Replayability in Games: What The Hell Happened?
I remember a time when every game I owned could be replayed and enjoyed countless times. Each game had at least some semblance of replay value. I lost this feeling around the end of the 16-bit era. Now when I look at my games collection trying to find something to play, the choices are few and far between. Do games really have less replayability? Or have I just become jaded over the years?
More and more recently I find myself playing a very select few games. Most of them are games I’ve enjoyed playing for years on end; games that have been around since the NES and Mega Drive. I can look at my current-gen games collection and count on one hand the games that I could possibly want to replay, most of them are FPSs. I’m not really an FPS nut or anything but Halo, CoD, and Left 4 Dead are probably the only games I pick up on a regular basis, with a little bit of Street Fighter thrown in now and again to fulfil my face punching quota. It isn’t that I don’t like the other games I own, I’m just bored of them. It seems like today’s games I enjoy once, but beyond that they become tedious. Even so-called open world games bore me. I barely finished GTA IV and I pretty much gave up on Crackdown after I finished the story and got all of the agility orbs.
I found myself wondering if I was just seeing my past gaming experiences through rose tinted glasses, so I plugged in the Mega-Drive and gave a few of my old favourites (Sonic, Street Fighter 2, Gauntlet 4, Ecco, etc) a whirl. I played for a disgusting amount of time without realising and before I knew it the sun was coming up, so I headed to bed, ready to reconvene the following morning. Upon waking up I actually had a massive urge to play again, so I sat back down with Chaos Engine (Soldiers of Fortune to you Americans). I played through the same 5 or so levels I had managed to get through the previous night yet enjoyed them no less. I tentatively wrote down the password for the furthest point I reached and moved onto Altered Beast, the greatest game ever released on any system, ever. Anyone who disagrees, I apologise but you were obviously dropped on your head repeatedly as a child. Ignoring my obvious bias towards this particular game I sat there played it over and over until I beat it, followed by another playthrough because those damn penis-ants are hilarious.
After sitting down and trying to figure out what made all of these different games replayable, I came to two possible conclusions. Either I’ve been playing games for such an amount of time now that my attention span is more fleeting than a child with ADD on crack, or there has to be something in common between these games that makes them replayable. Suddenly it hit me. Obviously I do have less patience for bad games compared to when I was a kid, but there is one thing that connects all these replayable games. Their simplicity. Simple games are replayable games. Simplicity is obviously not the only contributor but I do think that it is the main one. If you have two games that you enjoy equal amounts on first playthrough I would bet money that the simpler of the two has more replay value.
Simple games often have shorter story or main game modes in comparison to complex games. As an example Altered Beast takes about 2-4 hours to complete depending on if you’re as awesome as me or not. However, a game like Mass Effect can easily take upwards of 20 hours on a single run through. Maybe I just want to get the same amount of gameplay out of each game. Perhaps my brain subconsciously tells me to play the shorter, less complex ones again and ignores those that I feel I’ve got enough out of. Beyond this I also think that simpler games are inherently much easier just to pick up and play, you don’t have to work out where you are in the story or what the next objective is, and this can make for a more replayable game.
The increasingly complex technology powering our favourite consoles allows for increasingly complex games. I think as the tech behind the games progresses, replayability in games is going to decline further and further. That is, unless sacrifices in the complexity are made or developers add in other content to “force” replays upon the user (I find achievements have already started to fulfil this role quite nicely). The artificial lengthening of a game via achievements is another thing that really gets my back up, but that’s another post for another time. I’d really like to hear your take on this. Am I just getting older and jaded or is there some truth in the conclusions I’ve drawn.
Editorial, Article Tags: 16 bit, 360, altered beast, chaos engine, games, gaming, genesis, mega-drive, NES, replayability, Sonic, Xbox
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As you yourself have noted, the games you like to play repeatedly are shorter, simpler and therefore have a much shorter time commitment.
However, the longer, more in-depth titles require more time from the user, usually lasting a lot longer overall, and in some cases, offering a more fulfilling experience.
Using your numbers though, we can see that even if more in-depth titles lack replayability, they actually give you a longer exprience overall.
Using your estimation of Altered Beast, you’d have to complete it anywhere from 5~10 times to match the amount of time you spent on Mass Effect. The key difference that Altered Beast never offers anything new, as opposed to Mass Effect, which should give you new gameplay/story throughout.
While it is nice to play through the same simple game over again, it really doesn’t compare to having a new game to play each time.
hey what game is that picture from?
Great points Gandy.
I like to blame marketing and marketers for all of the world’s ills, and this is no different. I can’t help but feel that games are being designed differently(manipulated by the filthy marketing professionals of the world), so that they are more easily consumed, discarded, then replaced with a newer one.
Warcraft 2, Quake 2, the Doom series, hell even FFIII, all are games that I happily replayed over and over again. In recent years it’s really just Half Life 2 and the HL2 Eps that I have replayed more than 2xs.
I’ve been pondering the same issue lately, but unlike you i do not have a huge collection of old games (i traded a lot in to gain space … i know … huge disturbance in the force as final fantasy 7,8,9 etc hit the second hand shelves). Point is i agree, i believe your experience.
I wonder if there is a psychological reason such as remembering our youth, the extreme familiarity or something else, but i really don’t believe that to be the case. Generally our memory is very poor, we remember things we liked as better, and things we disliked as worse, in order to justify why we didn’t or did like them. Its a personal investment thing – the game was good because we liked them, thus it was really good and we 1 like them more and 2 the become better in our minds. Something that SHOULD be shattered if we were wrong and these were just “fond” memories. Sort of like why when a game has not been reviewed on a site yet, everyone (readers) are posting excellent reviews: They played the game without listening to reviews, found it was junk but had invested $X in it so they focus on the positive and try to convince others it is great to justify their own investment.
Alas, i digress. Recent games, RE5 for example, i tried to replay. Its resident evil afterall, it rewards replay by giving unlockables and those in turn make the replay experience better… but they don’t. Dawn of War i’ve bought 2 times now, after playing a pir8 copy the first time. WK40K games usually were buggy so it was a try before buy decision. I was very disappointed that it was only 8 hours to play through and decided never to buy it. I ignored that i’d played through it in under a week, loved the story, voice acting and the violence.
RE5 and DoW are different in genre, but both feature frantic action, stereo typed but good voice acting, gore but RE5 just lost me. RE5 was the better story … something i probably could not justify since at best it was b-grade movie material. But the controls suck – FPS on a console … (ignoring the wii) shaky at best.
Alterted beast is fantastic. Metal Slug is another game you can just pick up again and again. Street Fighter IV is awesome, and unlike Soul Calibur IV it encourages technique over button mashing by being relatively easy to manage a character.
I think, it’s the controls, maybe the crap stories help, but side scrollers generally just work. DoW worked in that it was easy to control. Max Payne… just gels. GTA IV on the other hand … becomes painful, cars differ to bikes differ to on foot. There is too much there, and unlike games where these altering controls are one time events or diversions here they are necessary. RE5, FPS on console – junk (well it’s great, but you know), BioShock, FPS on console – great (really out there story, great character and it does assisted aim which drags the controls out of the gutter). Heck, in RE5 i died maybe 20 times on the playthrough (ignoring the Demo experience) BioShock killed me more often (though more forgivingly). Doom / MaxPayne i would have died thousands of times. Ninja Gaiden 2 i got the achievement for using more than 500 continues (or whatever the number was), but the game just worked (though it was a button masher more than a technique thing …).
Maybe the challenge is gone (i did play RE5 on easy) but i know that if i played it on hard, the unassisted aiming would have meant i never would have finished the game. I think what happened that games aren’t focused on the game element anymore. They try to woo us with neat “abilities” which make the controls a nightmare. Or the try to put FPS on consoles (mind you some work, others are just cruel). Ninja Gaiden 2 and Altered Beast are similar in that they aren’t about puzzles, they are about managing health and dealing lots of damange. Diablo has the questing thing but again, very simple controls and more about managing health. We’ve gotten too complex on the controls and now you can not pick up a game, even on the same console and have the X button do the same thing. Most platformers it was only two buttons (jump and shoot), on the 360 we have 4 shoulder buttons, 4 main buttons, 2 analog sticks (with 2 built in buttons) and the d-pad + the back button. GTA Chinatown wars on the DS has 4 + 2 + select + the touchscreen. Most of the time i jump into a car and empty my gun, because the controls clash with something else i remember (lord knows what).
So what i’m thinking is – controls. Game replayability = consistent and familiar controls.
Of course you like Altered Beast, you big furry.
I’m just going to keep it short. New games these days seem to be about the story or the online play. For most games there’s only so many times you can play through a story before it becomes stale. Gameplay was king years ago, but now with games being more like interactive movies, the replay value for me has gone down.
I think chakkerz has something though in regards to controls. I can replay any 2D Castlevania game and have a blast, because for the most part the controls are solid which makes for a good platformer, while the only fps games I replay have the words “half” and “life” in the title.
Well it’s good thing they don’t make games like Altered Beast anymore. Also what Scot said *runs*