I've burnt out on this game several times over the last three years. What I've found helpful is to create a list of games in different categories: "actively playing", "unfinished", "continuous games", "purchased/downloaded", then a couple of wishlist sections from "out now" to "upcoming" in date order.
I put ED in the "continuous games" category alongside other games that don't really have an end or a "completed" state, like Mario Kart, Smash Bros, Animal Crossing, retro-game collections etc...
I find categorising games in different ways helps me mentally compartmentalise them. It means I can happily go ahead and "actively" play many other games, even going months at a time between sessions on Elite, and never feel like I've actually stopped playing it. Perhaps that's because Elite is the only game of its type (online, open ended, sandbox, MMO-ish etc...) that I play. So, I can just as easily go "I feel like making some more progress on Doom Eternal for the next few evenings" and then in between say "I feel like doing a bit of combat in Elite, or checking out XYZ system" and it doesn't feel weird at all.
Of course, in the early days of me playing Elite, it was the only game I'd play, and that would be almost every day. But when the burnouts started, I felt like I needed to come up with a strategy to both stop me from dropping the game altogether, and allow me to hopefully continue playing it right up until the end of its development. Consequently, I racked up many hours in the game early on, but my total now isn't that much more than it was back then - might have been about 1200hrs in the first few years, and latterly I'm just creeping towards the 2000hr mark.
But fair play to you OP, gotta do what you gotta do to keep from totally losing interest.
), i can wait for it if it turns out good.
