Are modern games becoming less replayable ?

[Stark]

Oh yeah, that was my point - I can't stand BG, but it's way more flexible than ME (which essentially has no real flexibility at all).

[Dooey Jo]

That' what Cov just said, smart guy.

He seemed to say that you needed to beat and replay the whole game for it to count (its endpoint, not your own endpoint).

[wautd]

Meh, that is why RTS is no fun as competitive multiplayer - or at least no RTS I've found yet.

Promode, otoh, is for the bad player about reaction times, movement, and aim, and for the skilled player about teamplay, strategy and really quick thinking when things don't go your way. (I don't play anymore, takes too much time. Somewhere I decided practicing for gaming was not my cup of java.)

Strategy games that are computerized board games, such as Flashpoint Germany which I play sometimes when I find a PBEM opponent, has the replayability of a board game.

I realize I'm probably not interested in what most people call replayability at all; I can count the number of SP campaings I've played through twice on my right-hand fingers - KOTOR (twice), Quake (numerous), SMAX (if it counts as a campaign), Railroad Tycoon 3 (ditto). Most games with a campaign, I get bored with the gameplay and quit before I finish, or cheat if the story is interesting enough.

Try the total war series, where morale, height and other advantages are taken into the equation.

Then try a team based battle if you want, the team dynamic makes the game very very fun.

For another RTS game that delivers a good multiplayer experience, Company of Heroes still manages to get my attention. One of the few good RTS games I can remember in a long time. Vastly different yet well balanced factions, maps with plenty of variation and detail and an original game setup. Also one of the few where the spam unit type X-"strategy" simply doesn't work. Sure, there are some standard tactics and opening moves for each map, but for every move, there's at least one countermove.
Many times I've had a match where I managed to win after all seemed lost just a few minutes earlier. (or vice versa, fucking up a certain victory so it becomes a hummiliating defeat). I guess that's what's making it replayable for me: anything can happen untill the game is over

I also like the way how they force the player to be aggressive (victory points, map control for income) but at the same time he has to stay aware that he doesn't overextends his forces.
Making early base-rushing impossible is a plus in my book as well.

And as a cherry on the cake, the graphics and sound makes the game ooze in atmosphere

[Stark]

Yeah, multi replayability is totally what we're talking about here. Picking CoH out for turnabout in multi is absurd when WiC exists, similarly, saying CoH looks good when WiC is still the best looking RTS in existence a year after it came out provides me with a lot of humour. If you're exclusively playing games where single-unit spam works, you're playing BROKEN GAMES.

I hear base rushing was solved as a problem in the 90s? Whoops RTS genre is laughably conservative, solution ignored. lol!

[wautd]

Yeah, multi replayability is totally what we're talking about here. Picking CoH out for turnabout in multi is absurd when WiC exists, similarly, saying CoH looks good when WiC is still the best looking RTS in existence a year after it came out provides me with a lot of humour. If you're exclusively playing games where single-unit spam works, you're playing BROKEN GAMES.

I dissed WiC... where exactly? It's an awesome RTS game. I just never played it properly on multi so I left it out.
I still prefer CoH over WiC but that's totally subjective. More variation between the units and factions imo

I hear base rushing was solved as a problem in the 90s?

Tell that to the makers of C&C 3

[Vendetta]

Tell that to the makers of C&C 3

C&C has never been about innovative or interesting mechanics, it's always been about gimmicky units and special weapons.

[Covenant]

That' what Cov just said, smart guy.

He seemed to say that you needed to beat and replay the whole game for it to count (its endpoint, not your own endpoint).

The logical endpoint could be somewhere besides the end of the game, but I was trying to draw a distinction between games that people replay parts of because they want to, and games that people replay parts of because they just want to win. A game is not replayable just because you continue to replay it after it kills you. This is a subjective versus objective thing--objective replay value refers to the amount of stuff there's still left to do after a single playthrough. If the experience is exactly the same the second or third or fourth time, it has low replay value--but you could still subjectively enjoy that experience.

But when so much of the game's content and budget and play experience is tied up in linear non-gameplay events like storyline, cutscenes, etc, it's hard not to argue that more of a modern game is spent watching the game than playing the game, and that games tend to be shorter, and more obvious, so it's certainly fair to rate them somewhat lower. All things being equal, a game with more and denser gameplay as opposed to less and more spread out gameplay will be more replayable. A game with branching options or endgame replay rewards as opposed to a linear, no replay reward system will be more replayable too.

A lot of replay value comes from the opening up of new areas after you beat the game, or a New Game Plus option where you start with your old gear, or unlocking new characters on the second playthough--or combinations of the above that allow you to access alternate storylines, play styles, and so forth. So in many cases the "logical end point" is at the end, since that's where your reward is. But if it's a schmup or something else, and the logical end point is just whenever you feel satisfied and want to quit, then it can be elsewhere too. How many books really have re-read value? But many people re-read them anyway. We shouldn't ever look down on a game because it has low replay value, but we shouldn't arbitrarily inflate it's replay value score just to justify the fact that we enjoy playing the exact same game again.

[Stark]

I dissed WiC... where exactly? It's an awesome RTS game. I just never played it properly on multi so I left it out.
I still prefer CoH over WiC but that's totally subjective. More variation between the units and factions imo

Yeah, because that's what I said, Mr Too Stupid To Use The English Language Properly. You showed up in a thread to post irrelevant WOW COH RULEZ stuff, with examples that aren't CoH-specific. It turns out similar concepts occur all over the place! I know you ignored my points but I'm not sure how your fannishness is relevant to a discussion on replayability.

Tell that to the makers of C&C 3

Can I do you a good deal on fucking full stops while I'm there? My whole fucking point was that the RTS genre is conservative and ignores solutions to gameplay issues - your hint was that I used the word 'conservative' and 'ignored' right there.

[CaptHawkeye]

Tell that to the makers of C&C 3

Are their seriously people in the world who think Red Alert 3 does anything paticularly new? Oh look, you can put bases in the water to protect them from zerging. Except it doesn't protect them from zerging, because you can just tech-spam and group horde naval units now.

You hear that? Not only do the developers blatently repackage the gameplay every time, but they even flaunt that in front of your face! How quaint! It's like some kind of joke.

Why am I even surprised? Their are people out there who really think Dawn of War 2's tactical aid is a totally new gameplay mechanic we've never seen before.

[Vendetta]

[
Are their seriously people in the world who think Red Alert 3 does anything paticularly new? Oh look, you can put bases in the water to protect them from zerging. Except it doesn't protect them from zerging, because you can just tech-spam and group horde naval units now.

You could build bases almost completely in the water in Total Annihilation. So, y'know, that's not very new either.

[Stark]

Hell, TRIPLE layer RTSs aren't new.

It's a shame games aren't more dynamic these days - many games (particularly RPGs) are just a primitive stat system glued onto a story - once you're either bored of the story or have 'cracked' the stat system, it's almost impossible to play again. Other games, which use different draws, can last much longer than their general quality suggests, simply by being more complex to fully understand.

[Eleas]

Hell, TRIPLE layer RTSs aren't new.

It's a shame games aren't more dynamic these days - many games (particularly RPGs) are just a primitive stat system glued onto a story - once you're either bored of the story or have 'cracked' the stat system, it's almost impossible to play again. Other games, which use different draws, can last much longer than their general quality suggests, simply by being more complex to fully understand.

Personally, as an RPG affectionado, I abhor complex systems, because they tend to be the easiest ones to break and simultaneously the most inflexible to design around. The challenge is to create simple systems able to generate complex outcomes and interesting challenges.

F'rinstance, look at how many games represent wounds. They use hit points. Hit points, for fuck's sake, when they could simply have a number between, say, 1 and 6 and map each number to a different effect. Simpler, cleaner, and infinitely more dynamic. Of course, if they did do it that way, we couldn't have enemies slowly being ground down by cumulative hosings of machine gun fire. That would be such a shame.

Or, to take a perhaps more pertinent example, we have the classic Atari 2600 game Adventure. By necessity, its elements operated under what we today would call trivially simple rules. These rules, however, still gave rise to unpredictable and amusing behaviour, such as bats absconding with other monsters, simply because they "felt" it was a good idea at the time and had no rule against it.

That's what's needed, I feel; game designers who stop and think 'hey, why not mix together a few simple rules and see what happens?', rather than vain attempts at modelling the synapses of an alien creature.

[Covenant]

It's the general worthlessness of game design procedure. I've actually got a few game Design Documents rattling around, as I've submited them previously and gotten some mixed feedback, but it basically is just a wash. It's like in Extras when Patrick Stewart was talking to Ricky Gervais about a script he wants to write, and Stewart keeps adding in more sex and nudity before he gets interested. If your boss is all like "I want to make a cool shooter game," and you're like "Well, how about we go with something really atmospheric, where characters use a lot of grabbed objects to combine things together and create their weapons instead..." and he goes "Yeah! Like we'll give them dispensers at checkpoints inbetween the alien braincrab spawn points. We can make them buy lives there! It's so original."

And you go "Actually, what I was thinking was we'd encourage players to investigate their environments scrounging for parts to make their guns, repair their gear, and so forth--not as a dispenser but more like Garry's Mod, with a few hand tools, and slowly create a sort of hand-cobbled set of stuff that makes players really focus on the environs, which allows the atmospheric element I mentioned earlier to get into their head, and then we can scare them. We could use the physics engines to let us do stuff like create machines that 'welded' together but smashable, or let players weld metal panels over windows and doors to stop monsters."

"Yes," the director says, "With undead corpse monsters. That... oh! You need to shoot them apart! That's so clever. Not at all like mechwarrior--since mechwarrior had robots, not corpse-crab-monsters! But all that makey-buildy stuff is confusing! And it would make it hard to place the monster closets." The director makes a face. "Let's just give them workbenches where they throw their collected tokens in and it makes something. We'll call it... Dead Space."

And a little idea dies in the womb somewhere. As the saying goes, companies like reinvention not innovation. First of all, trying to get the guy in charge to agree with you is difficult. Believe it or not, most game company people are extremely narrow-focused in what they personally like, and are a bit immature about what they like to work on, and this infects the people at the top too. No suprise, I'm sure. But worse is trying to get a publisher to pick up a wierd idea, since they don't know how to market it. Check out BioShock's story for that--they wanted to make SS2 over again, really, but didn't know how to market it. So they called it an action-packed Shooter and got their funds. It's hard to blame the entire system, especially when there's occasionally a good idea that gets out, but it is extremely frustrating. Some of us really wish we could make better games. But unless you've got a few million lying around, I'm stuck making whatever people let me.

[BountyHunterSAx]

The challenge is to create simple systems able to generate complex outcomes and interesting challenges. *SNIP*

If I understand you right, all these games fit that criterion:

The strategy card-game / computerized trading card game genre

More specifically: Magic the Gathering (Shandalar) [[Can find it on the Home of the Underdogs webpage]]
Megaman Battle Network 3 Blue/White (GBA)


Action/Platformer
N (the ninja game) [[Freely available online]]
Lode Runner [[Home of the Underdogs is your friend]]


-AHMAD

[Eleas]

If I understand you right, all these games fit that criterion:
<snip>

I suppose. Being a poor excuse for a gamer, I've played none of those games. But it is a fact that game developers now (no doubt driven by the mechanisms that Covenant described above) substitute physics tricks and scripting for that sort of simple emergent behaviour. There are differences, but I think even Thief might have benefited from a bit more simplicity of modeling.

The most obvious example I've found is the growing trend among independent P&P role playing games, in which a few generic mechanisms are used to model a wide variety of occasions. FORGE - based games are cases in point.

[salm]

snip

That´s the reason why you often read of people who had well paying jobs in large game development companies going back to being indy developers. They don´t have to develope the same indifferent crap the publishers want them to.
Hopefully the whole indy thing gains momentum with things like marketing via the internet on platforms similar to Steam or Apples App Store. Or even by inovative marketing concepts similar to what the guys working on Mount&Blade do.

[Covenant]

snip

That´s the reason why you often read of people who had well paying jobs in large game development companies going back to being indy developers. They don´t have to develope the same indifferent crap the publishers want them to.
Hopefully the whole indy thing gains momentum with things like marketing via the internet on platforms similar to Steam or Apples App Store. Or even by inovative marketing concepts similar to what the guys working on Mount&Blade do.

I definately agree. It's pretty hard to get a job anywhere without "AAA titles" under your belt though, so good fucking luck helping to get any new ideas in there anytime soon. They're looking for the type of person that H.R. screens out before they get a chance to pitch an idea.

[Stark]

Personally, as an RPG affectionado, I abhor complex systems, because they tend to be the easiest ones to break and simultaneously the most inflexible to design around. The challenge is to create simple systems able to generate complex outcomes and interesting challenges.

I just wanted to totally agree with this. A great many games in many genres add poorly thought-out complexity which achieves nothing but introducing far more 'break points' or best paths through the system, which actually reduces the system's usefulness. There is definately a sweet spot between 'roll thac0 to hit' and 'super complex graphs and ratios that nobody playtested and that are riddled with critical points that will appear on game faqs and ruin the game'. I was actually talking about complex game systems, not so much combat systems etc - in particular thinking of games like Space Rangers, where the dynamic universe is driven by a few simple elements reacting against each other, with a bit of randomness (never know when the coalition will launch a poorly-thought out assault lol) that means you get what appear to be 'complex' results from it.

[Eleas]

I just wanted to totally agree with this. A great many games in many genres add poorly thought-out complexity which achieves nothing but introducing far more 'break points' or best paths through the system, which actually reduces the system's usefulness. There is definately a sweet spot between 'roll thac0 to hit' and 'super complex graphs and ratios that nobody playtested and that are riddled with critical points that will appear on game faqs and ruin the game'. I was actually talking about complex game systems, not so much combat systems etc - in particular thinking of games like Space Rangers, where the dynamic universe is driven by a few simple elements reacting against each other, with a bit of randomness (never know when the coalition will launch a poorly-thought out assault lol) that means you get what appear to be 'complex' results from it.

Oh, allright.

Btw, are you feeling allright, Stark? No insults, no vitriol... your post seemed almost... nice. This is unsettling; please stop immediately, the suspense is killing me.

[Darth Wong]

I always thought the original MOO2 was endlessly replayable, until I had given it a rest for several years and then installed it again for fun. I tried playing it, and realized that the state of the art had left it so far behind that I couldn't really enjoy it any more. There were newer games that offered its benefits without its limitations.

Personally, I think really long-term replayability is just not feasible, unless nostalgia is really important for you.

[Stark]

MoO2 is an interesting example, because for me there was a lot of nostalgia about the game, but once you spot or hear about the broken parts of the mechanics, it's really hard to take the game seriously as a challenge or unpredictable piece of entertainment. I actually prefer the first one, but in the same way it's basically unplayable due to age.

[Covenant]

MoOII has the same kind of replay value as a Civ game. I wouldn't say there's much you haven't seen of it if you play it once comprehensibly, but if you enjoy the ride then it's fun enough. There's no plodding story or other bullshit to get in the way. There's the Antarans, Orion, and a tech tree, and that's it. The strategic depth, unrelated to replay value, is a little lacking though, especially if you choose to make the best possible choices available and create nearly unstoppable death machine spaceships. That it's tech tree and ship customization options haven't been surpassed long, long ago is to Microprose's credit and to the great embarassment of everyone else. It's not like MoOIII was even passably decent.

The big replay value comes, I suppose, from playing different species on the various run throughs. Beyond that I think it's merely a good game, one that a lot of people enjoy playing several times. I've played Star Wars: Rebellion a lot more than MoOII though, and Rebellion is not a very good game. Interestingly high replay value though, since so many aspects of the game's major twists are random. I tend to remove a bit of that by assassinating as many character as possible though. Nothing beats having Vader and Darth Needa (I always wanted Piett to be force sensitive and the game always chose damnable Needa instead) go and kill Admiral Ackbar before he can invent the B-Wing. Well, except, maybe good gameplay.

[The Romulan Republic]

I've played Star Wars: Rebellion a lot more than MoOII though, and Rebellion is not a very good game. Interestingly high replay value though, since so many aspects of the game's major twists are random. I tend to remove a bit of that by assassinating as many character as possible though. Nothing beats having Vader and Darth Needa (I always wanted Piett to be force sensitive and the game always chose damnable Needa instead) go and kill Admiral Ackbar before he can invent the B-Wing. Well, except, maybe good gameplay.

I would think randomness certainly helps with replayabillity. After all, the more randomness, the less you'll be doing the same things over and over.

Can't think of many games (any really) that have much randomness, however. The closest I can think of that I've played is a free game called Battle for Wesnoth, due mainly to the role luck plays in battles. Actually, thinking of Wesnoth reminds me of another aid to improving replayabillity, which is branching story lines with multiple endings.

[wautd]

I've played Star Wars: Rebellion a lot more than MoOII though, and Rebellion is not a very good game. Interestingly high replay value though, since so many aspects of the game's major twists are random. I tend to remove a bit of that by assassinating as many character as possible though. Nothing beats having Vader and Darth Needa (I always wanted Piett to be force sensitive and the game always chose damnable Needa instead) go and kill Admiral Ackbar before he can invent the B-Wing. Well, except, maybe good gameplay.

I would think randomness certainly helps with replayabillity. After all, the more randomness, the less you'll be doing the same things over and over.

Can't think of many games (any really) that have much randomness, however.

Hearts of Iron did a good job in randomness as well. Probably the main reason why I picked it up every few months.

I guess that strategy games in general (Total War, MoO, Hoi2, X-Com, Syndicate...) have a good replay value overall because of their greater dept (combination of strategic with tactical level and/or including economy, diplomacy & research which a real time strategy game lacks).
With regards to shooters, the only games I can think of that I've finished more than once were the ones that brought something that was never seen on the market before (Half Life single player was uncontested for a long time, Max Payne gave us bullet time but maybe more important, an excellent atmosphere thanks to the music and the way the story was told).


Racing games have probably the lowest replay value by far (can't think of any that I've finished it, let alone replayed it).



PS. With regards to sandbox games, the game that I've replayed the most was Transport Tycoon (over the years I've seen some clones coming out but they never came close to the original in gameplay.)

PPS. Perhaps you could say that the games that find a new niche are replayed the most. I never replayed a RTS single player campaign, except for Dune 2 simply because for a long time there was no decent alternative for it.

[Eleas]

(Half Life single player was uncontested for a long time,

I suspect I'm in a clear minority here, but I never found Half-Life 1 compelling, for much the same reason as have been mentioned earlier in this thread. Scratch a bit on the surface, and it was evident the "randomness" wasn't - it was all scripting tricks. In an example I mentioned earlier, imagine if it were possible to save one of these hanging scientists before he plummets to his doom... oops, the instant you come within five meters of him, he falls! What a coincidence!