Games

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).

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.

Deep Rock Galactic

In descending order: Skyrim Fallout 4 Starfield

Morrowind is a game that has extreme hours too, but not sure if it is 1000+ (yet).

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

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.

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

I have around 1700 hs in Destiny 2, and close to the same in Bloodborne. Over 1000 hours in the last 2 monster hunter titles. I've replayed resident evil 4 and castlevania sotn dozens of times.

So those are my most played games

Project Zomboid, Rimworl, Dwarf Fortress, Stellaris, Starsector...

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.

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.

Civ 6, Fallout 4

Monster Hunter World and Don't Starve

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.

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

Not a favourite anymore but still beats my second most played games by a factor of 4... Warframe was fun at the beginning and really clicked at about 200hrs. I left after about 2200hrs because I burned out but it still has a place in my heart.

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.

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.

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.

I've been playing Tf2 for over 1.5k hours now. I recommend you to try it out There's a reason why that game from 2007 is still not dead.

Team Fortress 2

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.

DOTA 2 is my primary time waster, have over 3000+ hours on it. It's endlessly entertaining, because there is so much variability in the games. You have 4-8 spells depending on the hero, with 6 active item slots, which means once your team has leveled up, team fights can be a burst of seconds, or a 5+ minute long affair, with each tank employing different survival strategies to block damage, heal, or escape, just to heal and get right back in it. There are multiple different game modes, but are a little challenging to find and play. Still, it is the one game I play with the steepest learning curve. I don't think I saw myself as "good at the game" until I was around 1000 hours in 😶‍

Smite is the only other game I have 1000+ hours in. I started playing it as a break from DOTA 2, and as a way to connect with my little brother. It's a lot like DOTA 2, but far more simplistic. Each god has 4 spells, with no active items. Instead of left-clicking for movement on a map, you use WASD to maneuver your god. It's fun, and you can pick it up after like 30 hours. The different game modes are a lot easier to navigate than in DOTA, but it's also a lot less engaging. The updates and quests are all very simplistic. I was going to try out the new Smite 2, but after watching some game play, it looks... exactly the same as Smite 1.

There was a moment in my life when I thought that perhaps I was outgrowing games... that they were just not really designed for the entertainment of adult human beings in a way that could satisfy me. Not one of my old stand-bys could, as you said, "scratch the itch" or provide "the same enjoyment that it used to." I found myself spending more time with films and books.

Then I got into FromSoft games and indie titles, and within a year I realized games still held incredible experiences for me. I hadn't outgrown games. I had only outgrown the bland slop represented by most AAA releases, and especially by online multiplayer releases. Personally, I'd recommend giving up on looking for a new 1000+ hour obsession. Instead I'd recommend seeking a broad array of 10-100 hour loves. If you haven't already tried them, for me a love of gaming was saved primarily by: Dark Souls, FTL, Spelunky, and Hollow Knight.

In order of most to least

D2 (thankfully there was tracker) WoW (i don't wanna know) PoE at about 4700 hours

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.

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.

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

No Man's Sky. A foot deep but a mile wide.

L4D2. built a new computer for that game specifically after loving L4D. super fun arcade shooter that will never be uninstalled from my computer.

X4 Foundations... This sucks people life: you start a game when the sun goes to sleep, one second later the sun wake up 😅

If you're a Destiny refugee, the most obvious answer is Warframe, which just keeps on getting better and better.

Team Fortress 2

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.