Over at Massively, today’s Daily Grind asks “Which MMORPG’s do you keep installed long-term, even when you aren’t playing them?” Well, MMO’s are their thing, so of course they’re being specific about that, but as I’m a more general-purpose blogger, I’ll answer the question more generally.

There is an odd bit to this, for me, though. Back in spring I got a new PC (from my tax refund money). My older PC was getting a bit long in the tooth, and I had money, so why not? (This is why I’m poor.) Just upgrades were straight-out, since updating anything that needed upgrading would require upgrading other things, which meant upgrading other things, etc. A new build was what I needed. So, as of spring sometime, I had a fresh, clean hard drive.

Suddenly, this question was really necessary. (I mean, the question itself wasn’t, because it was several months ago.) Just what exactly would I bring back? What would get the precious space on my hard drive? (Having two SSD’s, but neither particularly big, for games; there’s a regular 1TB HDD, but that’s no fun.) There was also the possible trouble of W10 compatibility; would my favorite older games play nice with W10? (I was planning on installing W7, but was unable to get the the installer to recognize my keyboard and mouse – USB only.)

What I decided was…I’ll answer that question when I wanted to play those games. My biggest hurdle was Fallout: New Vegas: one of my favorite games, but one modded all up; even though I have the mod files themselves imported, I’d have to redo everything to get things in working order. So, instead of bothering with that, I just decided to leave it be. Same with Deus Ex, my number-one-favorite game of all time: when I want to play it, I’ll install it then.

The game I was playing at the time was Conan Exiles. The upgrades really showed on that game. I was just playing single-player, and did pretty much what I had wanted to do. It’s still installed, but I haven’t played it in a while.

Star Trek Online gets an ‘of course’ mark. I haven’t been playing it that much, besides when there’s a ship grind event going (like right now). But I figure I’ll stick with that game, even if I’m not actively playing it, until the end.

I’m not playing FFXIV right now. Haven’t really since the middle of August. But it’s still there, waiting for me to have specific reason to log in. I liked it, it just didn’t grab me by the throat like ESO did.

Once I feel the urge, Cities Skylines is coming back. That was one of the games that was an impetus to get me to upgrade in the first place: it sucks up all the rams, so I needed more. But I was stuck playing one game, then another, and soon I’d almost forgotten about it.

Same thing with Crusader Kings II. That’s a fun game to go through a for a few hours at a time, then forget about it for months.

I also figure ESO will stay on my computer. No reason not to at this point.