How often do you go back to a game you have not played for a significant period of time (1 year+)?

@shindig recently said in the thread on Xbox's attempted acquisition of Activision that most people play games once and then never touch them again. This is not at all consistent with my experience of games. Of course there are many games that I only played once and then set aside to probably never touch again (I can't see myself going back to Fuse or The Last Templar ever, and I'm probably done with Echo Generation, even though I liked that game) but there are also lots of games that I might replay, or that I haven't finished but could see myself picking up again. It's super common for me to dip back into certain arcade style games after years off (Every few years I want to play Geometry Wars again) but there are also plenty of story based games where I take long pauses. I took a 4+ year gap between the first and second halves of The Darkness, and while I didn't remember every story beat I am glad I went back into that game and finished it off. I started Octopath Traveler in 2021 and have not finished picking away at that even though there are long periods where I don't think about it (I recently did finish my first path and roll credits on it...over 2 years after I started and with many long breaks.)

Just in the last couple days I was scrolling through my massive PlayStation digital library and downloaded Hungry Shark World and Downwell, two games I had not played for significant periods of time. I played a ton of Hungry Shark World yesterday and even though it's not a great game it perfectly hit the spot of what I wanted. This morning has been spent rediscovering Downwell, which IS a great game and one I can see myself playing off and on for years to come. I even booted up my PS3 to play a little Street Fighter X Tekken after I saw a Youtube video where someone defended that game.

Backwards compatibility, digital libraries, and cloud saves have only made this easier. For a game like Downwell it took me only a few minutes to get it up and running on my PS5 with all my progress intact. And it cost $0 additional money.

How often do you pick up games you have not touched in a long time to play them? I'm not talking about games you constantly play over a period of years like Fortnight or Starcraft II but games you may legitimately not have thought about for a year or more and then see it in your library or see it mentioned and get the bug to play it again.

For the purposes of this discussion I am NOT including things like Remasters/Remakes, significant DLC, or big revamps to a game. I'm not talking about booting up Cyberpunk to check out the raytracing, or replaying Metroid Prime in the re-released remaster, but rather playing the same version you already had with no significant changes. Playing something because of an external stimulus like you have a friend who wants to play it with you or you see it on a stream or there's a sequel coming out or whatever WOULD count though. So do replays of games you have finished. The only rule is that it's the same version of a game you have not played in a long time that you're booting up again.

My free time is SO limited nowadays that if a game doesn't grab me in the first hour, it's rare I'll ever play it twice.

Which sucks as the current trend is these moronic 80 hour games that no real adult can ever commit to.

The only exception for me was Red Dead II, cause I could jump on, do a mission in fifteen minutes then go do something else

@sombre: I think it's fair to call that a trend but it's not THE trend. There are a ton of great arcade experiences and compact short games releasing too. In my top games of last year I have Neon White (a mid length campaign but with very quick exciting levels) Citizen Sleeper (a visual novel that can be completed in one evening) and Norco (a relatively compact adventure game.)

You could also point to Rollerdrome, Vampire Saviors, and Tinykin as really good experiences that are either short or work well for quick drop in drop out play.

If you want to talk high production value "big" games the pickings are slimmer but A Plague Tale: Requiem and High On Life were both decent and less than 20 hours.

Then you have your Call of Duty campaigns or your more limited spinoffs like Miles Morales.

@sombre: As an adult who chooses to play 80+ hour games with relative frequency, I would agree, I don't feel very real either.

@Thread: Hmm... not often. Fewer than half of the games I drop end up getting put back on rotation. If they do, it'll usually be after significant time has passed and my tastes/skills have changed in the meantime. I dropped Xcom after a couple hours because I wasn't enjoying its flavour of strategy, but after enjoying Valkryia Chronicles 4 I've reinstalled it for another shot.

On the other hand, Yakuza Kiwami 2 didn't grab me the way 0 and Kiwami did, and I just haven't rebuilt the drive to try again.

It's probably more frequent that I go back to and finish a game I started a decade ago and never finished than it is that I replay a game I finished, but both happen. Last year I finished Eternal Sonata and Alice: Madness Returns, both of which I started when the PS3 was a current-gen console. Every now and then I'll replay a PS2 Kingdom Hearts game, a Megaman Battle Network, or pop in an old Smackdown game long enough to remind myself that those season modes we're mostly repetitive. I also did just buy a Genesis last year in order to replay some of the first video games I ever had, if that counts.

EDIT: Pokemon games have become something I replay more frequently. Now that all my Pokemon just live on a server somewhere, I can feel better about starting a new game for a Nuzlocke or whatever.

I think about replaying games more than I actually do it. I've not replayed anything old this year. Work (and the abundance of other games) just crushes any chance to get the time for it.

I used to do this fairly frequently before I had children. Although within the last couple of weeks, I’ve been replaying Final Fantasy VIII a little bit to see if my oldest enjoyed the card game. She got pretty instantly interested in the GFs and the Fire Cavern, since she’s had a minor obsession with lava recently. But the days of full classic FF or Mass Effect series replays are likely behind me.

I think the most notable one of these for myself is when I played the original Dark Souls for the first time in 2014, and gave up some time after the Capra Demon fight. I returned in 2016 and mainlined the game, and I’ve been a true mark for From games ever since. Also, I played a lot of Heroes of Might and Magic 4 last year after finishing the incomplete Songs of Conquest campaign. You can get the older HoMM games on GOG for like $2 on sale, and I found them to be wonderful post-bedtime veg out games.

I think i only answered half the question, that's probably due to my reading comprehension today.

I don't really go back to story-based games if I've finished them once already, especially not without new content being available. That said, I'm dipping my toes back into Divinity Original Sin 2 since I found a nice layout for it on the Steam deck. This is a first for me in a long time.

I return to roguelikes as the mood takes me. I hadn't played Monolith in 18 months until a couple weeks ago. I've also been known to boot up good couch multiplayer games that haven't seen regular play for years if the right person comes to visit.

I really don't play games much anymore, I just lack the drive to play anything for more than hour or two, which is why roguelites have become the only thing I really play these last few years. The only exceptions are Zelda games, Fromsoft games, and Hollow Knight.

I've been slowly making progress through Terraria since getting that game in summer of 2011. I just pop in every now and then when I get the itch to play it. Think I've put over 500 hours into it, and still am not that close to beating all the bosses.

I also have been slowly making my way through Breath of the Wild after beating the game a couple years ago, trying to finish the good side quests and the dlc. Not sure if I'm going to now that the sequel is about to be out. But I also bought it on WiiU and the controller I got struggles to hold charge so it just turns off sometimes if it's not plugged in a certain way, so it is really annoying to play my WiiU now.

How often do you pick up games you have not touched in a long time to play them?

It's funny, because when I first read that core question, my reflexive answer was "all the time, duh!" but if i actually stop and look at my behavior, i think the truth is really "almost never."

i'm primarily a single-player, narrative-forward kinda consumer with the double curse of poor impulse control and a bit of tunnel vision. that translates to an ever-growing backlog with a compulsion to complete things (even if i'm not over the moon with them).

i do frequently replay a core rotation of current-gen favorites (i like completing my favs on the highest difficulty)- but if i'm digging into the crates, it's to play something i've never played before to completion before starting the next one. i don't graze, so if something escapes my attention- far more often than not- i'm probably not revisiting.

I've mentioned this before, but one of the things I find myself doing, is when I play a game that is very good, one of the things I'm afraid of doing is rushing through it and finishing it too quickly, so I intentionally move on to play other games, usually live services ones and come back to it at a later date, this can range from months, and yes, ever years. A recent example is Hi-Fi Rush. I enjoyed that game so much I didn't want to "Rush" through it, so after meeting the second ally character Chai can use, I stopped playing the game for a good couple of months before I went back and beat it. The same with A Plague Tale: Requiem, which I literally finished earlier this week, an amazing game that I feared would've gotten overlooked if not for Game Pass.

Some exceptions are RPGs that are long like the Persona games and such, because they take many hours to finish I don't see myself rushing through them, so I keep playing them usually until I beat them. The same with open world games that are long, though I did the same thing to Horizon: Forbidden West, but it really doesn't count because God of War: Ragnarok took up my time during that gap.

Fallout 4 and Skyrim seem to be the sole games I return to nowadays. I used to replay some adventure games and RPGs religiously, but now there's so much good stuff out there I could never catch up on all of it. But Skyrim, probably every three or four years, generally around the time they launch some new special edition. Hah.

Honourable exception to my previous posts in the form of Chrono Trigger, which I honestly feel like replaying again for the fifth time.

There is a time somewhere past 10+ years where you've forgotten enough about a game that it feels almost like new. Recently I'm playing such old games more than I play new games. With backwards compatibility on the new Xboxes and services like GOG, it's easy. Sometimes it's a game that I just really liked, like Mirror's Edge. Sometimes it's a game that I liked but didn't finish back then like The Witcher or Banjo-Kazooie. And sometimes it's a game that's been on my library that I never touched before, or games that I was always curious about like Breakdown or Assassin's Creed, or sometimes it's a sick feeling that I have to play through a series before touching the newest release, so I played through Metroid and Metroid 2 (with guides) before playing Metroid Dread.

This why game ownership without too strict DRM measures is important to me, even if it may be a losing battle. I mentioned here fairly popular games but there are tons of lesser known games that matter to me too.

@apewins: I honestly recommend playing Metroid Zero Mission instead of the NES original, and Another Metroid 2 Remake (or Samus Returns if you want to keep it legit) for 2, if you ever get the desire to play through the series again. Playing the NES/Gameboy games is great as an academic excercise but those games have been heavily improved by later teams. Sometimes remakes and rematers miss a bit of what made the original games special, but in these cases they actively improve upon those aspects.

@broshmosh: Thanks for the tip, I'll check out Zero Mission at least if and when it comes to Switch online. But I really don't mind the old games having their jankiness and part of the fun is seeing how the gameplay has progressed over the years, not just the story.

I mean I've at least played an hour of Earthbound almost every year for...I dunno, 20 years? I love the game, I love the world, I love picking it up and putting it down, there are just certain days when I'm in the mood and nothing else will do. Same with Persona 5, I'll just go back to it every now and again.

Speaking of, I'm currently playing Persona 3 again for the umpteenth time, Stardew Valley is something I keep on at least two harddrives at any time, I'll probably dip back into Boyfriend Dungeon now that they've got the new characters in. Shivering Isles and the Cook, Serve, Delicious! are always fine to dip back into as well.

Honestly, I'm the kind of person a question like this was made for.

Installed and played 6 hours of Doom Eternal when it hit game pass. Haven't touched it since and it continues to take up 100 GB of hard drive space. I look at it often and think maybe I'll just delete it. But then I tell myself I'll get back to it one day. One day....

Constantly. I would say I could divide my game collection into two piles, one that's the games I buy, play and never touch again, and another which are games I consistently come back to every 3-5 years. And that second pile is starting to get fairly big. After jumping out of WoW Classic last summer (which is sorta this kinda thing as well) I've gone on a rager through my library and replayed something like 15+ of my favorite classics (like Arkham series, Skyrim/Fallout and several AC games.) Many of them for the fourth of fifth time.

I'm certainly an outlier though, and I did it quite a bit less the last decade when I was very much on the "play every new game" wagon. But even then I would replay games I really loved the first time around a couple of years later.

I do it often but only for non-story games.. mostly tile games and strategy games.. every year I get a bit better at them.. still a few medals away from full completion of into the breach

Very rarely, if ever. Sometimes I get an urge for a very specific game I have not touched in forever, but more often than not what I am met with is a few minutes of nostalgia and then I am hit by how dated everything feels and that often rubs me the wrong way enough to not stick with it. In general I find myself either really liking a game enough to sticking with it until finished or I drop it and it's anyone's guess if I'll ever pick it back up again.

I think the bad part of it is I find myself dropping games a lot more lately, and I am not sure if it's the games or my willingness to drop it for something 'new' more easily.

I think I usually go back to older games I've dropped if there's a sequel coming.

Like Dragon Age Inquisition, I never finished the Trespasser DLC because I couldn't stand DAI's combat. But now that the 4th game is coming up, I've gone back to make an effort to finish it.

Probably a little more often than I'd think I do without thinking about it (lol). With a franchise I enjoy, I go back to play the previous game, or games, before the next one comes out. I dread the next Horizon for this reason, though I've already played Zero Dawn three times through thanks to Frozen Wilds, New Game+ and Forbidden West, so maybe I know that game well enough to fire and forget at this point. DOOM, Star Wars Jedi, God of War, the Uncharted games and so on.

Then there are games that I find really interesting to get the reactions of other people who don't play video games at all, so I've played The Last of Us Remastered for a girlfriend and shown the prologue of The Last of Us Part I to a few other girl friends whose experience with games stopped with SNES and begging their boyfriends to stop playing Halo.

I'm also far from immune to the "same game new graphics" grift of remasters and generational patches, probably in large part due to having played most of the PS3 generation on a CRT over s-video and most of the PS4 generation in 720p on a 50"+ screen. The COVID stimulus enabled me to finally have the latest technology and the latest screen to absorb it with so I loved the early PS5 patch rush, but even prior that that I enjoyed Tomb Raider via PS+ so much on PS3 that I scrambled to buy it on PS4 and experience it all over again but looking like the PC port. Death Stranding, Ghost of Tsushima, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Control...I didn't finish these by any means but boy would I have, gladly, if I weren't so busy scrambling from one to the other.

And then there's the first three chapters of Red Dead II, which I've replayed twice and can't help but get consumed by. The last time I played it, this past winter, I deliberately abided by the day/night cycle and tried to make it back to camp for dinner each night. I rarely galloped or ran, and the only reason I gave up on that was that I was moving, well, so slowly through the game that I realized how long it would ultimately take and just couldn't deal with that kind of mountain. But I'll likely get back to it sometime this summer, because now I've got the fancy Pulse headphones and I quite like them. I'll bet that's hecka immersive.

There's probably at least one other category, but I'll just stop with my FromSoft bugaboos - I Return to Yharnam every other year, which I guess means I'm due this year. I start a new character each time that I do. I beat Micolash for the first time on July 5th, 2020. I also found Cainhurst Castle for the first time on June 10th, 2020. I beat the Cleric Beast on March 6th, 2018. So I'll probably beat this game with my 4th character, in 2024. Sekiro, on the other hand, I hate so much that I almost hate how much I hate it more than I hate it, because of how much other people love it. Nick Wiger of the Get Played podcast recently completed Sekiro despite not finishing Elden Ring yet and loved the hecking heck out of it. I've beaten Elden Ring, and I've never beaten a FromSoft game before. If he can beat Sekiro, can't I? And yet I've re-downloaded that game probably four or five times only to flame out at Lady Butterfly, every damn time. Ugh.