f13.net forums - Where is all the replay value dead?

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April 23, 2024, 08:37:55 PM

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In the heart or in the head?

Submitted by Paelos.

Game I replayed the most - Civ2. One of those rare games that I replayed over and over just because it was that damn fun.

Didn't get the replay value out of KotoR that I had hoped to. Its great that they managed to give you divergent endings, but so much of the middle game was basically the same, I just didn't have the patience to go through it all again. I think a better example of a replayable RPG is Morrowind. Partly because it was very free form and open ended, but also for another reason - modding.

I think you could easily add having an active modding community as another factor that makes a game replayable.

Replayable games-

<insert name of favorite online shooter here>
Civ Series
Pirates!
X-Com
Master of Magic
Sports games

Yeah, I didn't include modding because really that's not something you can get off the shelf, nor is it something that I consider to be the first run of a game. Once you start modding, I think it becomes a seperate entity based on the original, and really, I don't think modding actually adds value to the developers bottom line.

I was looking at this as a way to point out that a focus on replay features in a game will actually benefit both parties. The Civ series is an excellent game that I didn't mention. That is a great example of multiple options gameplay. If you can't play the same game twice because of random maps and building options, that's an excellent game. It tends to push you to the limits of trying to complete different objectives, and thus, forms a great experience.

The original KotOR's replayability suffered from the fact that at some point, you were given one binary choice, a choice which gave you so many light or dark side points depending on your choice that it was essentially an on/off switch. I forget which choice it was, but it was pretty obvious. I was leaning heavily dark side before making that choice and BLAMMO after making that choice, I had enough light-side points to wield light-side only weapons.

Modding sure as hell helped Valve's bottom line on HL 1. Had CS and DoD not been so popular, I'm sure HL1 would not have had nearly the shelf life that it did. Granted, it is the exception to the rule, but multiplayer modability, if it's easy enough for the developer to do well, can most certainly add both replay value and shelf life/profit.

But like you said, it has to be done well, and not half-assed in order to do so.

That's why I mentioned Morrowind when I brought up modding as, much like NWN, it actually came with the modding tools included in the game. Actively planning modding in to a game from the start like this can really add a boost to a game's replayability.

Quote from: Bunk on July 11, 2005, 12:30:16 PM

Considering the developers went out of their way to include world builders in those games, I would totally agree.

Quote from: HaemishM on July 11, 2005, 12:02:21 PM

That point was pretty late in the game. Right before the end level/battle.

Civilization 3
Online Poker
Battlefield Series

Battlefield is immense replayable because of the huge variety of roles that are playable as well as the unpredictability of a given skirmish.

There's a number of things for me that determine replay value.

1. Variety of gameplay within core game.

The ability to be able to play in a different style each time you pick it up is something that can get you to beat a game for the umpteenth time or go back to your old save game and hammer away until you've beat it in every possible fashion. A game that can accomodate itself to a steather, a Woo inspired pistoleer, or even perhaps Jessie Ventura from Predator is something that can keep you coming back for more. I think I've beat Deus Ex with at least 3 different types of characters that all made the game a different type of experience. Skill and skill tree character development aids in this as does having a contingent of non-combat related skills.

You can also see this a lot in sports games. Playing the as Vikings is a lot different than playing as the Ravens. Plus, the natural variances in what occurs in a game can help a lot.

Tactical squad games also have an innate advantge in this arena just because you're going to have certain characters that bring certain traits to your team and you can often vary which characters are in and who's not. Also these characters tend to have different and controllable development paths. You end up literally with a mathematical formula for varied gameplay experience.

Best examples: Deus Ex. Vampire: The Masquerade. Fable. WoW. Most turn-based tactical games: Jagged Alliance 2, Silent Storm, Final Fantasy: Tactics. Fallout series. Morrowind. NWN. Most sports titles.

2. Ethical and other choices changing the direction, outcome and perhaps even just overall mood and presentation.

Being the good guy and then being able to be the bastard and then having something more than just simple textual changes is truly something to behold. It's kind of pathetic that I just had to type that. This also directly ties in with a variety of gameplay. There needs to be several ways to skin the cat when you're making your way through a game. Do you sneak past the bad guy, do you stab him in the eye and then crap in the socket, or do you make polite conversation and then flash your fake ID and then just strut on by?

Also when you make a decision, it's just common sense that the game remembers that decision and has it affect the course of the game as well as the reputation of the character. If I chose to kill prisoner B instead of letting him go, make sure that affects who my character is and how he's reacted to in the future. Make my companions care, make them remember it. If the bounty hunters won't interact with me because I've been a boyscout, make sure they embrace me in open arms the next time I play through as a complete bastard.

Best examples: Fallout series. Deus Ex. KoToR. Fable. Vampire: The Masquerade. Morrowind. Planetscape: Torment.

3. Short completion time.

Heh, this is just the practical time starved gamer to me. I'm more likely to replay something if I know I can spend less than a month doing it. It's fun to go back and do everything you missed, be evil, or try that alternate ending if you know the game won't take 50+ hours to accomplish this. Of course, I leveled my alt to 60 in WoW, and have replayed such time monsters as BG2 multiple times, so, perhaps I'm just full of shit on this one.

Best examples: KoToR (for an RPG). Fable. Max Payne series. Deus Ex.

Extras, would be another but that's already been discussed in here. A variety of sidequests for an RPG would fall under here. I'm not much of a completist though, I won't max out any RPG character just to the level 99 on the character screen.

Heh, from this a game like Fable would seem like the penultimate replayable joy. However, the game itself has to be incredibly solid and engaging for the above to mean anything. Fable as a game itself is enjoyable but lackluster and you can somewhat tell how the game could be different and interesting if played in "x" manner. But, the possibility of an enjoyable replay is there. Games that tend to fall victim to this would be Morrowind (the main plot just sucks) and to an extent Vampire:TM (the combat and bugs are somewhat shitty).

Another giant detriment to a game's replayability is the ending. A shitty ending will make you reconsidering playing a game again no matter how amazing the ride was. Playing KoToR 2 was like having sex then having your dick hit with a mallet when it came to climax time. Knowing you're just going to get hit with the mallet again makes repeating the process something to avoid. Same issue came up with the game Silent Storm. Game was fantastic and just everything I wanted in a tatical squad based game and then HELLO GIANT ROBOTS. Giant robots busting into WW2 game. God damnit.

The two games that are most commonly in my rotation: Deus Ex and Morrowind. Both games can just be played so differently from one session to the next. What's funny enough is that each game has one aspect that the other doesn't that eventually keeps me from playing them perpetually. Deus Ex, despite the variety in gameplay is pretty much on rails. Morrowind on the other hand is amazing in it's freedom to do whatever the hell you want, but it just doesn't deliver a compelling main story.

/ramble

I would just like to throw FFT into the ring. I've replayed that game more times than I can count.

Probably the game series I have replayed more than any other is Fallout 1&2. You can make the pistoleer, then the brawler,the the charisma guy, etc. It's also one of those games where the ending is totally dependent on you and I can't tell you how many times I've played it and been like "Damn, I forgot to save that city. Oh well, next time."

I find sports games to have very little replay value for me. At some point I eventually learn how to win consistently and then get bored. Usually it is RPGs and RPG-like shooters that have the most reply value for me. I replayed RE4 3 times I think trying to get the badass weapons in it.

So what do you guys like the most as far as these factors that make a game replayable? For me it'd be ranked like the following.

1) Variety in gameplay. Like in Fallout, I can make totally different characters and handle things much differently.
2) Different endings. I'm a whore for getting the "best" ending.
3) Unlockables. Most of the time unlockables seem to be some nigh impossible minigame or some item that makes the main game trivial. Though I did get addicted to unlockables in MGS2 and RE4.

The only games that I've really replayed to death in the past decade or so are Max Payne and Vampire: Bloodlines. In both cases it was partly because they were immensely enjoyable and partly because the experience was different each time. You might not think that about Max Payne, but combat actually changes drastically as the skill level goes higher - cheap tricks that work on easy mode will get you killed on hard mode, so you have to find new tricks. And Vampire, of course, had its seven clans, five endings, and numerous combinations of skills to play with, which keeps the game fairly fresh.

Kinda sad that so few single-player games have that sort of longevity.

I'd point out that replay value is really a bad thing for the industry, in the short term. Give me a game that is fun to play again and again, and I won't buy another one.

Long term, I think that logic will cut the industry's throat, but I'm a dreamer. It is hard not to notice that the throttle on the gamers consumption of product is much more time than money, and hard to argue that we need to create fewer games to make the industry grow. So what is the argument you give to marketing and management to convince them that replayability is a desirable element in a game?

Because there's competition in the game industry. Suppose that company 1 creates one really good game, Game A, and company 2 creates three half-assed games, B, C, and D, figuring they'll get 3x the sales for the same amount of work. If I want to buy one game this month and I hear from my friend that game A is so fun that he's played it three times, and games B, C, and D were kinda fun once but are now collecting dust, guess which game I'm gonna buy? That'd be game A. Company 1 gets one sale, company 2 gets zero.

Mind you, people with short attention spans and/or lots of money to spend might well buy B, C, and D as well, but even they will probably pick up A first.

Exactly, it's all about beating out the competitors with a quality product first. Most likely your company isn't pushing out a game a month, so someone playing your game for the four months while you're making the next is alright for the bottom line. Plus, with replay value, you enter into secondary markets. Your games get longer shelf life and therefore more dollars. It's a quality over quantity approach to revenue generation.

It's a shame that it's not the only approach.

But the developers aren't selling games to us, they are selling them to publishers. And publishers do have games coming out every month. Moreover, the publisher isn't selling their name, and generally not the developer's name either. They are most likely selling the license name. Mainstream marketing is all about turning over the titles. This approach devalues quality and replayability. Which is ultimately a bad thing, but that is a problem for next year's board meeting.

More like that is a problem for the next CEO, once I've cashed out my CEO stock options and taken my severance package. The corporate-provided Golden Fucking Parachute goes a long way to explaining the myopic view of some of these cockmunchers.

See, to me, publishers should want every game to be fucking fantastic, they should want every game to ooze quality. But they don't. They just want every game to hit its target street date so they can balance ledger sheets properly. And then they get all confused when selling shit time after time leads to unexpected losses as opposed to decent profits.

I'm not a big replay value guy, because I've usually moved onto another game by the time I've finished a game. The most replay I get out of something is either from sports games, which are meant to be replayed (and as a consequence, happen to be some of the biggest selling console titles ever) or in limited quantities, such as when I replayed the endings of Deus Ex or Vampire: Bloodlines making each of the final 3 choices I was given at the climax just to see what the endings were like. I think emergent gameplay, such as in the original Deus Ex, really is the holy grail of development. Allowing the player to play HIS way through most of the game, allowing choices? That's the sweet spot.

Quote from: Evangolis on July 11, 2005, 06:07:17 PM

I'd point out that replay value is really a bad thing for the industry, in the short term. Give me a game that is fun to play again and again, and I won't buy another one.
... So what is the argument you give to marketing and management to convince them that replayability is a desirable element in a game?

Not to derail this thread totally, but I think "replayability' should be a goal for subscription game services moreso than single player games. After all, subscription games need to keep people paying per month to play, thus they (ideally) need to have enough hooks to get people still playing, week after week, month after month.

Replayability in single player games pretty much means playing a new game once you have completed it, either the same way or with differences like the aforementioned plot choices, multiplayer, and mods. MMORPG don't traditionally HAVE a "game over" state, yet they more than any other title NEED people playing for long periods of time.

For them, I think replayability is not "start a new character". While thats part of it, i think the greater focus on replayability should be the day to day reasons of why people want to logon and what the do; that is, what are the mini-games imbedded in the world and do they have long term replayability?

Puzzle games can have lots of replayability individually, so a game like puzzle pirates seems to have a lot of built in replayability from it's embedded games. PVE combat games, not so much. If combat really is no different from mob to mob, you basically have a very simple puzzle game; im class X with skill Y so I need to do the following steps in order and hope the RNG doesn't screw me. The replayability for typical PVE combat seems more about the playing the slot machine loot generator game.

You know, broken down to it's base components, it's amazing how much the mini-games in mmorpgs stink. The Social hooks of combat, crafting et all are the only hook these things have over single player games, but if the trend continues towards more casual friendly subscription games, the embedded mini-games better start improving too. Unless you're Sigil of course.

Xilren

Quote from: Riggswolfe on July 11, 2005, 05:59:16 PM

Probably the game series I have replayed more than any other is Fallout 1&2. You can make the pistoleer, then the brawler,the the charisma guy, etc.

The S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system is awesome.

What about games that're fun to replay BECAUSE they're buggy?

I'd say that this guy properly maximizes the fun of the games he plays. I found myself enjoying Deus Ex 1 and 2, Thief 3, etc. a lot more after I started playing them with the goal of breaking the game in the worst ways possible.

I do see the need of online games for replayability as one way out of the publisher trap, by putting SP games into a quality competition, instead of the publicity competition they are now in.

So, yeah, I am hoping that MMOs will improve the quality of games. Be more optomistic than that. I dare you. :-D