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.
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Morning Folks! Yesterday I wrapped up my third character of “Bel League” and this is ultimately the one I originally planned as my “first alt”. Essentially, I wanted a low-pressure map blaster that I knew I could make work on minimal or easily obtained gear. Essentially the idea is to go Champion for survival and Lightning Arrow for ease of getting off the ground. I am more or less following the template of Belgladius, with some items that I used in the original Raider version of the build that was my Ancestor league starter. Primarily the build uses Shadows and Dust for rampage and unholy might as well as some additional Mana Leech, and Perseverance to turn my permanent fortify stacks into permanent Onslaught as well as a bit of Attack Damage since I am stacking both Armor and Evasion. In this specific build I am throwing in a Poised Prism because it is just a generically good quiver with some resists on it and The Taming which similarly fixes some resists and offers up a bit of elemental damage.
The biggest challenge that I find myself in currently is getting enough levels to finish out my tree and I am one level away from 78 which will allow me to actually equip the belt. I also need to sort out my Pantheon and at a minimum get the freeze immunity. One of the huge benefits of a character like this is that it slides into maps extremely easily. I’ve been grinding tier 5 maps to get some levels and am about to transition up into yellow maps. By the time I am in my 90s I should be ripping through Red maps without much issue and hopefully running red/blue altars for drops. Between now and then I really need to find myself a new bow because while I found a lucky six link along the way 566 dps will not cut it for long. Realistically I need something more in the range of 800-900 to really rip through the t16 maps.
I also probably need to find some better gear, because right now after raiding my vault… I am in an “aggressively fine” state. When I ding 78 I will be able to equip Perseverance, and then with a little harvest crafting, I should be able to balance out my resistances. This will still leave me far in the red as far as Chaos goes, but pending I am careful with map modifiers that should not really impact me heavily even in red maps. I would really like to see my armor and resistances a little bit higher, somewhere in the range of 20k so I will need to be on the lookout for good replacements to slot in. If I find two amazing rings, I might be able to keep the resists while also pouring on some chaos. My amulet is also pretty crappy but I am mostly using it to get some attributes I need to equip other items. If you are curious here is a POB I dumped this morning with the current state of my gear.
None of this really matters though because this is what it looks like to play this build… admittedly with a MTX that makes the Lightning Arrow a bit more vibrant. The biggest challenge is how much I need that Mana Leech because there will be times when I run out of mana while mapping and have to wait for the Leech to catch up. In theory, I should have -7 mana on my Amulet and Rings to make this build feel a bit more stable. It works well enough while you are rolling but definitely suffers from the “never stop killing” problem because when there are lulls in the density I start to bottom out my reserves. While I enjoy Boneshatter quite a bit and it feels good to map on it… this is really the gameplay I want when I just want to delete a bunch of surplus maps for goodies. I need to finish out the fourth lab at some point today, but I don’t figure I will have any issues with it.
So with Lightning Arrow coming online, I am very likely to fall into the old familiar pattern of zipping through maps quickly to gain sulphite and then spending that sulphite while delving on the Boneshatter Juggernaut. For the past several leagues I have preferred to have some sort of fast mapper character and then a delve character and alternate back and forth between the two. I am hoping to get my Lightning Arrow character at least to around 95. I am doubting that I will make the pivot into magic find like I did last league, but If I just happen into a couple of extremely well-rolled Ventor rings and a very well-rolled Goldwyrm I might alter those plans. I mostly hope to be able to juice the maps through the league mechanic and see what all I can get doing that and maybe blending in some delirium.
Anyways! I am off to get ready and go do some shopping. I hope you are all having a great week as we slide forward towards Christmas. I am technically “off” now but I had to pop in and deal with some work this morning. I am looking forward to the long break and finishing my fiftieth book of the year and hopefully having a bit of a much needed mental reset.
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If you have followed me over the last few days, you have watched me playing around with one of the new transfigured abilities called Volcanic Fissure of Snaking. My idea behind the build was to go with Chieftain which gives me easy access to lots of resistances as well as Hinekora, Death’s Fury for big explosions, and Tawhoa, Forest’s Strength for what is essentially a form of melee-based spell echo. Instead of leaning into scaling a bunch of physical damage, the idea was to convert all of my physical fire damage and instead scale that, chance to ignite and ignite damage with proliferation. The hope was that I could run around with a mace and shield, which would give me extra defenses, and then paint the room in firey eruptions. Leveling through the campaign this felt excellent and after crafting a few clusters it seemed to solve my problem with single-target damage.
However when I swapped over from the campaign to tier 1 unmodified maps… I had some significant damage problems. Ash urged me to grab one of my spare boneshatter axes and throw it on the character, which meant swapping around a ton of points that I had put into shield defenses and attack damage while holding a shield. This however killed my defenses and meant that I saw the “rip” screen quite a bit more. So I am living in this middle ground between having enough defenses and having enough offensive power to make up for not having said defenses. I am only level 74, and I know that levels could help solve this problem… but I am not really sure it is worth the uphill battle and the constant flow of regrets to try and salvage this character. The only positive is that I didn’t really go out of my way to acquire gear for the character and most everything I am wearing is stuff I had lying around in my bank already.
On top of the ascendancy benefits, I went chieftain because I thought starting on the left-hand side of the screen near all of the fire and physical damage buffs would help me. The problem is… it is sort of hard to scale both physical and fire damage while also adding enough defensive layers to make the whole mess viable. Then there is the problem with the ability Volcanic Fissure of Snaking itself… because using it with a two-hander means that it is almost comically slow. So that adds a whole other thing into the mix, that I would in theory need to blend in a bunch of attack speed to try and make the mess feel a bit better. There are other ascendancies that might be better served for this sort of build, but I fear that they would have to rely on clusters even more than I currently am. I keep thinking that Physical to Fire Melee Ignite is more viable than it might be currently.
Ultimately I wanted to play around with one of the new abilities and I had a lot of fun with it… until I didn’t. I think there is a build here, but I feel like I am maybe not capable of building it. At a minimum, I think this might be one of those things that is a bit harder to build without easy access to some specific uniques that would make the one-handed version viable. Again I am annoyed at the restrictions of SSF, but I might shelve this until I finally do migrate out of the private league. I think I am going to low-key start trying to farm things that I know I can turn into currency when the transfer to trade takes place. It will be very hard coming from behind over a month into the league and trying to gather up the currency needed to finish my builds. I feel so hamstrung by not having access to trade that while I have enjoyed the communal nature of the league… I am not sure how up for this I will be in the future. Maybe as a short-term 10-day league, but never one that goes on this long.
I think I figured out yesterday what it is that I like so much about trade leagues in Path of Exile. In a game like Diablo III, loot is so plentiful and there are truthfully a very limited number of possibilities that it is a foregone conclusion that you will see a given item. Enough time put in and it will absolutely with certainly drop, and often in even an ancient legendary version and maybe if you are super lucky a primal. Path of Exile however has a much wider loot pool and it is absolutely possible that you can spend an entire league grinding away and never actually see something… for example, we’ve yet to see a Profane Proxy for Kodra but in past leagues, I was chucking these into Loreweave recipes because we had spares. Trade League allows me to convert the things I am getting, or even the things I enjoy farming the most… into the items that I am now seeing drop. Everything that I do feels like I am working towards some deterministic goal and I like that a lot.
This is a similar problem I am having in Last Epoch, I have run countless helmet nodes in the Monolith and still have no Herald of the Scurry to show for it. I also have a slew of Necromancer drops that I have never seen and have no real deterministic way of farming them. It makes me question my thoughts about the trade league going into that game, and whether or not I would feel happier playing with access to buy items from other players. Path of Exile and the trade league I think have skewed my feelings about this in ways that I did not expect. I just get frustrated with the inefficiency of waiting around for a specific thing to drop, rather than just converting other items into currency and buying exactly the item you wanted instead.
I didn’t expect to be so vehemently turned into a “trade league enjoyer” but I guess that has happened. I am not sure what I want to do at this point. I might take a bit of a break from Path of Exile and go back to Baldur’s Gate III and try and wrap that up before the end of the year.
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So I am nearing the end of the campaign on BelGoesFireSnake my Volcanic Fissure of Snaking Chieftain, and I am of mixed opinions. It is amazing to see the entire screen erupting into fire and it brings me immense joy to see a screen covered in magma like the above screenshot. The problem is that it comes with the fairly extreme price of most of your attacks not actually hitting your target. So when you are trying to fight a boss… it feels really bad against anything with sufficient heft. So for clearing entire screens… this build has you covered and does it in a very fun way but anything that is even the slightest bit tanky will feel like you are dealing negative damage.
Right now this is suffering from some of the same problems that I had with my Shield Crush Chieftain from last league. Avatar of Fire may not be worth it. Between it and the fire mastery I am converting 90% of my physical damage to Fire… at the cost of dealing ONLY fire damage. This is why I have leaned heavily into Ignite damage and elemental proliferation… which I just took out of my main five-link because I was able to craft a Fan the Flames cluster. I think I might have to go more heavily into cluster jewels just to pick up enough damage nodes on the end of the tree where I am sitting. My large cluster has Prismatic Heart and Widespread Destruction which help to scale up the Fire Damage further. I’ve also got another easy-to-reach large cluster that I could expand further, but it always feels like you are brute forcing your will upon the tree when you start using a bunch of clusters.
If I can make this stay as tanky as it currently feels… this honestly might be a fun build-down in Delve. The Volcanic Fissures do a great job of finding mobs so you could just be throwing them out while you go down the tunnel mopping up the easy stuff. In theory, I need to find myself a high-level base for a Mace and then try and craft as much physical damage on it. For the moment I am using Lavianga’s Wisdom mostly because it adds a big chunk of increased physical damage. The build that started me down this path was doing Strength stacking and using a Brutus’ Lead Sprinkler which we have not seen yet in Bel League, but I have enough strength to make that a reasonable option. Another potential is Nycta’s Lantern but I am not sure if I have ever actually seen one of those drop. While it is super cheap in trade… I am not sure I can actually find one in SSF.
I have a feeling that this character is ultimately going to be a dead-end learning experience. I think more than anything I need to spend some time down in Delve and pick up some crafting bases to get the rest of my gear fleshed out. If you are curious this is where I am build-wise.
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