Playtime is an important metric in the world of video games. Reviews are inherently subjective, meaning that they can't reflect how large numbers of people might feel about a game. Player numbers aren't perfect either seeing as thousands of people can still get together to play a bad game, demonstrated recently by God's chosen dumpster fire The Day Before.
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Very few people though, will willingly play a bad game more than once. As such, replayability is a valuable commodity for game developers to capture if they want to guarantee their game's long-term popularity. However, replayability is a hard thing to quantify and, in recent years, I've found myself more and more surprised by what games I keep returning to. Today then, I'd like to discuss what I think are three of the core tenets of what makes games replayable and some of the best games that manage to deliver them.
Length
How long a game is, just like a book or a film, can greatly impact how willing you are to come back to it. I challenge you to find someone who's read War and Peace more than once. Or at all for that matter. In the same way, a game that is too long can be aggressively off-putting when you think about the time investment of another playthrough.
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Huge, expansive RPGs or open worlds that boast infinite entertainment with new stories and quests to discover only ever inspire fear in me at the idea of replaying them. Infinite times two sounds like a little much for me. I'll often consider the prospect of starting again from scratch before realising that I don't have a spare 40 hours to get back to where I was and decide to just open an old save to play around with instead as a way to scratch that itch.
On the other end of the spectrum, a game that is too short can be difficult to come back to seeing as players might not have had the time to get attached to the world or its characters on a first playthrough. Going back to the book comparison, I challenge you to find anyone who's massively invested in the emotional struggle of the Mr Men books. When a first playthrough doesn't spark any kind of care or interest in a world or its characters, there isn't much incentive to come back for a return visit.
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One of the games that I've replayed the most over the years, in part due to its length, is Batman: Arkham Asylum. Batman and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day runs to around 9-10 hours in length allowing you to get nice and comfortable with its smooth combat, colourful characters and dark, dingy environments without ever overstaying its welcome. As a result, I've never really gotten the feeling that I've had enough of the game, making it a comfortable space to come back to any time I'm in the mood for more time alongside the world's richest spandex enthusiast.
It's worth mentioning at this point that a game that is too long or short to replay isn't always a bad thing. Long games like The Witcher 3 have incredible main plots and lots of deeply involving side quests that would take an impractical amount of time to go through on repeat playthroughs. However, this is entirely by design. The game isn't made to be experienced over and over again. Rather, it's designed to offer players a completely comprehensive experience on the first go around, which is no bad thing. In the same way, some games are designed to be low-maintenance experiences that pop in and out of your life without hassle. These types of games are simply aiming for a different feel, which is nothing to frown at.
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That being said, length is still clearly an important factor for encouraging repeated playthroughs of games but it isn't the only one. I've played games like Fallout: New Vegas and Elden Ring multiple times and both are potentially very long RPGs to get stuck into. As such, even long games have their own effective techniques for drawing players back in.
Variety
Variety is apparently the spice of life, a logic which applies as much to digital lives as it does to real ones. In my experience of what draws me back to games that I've played before, what is usually one of the most compelling incentives is the idea of being able to play the game again but in a wholly different way. Narrative choices, character building, different weapons, all of these give you the option to tackle a game all over again from scratch and experience it from a new perspective.
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I've already highlighted Fallout: New Vegas as an example of one of my regularly replayed games and a large part of that is because of the amount of variety the game can offer. On the one hand, you could specialise in intelligence based skills and use the power of science to melt your enemies into a fine paste, or you could spec yourself into strength, pick up a large stick and hit Caesar's legionnaires with it so hard that they explode. These different approaches to gameplay mean that you can Groundhog Day your way through multiple playthroughs without ever having to deal with any kind of monotony.
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| (Image property of FromSoftware and Bandai Namco) Elden Ring does this well too with bosses that act as roadblocks between key areas that you can take different approaches to tackling. Build variety in Elden Ring helps to re-contextualise areas across different playthroughs and change up your whole experience of the game. The magic academy of Raya Lucaria caused very few issues for me on my first playthrough, But, when I played through it again with a mage character, my magic-based attacks bothered the student body about as much as throwing a cheese grater at an angry gorilla.
Overall, build variety can go an incredibly long way towards making a game more replayable by giving players options that spark their curiosity and give them reasons to come back to games over and over to try out new tactics and see how they change the experience. However, even some games with more straightforward gameplay designs can offer incredible opportunities for replayability through their ability to craft memorable experiences. Stand-Out Moments Have you ever had the experience of scrolling through Instagram or YouTube when you come across a clip of one of your favourite game's best sequences or best levels and it immediately gives you an itch to replay it? Oddly specific though it is, it's an experience that myself and others have had that, sometimes, will prompt entirely new playthroughs of games we've already played simply so that we can experience those sections again.
It makes sense in practice. There are some moments or levels in games that carry a real energy and uniqueness that makes them stand out both within the game and in the video game landscape generally. While not every game is lucky enough to have moments like this, those that do can boast that you aren't able to replicate that experience anywhere else and so, if you want to experience them again, you'll have to start a new playthrough. It's like the drug addict model of replayability where a game gets you hooked on one experience so that you have to keep coming back if you want to feel that way again. A recent example of this phenomenon is Super Mario Bros Wonder which offered the unique selling point of Wonder Seeds which, speaking of drug use analogies, would bend your perception of levels in chaotic and unpredictable ways once Mario and his friends picked them up. This gave the game a sense of life and creative joy that is very difficult to replicate, making multiple playthroughs all the more attractive as players can experience that same chaotic joy all over again.
A slightly more subtle example of this factor at play can be found in Bioshock. Being released in 2007, Bioshock was of the era where games were still separated into distinct zones and levels with loading screens in between rather than having one large, continuous world. The result of this is an interesting one. Bioshock's level-based structure gives each decaying corner of Rapture its own sort of oppressive charm where the horrors of an underwater world turned upside-down are punctuated by eccentric environments and noteworthy encounters. The result is a game with such strong level variety and character that it makes the game all the more replayable on the safe assumption that you're unlikely to ever get bored with any of the game's individual areas.
As such, alongside the factors of a manageable length and a variety gameplay options, distinctive moments stand as an important ingredient of the design stew that makes up replayable games because it removes any worries about monotony that might come with a second playthrough with a guarantee that there will always be new and interesting things to see. Conclusion To wrap things up then, replayability has always been a big deal in the games industry for how it offers developers a selling point for their new titles and how it gives players confidence that they'll be able to get their money's worth from their latest purchases. However, making a game replayable is about more than just cramming it full of stuff to look at and then forget about the second a newer, shinier looking game comes along. The most replayable games, to my mind, are the ones that understand how to not outstay their welcome, never letting players get sick of them enough that they wouldn't consider coming back one day. On top of that, the best in class usually offer the ability to remix how you want to play the game with robust choices or some kind of build variety that allows new playthroughs to really feel new. Finally, some games do away with all of those fancy RPG choices and instead make sure that their levels or environments offer experiences that you can't find anywhere else so that, if you want to have that kind of fun again, you'll have to keep coming back to the same place. At the same time though, different games will always appeal to different people and so perhaps there are other ways that games have kept you coming back for more. If you feel like I've missed anything important, you'll have to let me know, but in the meantime, why not go back through your collections and see what games you haven't played in a while? I'm sure there'll be something just waiting to pull you back in for another few weekends and extend your backlog even further! All images and property names belong to their respective rights holders and are utilised here for the purpose of criticism and review. |
