NTSC-RePlay 002: Longevity vs Replayability

[Neon Ignition]

Our second call back is to a discussion from 2003 about the value of game longevity pitted against replayability. Near two decades on we see games such as new Assassin's Creed entries release that offer countless hours of sprawling open world gameplay as a means of providing value for money in the face of £50, £60 or even £70 new game price points. It can lead to success but also derision with many also calling such games out for being hollow, tick box exercises.

The original discussion centred on why games felt the need to present reasons for players to re-experience the same title when other media such as Albums, Films etc don't, you simply return to it because you enjoyed the experience. That, in light of 20 years progression, is what we'll be looking at as we move from:

NTSC-UK... to NTSC-RePlay

It was 13 March 2003 when TheShend put this subject forward. We've since then swung through the era's of MMO's, hundred hour JRPG's, online multiplayer titles and the era of bloatedly animated Rockstar juggernauts. We're now seeing a resurgence of single player experiences however your typical 6-8 hour linear adventure is still somewhat a dirty term. Hits like Ghost of Tsushima or Gears 5 still aim to qualify themselves by leaning into either open or multiplayer components. This comes largely also due to MTX but also a lack of faith, despite bloating budgets, from developers that making a linear reasonable length title will inherently see players replay them and turn up to buy a sequel too.

Are a million side quests, a largely barren open world or a mandatory multiplayer component really a necessity for modern titles?
Or has replayability been handled wrong these recent years?

[Neon Ignition]

I do think there's something to the argument that games get replayability wrong these days when it comes to single player titles. It's not to dismiss getting value for money but for the most part when I think about the games I return to from across the various software generations it tends to be titles that I not only enjoyed the most but were also digestible. I return to them because they're fun but I don't 100% them every time, they're familiar experiences I go back to and cane every now and again. It can be galling, the idea of spending upward of £70 on a 6-8 hour game, but that length does seem to be the sweetest spot in terms of delivering an experience that is fun, doesn't outstay its welcome and I'm likely to return to.

By comparison, the second AC bloated itself even more by aping Witcher it lost me completely and I'd stuck with it up until that point. They're now huge sprawling adventures but I find them to be soulless husk titles that I'll never go through let alone replay rendering all that game length redundant.

[charlesr]

Genre dependent?
Forza Horizon, great single player experience. Super fun online too for extended play.
Battlefield - forgettable single player (fun at the time, but you'd never go back), but exists mostly for online play.
Gears of War 5 lost me on the single player - just played too much of 1-4 already for it to feel in any way new and the multiplayer doesn't save it at all.

[QualityChimp]

This is something I really struggle with.

On one hand, I absolutely relish games with a massive world to explore.
Finding all the comedy places in GTAV, exploring the wilderness and peculiar locations in RDR2, unfogging the map in Fallout 4 and venturing to places I probably shouldn't be at a lower lever.

However, last month I loved zipping through Resident Evil 2.
I didn't rush, but got through the first playthrough within a week and it was lovely to play something so streamlined.

I'd like to play The Order: 1886 because it's a polished, but brisk experience.

I think the issue is they don't seem as good value as longer games, so it's not right to charge full price for them?

Personally, I really enjoyed Spider-Man, but boy was that bloated with pigeon-catching missions to the point where I nearly gave up.

I could happily replay EDF forever and something like WWZ had the perfect levelling loop.

Ultimately, I guess us gamers are pretty hard to placate, no matter what size the game is!

[wakka]

Most modern games that I've played don't really feel built for replaying. They're more likely to be padded out for the first runthrough with lots and lots of things to do (of varying quality and interest).

Personally, I hardly ever replay stuff. I like the idea of it, I get 20% in, then I lose interest because I've seen it before. The exceptions are generally games of extraordinary quality and manageable durations that I haven't played for many years.

[chopemon]

I think most forms of media over the years have got into a vicious cycle of always pushing people to the next thing. That's either on a high level like each new """must see""" on Netflix or a map full of objectives in an Ubi game. The mass market has been conditioned to always be moving on to the next thing and replaying anything is for freaks.

It is also a factor of people wanting games to have such high production values that games need to have lots of repetitive content in them to value for money and time spent on them during dev. Games like Resident Evil 2 are the outliers now. AAA games that look phenomenal but are mostly linear short single player experiences with replayable modes. Even Naughty Dog games are bloated now because the content was so expensive to make, the Last of Us 2 has to be 20-30 hours long to get the most out of it.

Games also cost so much to develop now that they often need ways of getting more money from the player with IAPs. People think that they are just devs being greedy and that is definitely true in some cases, in others IAPs are needed to sustain the cost of development. Forza Horizon whatever the new one is (genuinely can't remember what number we're on) looks mind blowingly good. That comes at a huge cost and that budget needs to come from somewhere.

I really enjoyed the way companies tried to shoehorn in multiplayer modes to single player games in the PS360 era. The Dead Space 2 multiplayer was fantastic fun and had great ideas. The AC Brotherhood MP was amazing. But now those kinds of MP modes are too expensive to develop and the audience seems to have a very small number of MP games they always return to so anything developed would have a shot shelf life. By which I mean that players will play the latest AAA game on the nights that they're not playing Warzone or Fortnite. The big MP games are so ridiculously feature and content rich that a multiplayer mode in something like Horizon can't hope to compete without doubling the game's budget and even if they did, the audience would abandon it really quickly.

Even in the indie space the audience is transient; playing the latest zeitgeist game and moving on. Some games like Dead Cells weave replayability and extended life into their design but people still go bonkers when an indie dev dares to charge anything approaching £40 for their game.

EDF is a great example of a game that is replayable for hundreds of hours because it is all systems based. There're no cutscenes or complex scripted sequences. It is just an overwhelming variety of guns shooting enemies that don't need scripting to react to the player. It is something of an endangered species though. Third person shooters nowadays are always pushing the player to the next inane micro objective or trite story sequence that players are not encouraged to master gameplay systems. Players are often encouraged to only engage with systems lightly either because the systems are so simple (killing almost blind enemies from bushes in prestige games) or because an upgrade tree nullifies any required mastery (Saints Row 3 onwards). In games that require no mastery, there is no scope for replayability and players have been taught not to bother replaying anything so these games just become mushes of micro objectives, menus begging for MTX and simplistic interactions.

So, I'd prefer games to be more like Resi 2 and EDF but I don't see a future for those games. I hope in the future my company can make a 10 hour survival horror and I'm thinking of ways to exploit the work involved in making that to create ways that players can replay it for many more hours if they want to master the mechanics in it. I'd also like games to look less good, cost less to make, be more daring and be tighter experiences, Like, have you seen how good MGS2 looks on a PS2? Imagine if the mainstream were satisfied with that level of production value and devs could focus on gameplay detail rather than unnecessarily accurate cloth physics.

[wakka]

Great 'inside baseball' insights as usual.

So true about Resi 2. That is a game that is masterfully designed for replay. On the remake, I beat one scenario, then leapt into the second and beat that, then jumped into trying to speed run it (not very skillfully, but still). That almost never, ever happens with me with games. But that game is so much FUN. And it's built for that type of gameplay. All killer, no filler. Not really a commercially viable approach at the AAA level now.