Let’s talk about replayability
Wednesday, February 17, 2010Okay so I’ve been thinking about replayability or replay value, whatever you want to call it. There are certain games that I like the replayability of, several games that does this well comes to mind and there are of course several that I know that blows in this particular subject.
The influences for Replay Value
In the past there wasn’t that many sandbox games or open-world games. So developers had to create the replay value with simple choices to change the flow of the game or simply the ending. One example of this is Star Wars: Jedi Academy or later Star Wars games relevant to the life of a jedi. Throughout these games you’ll happen upon one or several situations where you have to choose to be good or evil. These simple choices are stepping-stones to each ending, and being one or the other tends to give the player access to powers of each side. Being male or female may have some impact as well.
The kind of replay value that I like is the one of Multiple Classes and restrictions. This type of replay value you’ll find in most RPGs, will you be a fighter? an archer? a mage? a rogue? etc. If we take a game like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion we see that the game offers a lot of classes but in my eyes botches the idea when not restricting the character to one class or the skills he/she has chosen. A pure fighter in the game can learn everything about Magic though it takes a lot more time, but it’s possible. I don’t really like that kind of multi-classing, see I believe in Immersion when playing, the chances that “I am” or that “I play” as a character that knows everything or is good at everything seems a little bit far-fetched. I like to take up “roles” when I play games, if I play a game like battlefield I like to act as the medic and my actions will reflect that choice. I like the replay value of games that has classes that make the game feel like a whole other game all together when playing another class. Strategies, missions, how NPCs talks to you, how they act around you.
I like games that have choices that matters, not during several particular events during the game but all the time. Which is pretty much impossible considering how many “paths” to the goal the developers would have to create. If we take the popular game Mass Effect 1/2 and look a little closer you’ll start to notice that there are only 5-10 actual choices that make a big difference more so in the first than the second. Most choices good or bad lead to the same outcome. Oh well let’s move on.
Let’s talk a bit about level-design, you know the old Diablo games? The Diablo-series is a series that is very high on my personal favorite list. The game had lot’s of different environments, classes that felt different and items to keep you satisfied. The support for cooperative and competitive play was also there. The games also had an interesting level-design, simple but very effective, for each playthrough the maps and enemy placements would be different. I loved that, and I wish one could enhance that to a better and bigger experience with some kind of modular level-design that does not feel “blocky” when put together.
More complex games hinder the replay value
I feel like with todays games growing bigger and more advanced a lot of replayability of the past is disappearing, you have voice-actors, motion-capture people, several writers, scripts that need to go through localization stuff. To change a simple thing in the script these days isn’t the same, a thing that would take ten minutes becomes several hours/days/weeks to take place in modern games. Sometimes I wish that everything could go back to a simpler time, I love voice-acting and it does a lot for the immersion of video-games but I didn’t need it before.
An awesome game like Baldur’s Gate had an awesome size = lot of quests to do, since the quests was only text with triggers etc you could add a lot quests to the game pretty quickly compared to modern games where you have to go through the whole voice-acting process, and what’s up with all the localization stuff? Hell when I was a kid there was no good games in Swedish I had to learn English, I played games in Japanese I had to learn friggin Japanese as kid, recognizing signs and what not until I understood what was wanted from me, imagine the hell of going through an RPG in Japanese as a kid, just a simple quest like “go get a potion and bring it back” would take a while to figure out. All games should be in English and just leave it like that, it would speed up the process.
The pinnacle of Replay Value
User created content, I mean levels, weapons, scripts, quests, GUIs, graphic enhancements etc. All the things that makes PC-gaming awesome should somehow be available for console-gamers as well. Plug in your X360 HDD to your computer, copy the files over, and let the game handle the extra content as mods. How much better wouldn’t Call of Duty Modern Warfare 1/2 be if you could see some user-created maps there as well? How the hell did they think the worlds most popular shooter (Counter-Strike) happened? User created content! Sure it would probably make cheating and stuff like that a lot easier to do but hell Fallout 3 isn’t Fallout without the constant search for food and clean water. I downloaded a mod for Fallout 3 and it was awesome, you got hungry, you got tired, you needed water. You could find all these things in Fallout 3 but they didn’t have any value, food, water, whatever. It wasn’t needed. I needed to raid peoples camp to survive, I was a true waste-lander.
I don’t say that I have the perfect answer, I’m not an educated game designer or programmer, but it should be possible in some way right? I want to believe that anyway. What kind of replay value do you guys like? and would you like user created content to be available for console-users?
Wow, this is an interesting perspective from a PC gamer, considering I’ve only ever owned consoles. I especially like what you did with Fallout 3, that you were a true wastelander because of a mod you downloaded. To be honest, the game should have been that way in the first place, but I guess a lot of developers want to dumb things down for mass appeal.
Oh, and another thing you said, about games being in English. I suppose I take this for granted seeing as it is my one and only language I speak, and all games I’ve played have been in English anyway. Well, I actually played Enchanted Arms in Japanese, but I cheated and had the subtitles on. I love playing JRPGs with Japanese dialogue. In fact, I’m saddened to hear that FFXIII will only be available in English :-/
@Rockers Delight
. Yeah the Fallout 3 Mod was great, it made my experience so much better. I desperately needed to survive, I had to prepare myself for going on long journeys packing a lot of food and water and use what weapons I could find in the wasteland. I had only 2 weapons I believe and the rest I found on my journeys, I could never pack that much into the bag without sacrificing food and water.
Well I’m not only a PC-gamer, I own a Wii, PS3 and a Xbox 360. I try to keep it varied, need to play those exclusive games
I also love playing JRPGs with Japanese dialogue more often than not the English version does not seem right somehow. All japanese-ports should have the japanese + subtitles available.