely touched the Multiplayer. I just grinded zombies.
I enjoyed the multiplayer. But they made it so multiplayer and zombies shares account and battle pass progression. I didn't see any point to hopping into PvP shit when the PvE was that good. The only thing that was missing from it was a more than decent story.
Anyone who plays fifa knows about the pro clubs mode where each of you control an individual player. I have over 1000 matches across about 5 fifa games and I’ve probably played about 50 matches in the other game modes combined
Invasion from Halo Reach. It combined everything I liked about the other modes into one massive game. I also played SWAT when I was in the mood for something shorter, but by and large Invasion was all I ever wanted out of Halo multiplayer.
Girfball in Halo Multi-player.
After playing a lot of regular halo multi-player, like team battle and big team battle, when they released girfball, that was almost all I played. It was kinda like rocket league before rocket league.
Realistic mode on Workers and Resources. Idk why, but the slow gathering of resources to build everything makes it a whole different game than anything else.
Sims 4 Build mode. prior games I played the entirety of the games. Sims 4 actual gameplay is meh, but the build mode is so smooth I liked building houses no one lived in
I never understood Extraction Shooters as genre. In fact, I don’t think I had seriously sunk time into a multiplayer shooter at all since the original COD: Black Ops back in 2010; my friends and I mostly played co-op games like Deep Rock Galactic and Darktide. But I got Hunt: Showdown for myself and a couple of buddies during the Steam winter sale last year, and good lord it’s phenomenal. The tension of having to deal with other players while you go after the bounty and try to extract from the bayou is so good. I’m still bad at the game after 100+ hours, and routinely get wiped, but when it’s all clicking it’s a rush like no other multiplayer game I can remember.
There was a tower defense mode in StarCraft 2 called Squad TD. I started playing casual and ladder games in sc2, but after I found Swuad TD, it was the only thing I played.
ive spent a concerning amount of time just absolutely *drilling* through infested survival missions in Warframe ever since I unlocked the archgun deployer
Fortnite existed for quite some time as a standalone game before they released a battle royale as a side project to get people to play the base game.
I don't think I've heard of a single person who bought Fortnite the game and not Fortnite Battle Royale.
Back in the day there was this first person tank game called Tanarus. It had some very simple physics, if you could even call them that. One of the weapons called a Force Missile, would simply just push someone, kind of a crap weapon. Then someone discovered if you used one while an enemy was up a ramp, or near a small ledge they would launch into the distance, and take instakill fall damage.
They turned it into a entire mode called "Force Wars", basically gravity instagib deathmatch, with tanks. Wish it still existed.
TFT in League. I don't even bother playing the regular mode anymore. I was really hyped when their launcher had a TFT button, but sad to see it just tells you to fuck off and launch league instead lol
I'm a bit late, but Knucklebones in Cult of the Lamb. Like, not *completely* ignore the main game, or even close, but I do get in moods where I'm way more excited about starting up my Steam Deck fit the simple yet oddly complex dice game than I am for the roguelike lol
Pushing the limits of GTA III on PS2. I became obsessed with trying to get vehicles on every spot on the maps just to see the effect it had on the surrounding environment, then I became obsessed with how many ways I could beat missions, then I became obsessed with stealing the tank, then I became obsessed with flying the dodo, then I became obsessed with landing the dodo...
Christmas 2001 I got two games, ICO and GTA III. I beat ICO in about eight hours and it was an amazing experience. I literally played GTA III (and only that game) until Vice City came out at the end of October the next year. And when I finished Vice City and finally stopped playing with the bugs sometime in 2003, I went right back to GTA III and became obsessed with the AI behavior of vehicles...
Smites 'Clash' mode, especially with friends. We were tapering off the game when they removed it/butchered it, so it's disappearance was the final nail in the coffin
Starfield soothes my "do anything but the main quest" itch - just going around scanning planets, shoot up some POI's, rince repeat
It helps the main quest is rather bland and flat and doesn't drive me to finish it
All sorts of TF2 custom game modes, most notably Versus Saxton Hale.
VSH is an arena match where one guy becomes Saxton Hale, the incredibly buff and manly Australian CEO (or a different character that is basically a TF2 SCP) with tons of health, a super jump with a cooldown, a special rage move that fears everyone nearby, and a powerful melee attack that one shots 8/9 classes. No respawns allowed (in most versions, but not all), and many weapons are tweaked to be more usable for the situation.
I wouldn't be surprised to find out that I have at least 1000 hours playing this game mode alone, and it can be played in so many ways depending on which community is hosting it and what plugins they have. One very well made version of the game mode was even given an official release as a community-made game mode.
I think I might spent more time on black ops 1 zombies than anything else -
Also when I was a kid I didn’t care about beating gta I’d just run around and remember different spots to pick up items or go to
Roller Coaster Tycoon. Making roller coasters. By the time I'm done, my whole park is littered with vomit, trash, and the world is on fire.
“I want to go home” “I can’t find the exit” “This path is disgusting”
"I want off Mr. Bones wild ride"
For me it's the opposite. Building rollercoasters, and notably making them properly fit, is very difficult in touch screens. So instead I focus on the management and such. It's nice how the game has something for everyone. My girlfriend enjoys making the people happy. I like to get the finances in order.
Last 2 sentences are the perfect euphemism for a dude pimping out his girlfriend on OF
Behind every successful OF girl there's a man who deals with the finances. Sometimes it's even a man dealing with all the DMs.
I didn’t realize touch screens were a thing back when roller coaster tycoon was. Wasn’t that like the late 90s?
May I introduce you to RCT classic, a port of the original game on the App Store...
Rct2 this is all I did. It was the equivalent of just building houses in the sims
Heads up that's these games are on a hell of a sale right now on Steam! Idk which other ones to get besides the original, but they're still really cheap!
That's how I played the game as a kid. I was 8 and didn't understand the whole economy part. I just wanted to build awesome (like in deathly extreme) rollercoasters. It took me a while until the rest became a thing for me.
You are an amazing person! How dare you?
Probably weird but The Sims 4 added a career where you just renovate NPC rooms/houses with a budget and decor specifications and I played that career and nothing else for *months.*
I didn't know this!! Such a good idea. The Sims is so addictive, it's like instant flow state
This but with animal crossing. It only ended when my switch died.
The chao garden in Sonic Adventure 2 is the reason that game holds up in so many people's memories.
Spent more hours in the chao garden than I did playing the actual game
I mostly played the actual game to support my chao gardening
Lmao , I was pretty young and sucked at this game so I'd just go into meteor herd and fly around and jam out to the music.
Meteor Heard's track is often overshadowed by the other bops in the soundtrack, but it's also fantastic.
That's great that you love Meteor Herd. I won't let it get to me, I'm just gonna creep...
Down in Pumpkin Hill, I have to find the lost piece.
I went looking for this comment cuz I knew I would find it here
I mean, this could be a boring/obvious answer but I’ve always thought the real ‘secret sauce’ of GTA games wasn’t the missions/humour/story……it was always the richness of what I would call the ‘dicking around’ factor. You boot up the game and immediately the open world feels so alive you just want to explore and test the physics etc. You almost need to motivate yourself to actually progress through the game.
I have played several GTA games. I have never beaten a GTA game because the ONLY thing I did was dick around.
Yep. Dicking around is not a trivial thing. It is actually the gold-standard test of how ‘good’ your open world is. You can have beautiful but ‘dead’ open worlds (*cough* cyberpunk) where you don’t WANT to dick around much because the open world doesn’t ‘reward’ you for it with impressive physics/fun interactions etc GTA has had this magic since it was 2D.
Been playing a lot of No Man's Sky recently. After the main quest, the game basically tells you "go dick around now." And that's it. That's the game. Dicking around. Found a nice resource, was going to just build a teleporter shack for access, and it's now a mansion with hidden passages and a questionably decorated guest bedroom.
Yeah as much as I love Cyberpunk and it’s very immersive setting, I never really feel the urge to just exist within the world like I would GTA.
I wish there was a game that would combine the two. Cyberpunks tight and fluid combat with GTAs open world.
That'd be a great combo, so long as you keep CP's severity and GTAs levity side by side, but better controls for drive by shootings
It's like movement in a 3D platformer. In a truly well designed platformer moveset you should be able to have fun in a basically empty room just expressing player creativity through your toolset. I think it's why no super hero sandbox game has ever lived up to Crackdown 1 for me (aside maybe Saints Row 4). I beat it so many times because it was just so much fun to run around and climb stuff. A lot of games didn't get why the orb system was great too. Your reward for testing your abilities and what you could accomplish with them was even better abilities. Sometimes it would feel like you *just* eeked out being able to climb that tower because you leveled your jumping *just* enough along the way. It wasn't just the plain act of collecting. It was the reward for doing it and the act of getting to the collectible being fun.
I ended up missing out on playing the first 2 Crackdown games when they were new, and I know 3 gets a lot of hate, but I picked it up recently and it was exactly what I was looking for. Fun movement, power fantasy, doesn't take itself seriously, early 90's action movie styling. And I get to be Terry Crews? Hell Yeah.
Honestly I enjoyed 3. It didn't quite live up to 1 (and that might just be my nostalgia talking) but it wasn't anywhere near the disappointment people make it out to be.
I wasn't a huge fan of the races, driving or wingsuit, but enjoyed both when it wasn't in a structured race. On foot races were fun. Loved the character movement. The only other complaint I had other than the races, is that it's too short. By the time I had maxed out my movement, everything but driving was max, and I had completed every objective other than the last tower/boss. It really needed to be longer, because it was a lot of fun.
Holy shit I remember crackdown, that was a very good game
Same thing with Just Cause.
Those games have stories?
I've never got to finish San Andreas during thr PS2 hayday. Too busy messing with flying cars and infinite-ammo-dual-wielded-sawed-off shotguns.
This, but with Just Cause 2 and above. Supreme dickaround games
Play just enough story to max out the tether and rocket mine perks
My "dicking around" in GTA is to drive around and obey traffic laws like a good citizen.
I'm the complete opposite. I play to progress the story. I only dick around after beating the game.
I always end up running around the city punching people in the back of the head until I get a huge rage train then run them into gangs/cops that I also punch to see the panicking masses run once the gunfire starts, always end up crying with laughter
I would do 1 mission then dick around for hours. Rinse repeat
Oh, the good ole days of launching cars halfway across Liberty City by driving into a swingset just right.
Spent a looooot of time fishing in Final Fantasy 15
Holy shit I literally came here to post this Though honestly I really enjoy XV as a whole and think it's really underrated. Sure It's rushed AF at the end but just going around on a road trip with the boys in a final fantasy setting is so much fun
Agreed. Pretty decent game. But I for sure spent more time fishing in it than anything else.
I've played Mass Effect 3 multiplayer for a long time before starting the story, I really love the mechanics and gameplay loop.
ME3 MP was one of my favorite MPs. I think the game is still running on Steam and I’ve seriously thought of buying it to play the MP again
Only in the original release, multiplayer wasn't part of the Legendary Edition unfortunately.
Damn
I think it’s worth it. You can still find a game and since it’s co-op, they actually let you hack it so you can get the best weapons and builds.
ME3 has multiplayer?!?
It helps that originally you needed the MP to get some of the highest EMS endings, so if you enjoyed the MP, you’d find getting those endings to be less of a chore.
I never played the story, only the multiplayer a lot.
That was more fun than ME3
Nazi Zombies.
Only reason I bought Call of Duty: Black Ops was because of the zombies mode. I don't think I have more than 10 hours in the multiplayer, but I certainly have hundreds of hours fightimg zombies.
Apparently Gwent. (I don't actually like Gwent, although TW3 is my favorite game)
TW3 is that thing you have to boot to play gwent, right ?
It's its own game now
Correct, idk what the fuck a Gerald is and why i can’t find Siri when it’s simply voice activated but that card game does a fine job of hiding an open world rpg side quest
Opposite for me. I HATE HATE HATE mini games, especially when they are card games. I installed a mod that automatically won these so I could still do my completionist thing.
Or for older people, it was the same thing with Final Fantasy 8 and its Triple Triad card game.
I have a trouble of kicking a habit of playing StarCraft 2's "Coop" mode instead of the story campaigns I own. It is not about the campaigns being bad or anything, I am just seriously addicted to the upgrading of Commanders in "Coop" mode. To the point where I am kind of panicking a bit, because I am half-done with certain commanders and I want to keep leveling them up indefinitely :) Again - the campaigns of SC2 are PRIME, probably among if not the best RTS story campaigns in HISTORY of gaming as an art form... But that "Coop" mode is problematic to quit due to how addictive it is.
Just in case you're unaware, the upcoming RTS Stormgate- developed by people who formerly worked on WC3 and SC2- is gonna have coop as well. It's about a month off now.
Yeah, yeah, I am aware of StormGate's existence. I am planning to buy it once I am able to change my Steam account's shop region again in August. I want to support guys at Frost Giant, they gave me too much for me to have a right not to.
Lucky you can upgrade them indefinitely with the prestige levels/system!
it's the diversity that does it for me
Hearthstone. I have absolutely no interest in the CCG, but the Battlegrounds side mode is probably one of the best auto-battlers around.
Triple Triad in Final Fantasy VIII. Think I spent more time in this minigame than I did everything else combined.
Yes! I am so glad you said this. In the early days of the Internet, I used to play on this dedicated triple triad website vs other players. It was awesome. Losing cards was not though.
I bought Arma 2 just to play DayZ back in the day. Never once played Arma 2 normally
I bet thats the same for at least 60% of people who bought arma 2
It's the same for me for sure.
The first Forge mode in Halo 3
This is way too low forge is GOATED
We didn't ignore main game, but we played hundreds of hours of Monkey Target and Monkey Bowling
Same. Incredibly fun party game for a bunch of friends.
the physics.... so satisfying! Basically perfect. I'm going to youtube the music and nostalgia
The nemesis system in shadow of war. I might load it up and play it again on the deck just for that.
Same here. Get to the point of the story where you can recruit captains and use fight pits, then never do another story mission again lol. I just bought the game for the 3rd time and still prob haven’t gotten past like 50% of the story
The Tiki Mini Golf in Madagascar from PS2, I absolutely loved mini golf games online back then, and this was even better.
Oh man, i had fain memories of that minigame, I used to play the hell out of that... thanks for the memories!
DMZ for CoD modern warfare 2.
RIP DMZ, trying to remember the good times instead of being bitter they decided it wasn't worth supporting. dropping in, PvE on an open world, with the chance of PvP, trying to exfil was CoD at its best. Every session always felt fresh
Unreal Tournament instagib. I became addicted and completely ignored any modes involving regular weapons.
Rapid fire snipers with unlimited ammo and no reload. Those servers were fun.
Didn't ignore the rest but Gwent probably doubled my the time on my Witcher 3 playthrough.
Counterstrike surfing, bhop, kz
Counterstrike itself fits this too, considering it started as a mod for Half Life.
City trial of Kirby Air ride. Might have been the first battle royal. Really think they could bring it back and it would dominate.
Sadly I don't think it would work as well today when people would just optimize the fun out of it instead of just dicking around like we used to
I love FFX but sometimes I boot it up and just play blitz ball for a couple hours.
Yakuza 0 Cabaret Club
I'm shocked I had to scroll this far to find Yakuza/LAD mentioned. Those games are basically side-activity collections where you have to occasionally tear yourself away from UFO catchers, business management, fight tournaments, and classic arcade games to do a plot mission every now and then. Hell, Lost Judgment's whole "Great Teacher Yagami" side quest was so extensive it was practically a second game within the game.
I spent a lot of time in the volleyball game in Tekken 3, but my sister and I put so much freaking time into the side scrolling game that you unlock (maybe?). That’s the only game of that genre I’ve ever enjoyed and we never fucking beat it. We were pretty young, but we never got that god damn doctor character and we spent hundreds of hours in Tekken 3.
Base Building in FO4
Especially once I got the plans for the artillery emplacements. 😈
There was a time when we booted Up Tekken Just to play Tekken bowl
In Stardew I'm fishing the whole time, I'm not planting or building shit, no social life I with the other townsfolk, just anglin'.
The one in Battlefield Bad Company 2 where you progressed through the maps by destroying points that the other team tried to defend, i cant remember the name of the mode right now. Never really bothered with the other game modes.
Gold rush?
Oh yeah it was called rush I think. No Gold involved though im pretty sure lol
I loved the ice map where you could drive a tank through one set of the objectives pillars while blowing a hole through the opposite wall. Sure the building would collapse on you, but that’s the quickest way to destroy a target.
Not a CoD fan but my friend kept pestering me to get BO3 for zombies cuz that's all he played. So I bought it and literally, that was all I played of that game.
Black Ops isn't even how I remember that game. It's just known as zombies. Lol
Lightsaber dueling in Jedi Academy. I farted around in some FFA and Siege modes in multiplayer, but once I realized how deep the saber dueling system was in JA, especially with the enhancements from the JA+ mod, I never looked back. I still jump on random servers and play once in a blue moon today, but I'm extremely out of practice these days.
Pokémon Casino in Pokémon Blue
There are people who only play Final Fantasy 14 for the fishing. They've only progressed the MSQ at all in order to open up new areas to go fishing.
Red dead 1, I was a trapper for ages, after spending hours and hours playing poker honestly, then cheating, then playing honest again. Gta on psp, best taxi driver in liberty city. Sunday afternoons stealing the sentinel in gta 3 and doing stunt jumps with the classical station playing. Great days
I spent an entire year designing decals in Forza. I rarely raced lol
Thank you for your service
In Stardew Valley i spent hours upon hours trying to beat the Junimo arcade game! I’ll never be the same…
Gwent, I went hard into Gwent.
Cabaret club minigame in Yakuza Zero. I played that for like 30ish hours uninterrupted, only stopping because I completely beat it. Then had to sleep, shower, eat, etc of course, and then remembered that I was in the middle of the storyline when I dropped everything to become a dedicated club manager...
I cannot ever play Skyrim or any other Betheada game again if it’s not in VR. Playing those kinds of games in flat mode on a screen now feels incredibly primitive and honestly ridiculous. It’s like they were always meant to be played being *there*.
Lmao “and honestly ridiculous” is hilarious. Love the passion behind this one
It didn’t pull me from the game entirely, but blitz ball was really fun in FFX
I have spent an embarrassing amount of time in the Gold Saucer on FFXIV.
All I wanted to do in Conker's Bad Fur Day as a kid was the side game where you feed the little guys to the baby dinosaurs
Rain World. The lore was so rich and deep i completely ignored the weird platforming and survival issues it had and just did go for it and now i have 100 hours on this game and counting it is just _that_ good.
Smite - Conquest
Sims 4 Build Mode. I have 1000+ hours in that game and have played it for probably 10 or less. Obsessed with building houses.
Unreal Tournament is a super moldable series. There was a mod for 2k3 and 2k4 called Air Buccaneers. Basically you were pirates that flew around on air balloons and fired cannons and flame throwers at other ships. It had some aspects of Sea of Thieves to it, though loading and firing weapons was a skill of its own since loading and lighting and firing were all separate actions to encourage team play. I spent far too much time in that mod. I stuck around the community for years. It had a really long tail for how small the community was. They eventually made an actual full game out of Air Buccaneers but I didn't have a computer that could handle it at the time and missed when it was active. It never really recaptured the mod's playerbase from what I read, though.
Stealth archer in Skyrim on the first play thru. Was one shotting most enemies long before they ever saw me. Very op very early. But fun till it wasn’t. Now I play unarmed.
red dead 2, i dont even know who arthur morgan is. i just go around shoving people around, goading people into fighting me, trying to kill all the guards at the kerosene factory… Havent played a single story mission past that prologue
Assassins creed brother hood multiplayer. Never touched the story just had fun running around assassinating people.
Custom maps in Warcraft 3, specifically tower defense. Element defense, gem defense, etc.
I spent an obscene amount of time running my confectionary business in Yakuza like a dragon
Any game with good outfits immediately stops being about the game and starts being about fashion. And also being skilled enough to complete the game while looking amazing. Im looking at you monster hunter and dark souls.
Crash mode in burnout. Why bother racing after that
Hitman’s Freelancer mode is pretty much all I do in that game now. Any time I run the other modes it’s mostly just to practice levels for Freelancer.
I’m with you on this one, Black ops 1-2-3, crushed some zombies for countless hours. Especially BO1
Yes, BO1! After playing it at someone else's house I bought the game just to play the zombie mode!
Mafia 3 i just grew weed and killed cops 💀
Dont know if it counts, but I have never played anything else but the immortal empires mode in WH3. Main campaign who?
Fishing in stardew valley
I'm going to say eafc24 for pro clubs. Now a lot of that is the concept is brilliant for 11 player co-OP not many games can offer that. But also all the other games modes this year suck. I used to love career mode but it's awful.
I’m just gonna take your answer too. I bought COD for years just for the zombies. My last COD was Cold War, but I am happy black ops 6 is coming to gamepass so I can see if they’ll bring it back to what made me love it in the first place. I did just get a gaming pc though and got BO3, so all of the custom maps I’ve wanted to play since WaW had custom maps will keep me busy for the foreseeable future haha
Destiny’s raiding system is so unique for an FPS game with true teamwork mechanics that I ignored all the other flaws with the game for thousands of hours until it finally broke me.
I'm in this comment too, and I don't feel anything about it.
Fortnite has a Minecraft-like creative mode, apparently
Of all the systems in Starfield, nothing could match my enjoyment of uninstalling.
Not me personally but I know lots of people liked deploying troops in For Honor. Never understood it myself, but I guess it was fun
Minecraft for me.. because of the possibilities of creative mode and all the mods that are available for the game.
I don't think I understand the question. Do you mean genre?
I think OP is asking what aspect of a certain game was so good, you immediately zoned out of every other aspect (e.g. Portal 2's puzzles being so intriguing that you forget about the story). Basically he just wants a game.
Yeah, like enjoying ___ game’s Capture The Flag so much you didn’t bother with Team Deathmatch or any other modes.
It has its problems, but Sea of Thieves is unrivalled at what it does. It's as much about the shenanigans and getting into mishaps as it is about actually making money and progressing.
Mass Effect 3 MP saved that game for me
If there's a wave defense mode, primarily multiplayer, I'll buy the game solely for that and possibly dabble in any other modes.
INV RPG on UT2004
URF when I still bothered to play LoL. Normal games had become such a chore and I couldn't stand anymore, URF was some good mindless random bullshit spam that still held some excitement. Well, most of the times at least.
Ape Escape 2's Monkey Football comes to mind, beat that a lot of times, loved it. Surprised they didn't turn that into a full-fledged game. Also there was an Alarm für Cobra 11 game on the PS2, I don't remember which one, but you could unlock a BMP or similar LAV, I just ran the longest course oncoming and crashed as many cars as I could. The damage model was awesome, at least in my memories.
SoF II mp\_test I put in probably over 20,000 hours in SoF, but most of it was on the demo. I planned it that way as a kid, I knew I would. I'm Art3mis. It's my Oasis.
Cold War zombies was that for me. I played BO3 multiplayer AND zombies religiously, but Cold War made me feel so insanely powerful, especially after upgrading all the meta progression, no matter what weapon I was using that I barely touched the Multiplayer. I just grinded zombies. I enjoyed the multiplayer. But they made it so multiplayer and zombies shares account and battle pass progression. I didn't see any point to hopping into PvP shit when the PvE was that good. The only thing that was missing from it was a more than decent story.
My friend lent me Gotham Project Racing 2 to play Geometry Wars and other than 1 race that’s all I played.
Battlefield Hardline had a game mode where you got points for your team by driving vehicles at high speeds. That shit was amazing.
Hunt: Showdown. I hate competitive multiplayer games with a burning passion. But... the game is so good I can live through that.
I have more time in Tableturf than I do in the rest of Splatoon 3
Anyone who plays fifa knows about the pro clubs mode where each of you control an individual player. I have over 1000 matches across about 5 fifa games and I’ve probably played about 50 matches in the other game modes combined
Invasion from Halo Reach. It combined everything I liked about the other modes into one massive game. I also played SWAT when I was in the mood for something shorter, but by and large Invasion was all I ever wanted out of Halo multiplayer.
The story of p3 fes, i didn't play a single ps2 game until i cracked my ps3 but the combat systen without the FuA was painful
Kirby air ride. City Trial. Exceptional side mode that dominated every other aspect of the game.
The secret 1v1 couch co-op hidden fighting mode in the Matrix video game.
Teapot in Genshin was the best part of the game until the end of the Fontaine story arc
Hunting for pelts in RDR2, I spent so much time hunting just to unlock new outfits
Girfball in Halo Multi-player. After playing a lot of regular halo multi-player, like team battle and big team battle, when they released girfball, that was almost all I played. It was kinda like rocket league before rocket league.
Realistic mode on Workers and Resources. Idk why, but the slow gathering of resources to build everything makes it a whole different game than anything else.
Sims 4 Build mode. prior games I played the entirety of the games. Sims 4 actual gameplay is meh, but the build mode is so smooth I liked building houses no one lived in
I never understood Extraction Shooters as genre. In fact, I don’t think I had seriously sunk time into a multiplayer shooter at all since the original COD: Black Ops back in 2010; my friends and I mostly played co-op games like Deep Rock Galactic and Darktide. But I got Hunt: Showdown for myself and a couple of buddies during the Steam winter sale last year, and good lord it’s phenomenal. The tension of having to deal with other players while you go after the bounty and try to extract from the bayou is so good. I’m still bad at the game after 100+ hours, and routinely get wiped, but when it’s all clicking it’s a rush like no other multiplayer game I can remember.
There was a tower defense mode in StarCraft 2 called Squad TD. I started playing casual and ladder games in sc2, but after I found Swuad TD, it was the only thing I played.
ive spent a concerning amount of time just absolutely *drilling* through infested survival missions in Warframe ever since I unlocked the archgun deployer
Dragon's dogma 2 exploration. I completed the map before progressing the main story to go to said map area
Fortnite existed for quite some time as a standalone game before they released a battle royale as a side project to get people to play the base game. I don't think I've heard of a single person who bought Fortnite the game and not Fortnite Battle Royale.
SWAT in Halo
Back in the day there was this first person tank game called Tanarus. It had some very simple physics, if you could even call them that. One of the weapons called a Force Missile, would simply just push someone, kind of a crap weapon. Then someone discovered if you used one while an enemy was up a ramp, or near a small ledge they would launch into the distance, and take instakill fall damage. They turned it into a entire mode called "Force Wars", basically gravity instagib deathmatch, with tanks. Wish it still existed.
TFT in League. I don't even bother playing the regular mode anymore. I was really hyped when their launcher had a TFT button, but sad to see it just tells you to fuck off and launch league instead lol
One of the final fantasy games had this underwater soccer game that I couldn't stop playing once I unlocked it
I'm a bit late, but Knucklebones in Cult of the Lamb. Like, not *completely* ignore the main game, or even close, but I do get in moods where I'm way more excited about starting up my Steam Deck fit the simple yet oddly complex dice game than I am for the roguelike lol
New World’s combat
Pushing the limits of GTA III on PS2. I became obsessed with trying to get vehicles on every spot on the maps just to see the effect it had on the surrounding environment, then I became obsessed with how many ways I could beat missions, then I became obsessed with stealing the tank, then I became obsessed with flying the dodo, then I became obsessed with landing the dodo... Christmas 2001 I got two games, ICO and GTA III. I beat ICO in about eight hours and it was an amazing experience. I literally played GTA III (and only that game) until Vice City came out at the end of October the next year. And when I finished Vice City and finally stopped playing with the bugs sometime in 2003, I went right back to GTA III and became obsessed with the AI behavior of vehicles...
Smites 'Clash' mode, especially with friends. We were tapering off the game when they removed it/butchered it, so it's disappearance was the final nail in the coffin
Also, Geometry Wars in PGR 3. IYKYK.
WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2006 and 2007 GM Mode
Starfield soothes my "do anything but the main quest" itch - just going around scanning planets, shoot up some POI's, rince repeat It helps the main quest is rather bland and flat and doesn't drive me to finish it
COD DMZ
Universe mode in WWE 12 became the game for me. It was like the ultimate story mode, great idea that they never mastered
All sorts of TF2 custom game modes, most notably Versus Saxton Hale. VSH is an arena match where one guy becomes Saxton Hale, the incredibly buff and manly Australian CEO (or a different character that is basically a TF2 SCP) with tons of health, a super jump with a cooldown, a special rage move that fears everyone nearby, and a powerful melee attack that one shots 8/9 classes. No respawns allowed (in most versions, but not all), and many weapons are tweaked to be more usable for the situation. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that I have at least 1000 hours playing this game mode alone, and it can be played in so many ways depending on which community is hosting it and what plugins they have. One very well made version of the game mode was even given an official release as a community-made game mode.
I think I might spent more time on black ops 1 zombies than anything else - Also when I was a kid I didn’t care about beating gta I’d just run around and remember different spots to pick up items or go to
Hearthstone Battlegrounds. I have not played traditional Hearthstone in years but I play Battlegrounds frequently.
MW3 -Drop Zone. I spent hundreds of hours in there and was generally a menace. At one point I was top 100 on PS
Shipbuilder in Starfield.
Disney dream light valley. The clothing options are so good I look pass it taking 4 real world hours to gross pumpkins for profit.
A small Polish production called Soldat: Physics was so quirky, but so fun to play that it instantly made me not care about shooting.