Curious as to what people think has the most replay potential.

Rules:

  1. The “desert island” aspect here is just to create an isolated environment. You don’t have to worry about survival or anything along those lines, where playing the game would be problematic. This isn’t about min-maxing your situation on the island outside of the game, or the time after leaving.

  2. No live service games unless the live service aspect is complete and it can be played offline – that is, you can’t just rely on the developer churning out new material during your time on the island. The game you get has to be in its complete form when you go to the island.

  3. No multiplayer games – can’t rely on the outside world in the form of people out there being a source of new material. The island is isolated from the rest of the world.

  4. You get existing DLC/mods/etc for a game. You don’t get multiple games in a series, though.

  5. Cost isn’t a factor. If you want The Sims 4 and all its DLC (currently looks like it’s $1,300 on Steam, and I would guess that there’s probably a lot more stuff on EA’s store or whatever), DCS World and all DLC ($3,900), or something like that, you can have it as readily as a free game.

  6. No platform restrictions (within reason; you’re limited to something that would be fairly mainstream). PC, console, phone, etc games are all fine. No “I want a game that can only run on a 10,000 node parallel compute cluster”, though, even if you can find something like that.

  7. Accessories that would be reasonably within the mainstream are provided. If you’re playing a light gun game, you can have a light gun. You can have a game controller, a VR headset and controllers, something like that. No “I want a $20 million 4DOF suspended flight sim cockpit to play my flight sim properly”.

  8. You have available to you the tools to extend the game that an ordinary member of the public would have access to. If there are modding tools that exist, you have access to those, can spend time learning them. If it’s an open-source game and you want to learn how to modify the game at a source level, you can do that. You don’t have access to a video game studio’s internal-only tools, though.

  9. You have available to you existing documentation and material related to the game that is generally publicly-available. Fandom wikis, howtos and guides, etc.

  10. You get the game in its present-day form. No updates to the game or new DLC being made available to you while you’re on the island.

What three games do you choose to take with you?

  • @talOPEnglish
    6•2 months ago

    [continued from parent]

    • A pinball game. There are some pinball games that implement many tables, and “all DLC and mods” will buy a lot here. Many people have shown that they can happily come back and keep enjoying a pinball table for many decades – it’s an easy-to-learn, hard-to-master game. And I’ve been able to come back over a long period of time and enjoy pinball games, especially some of my favorite tables, like Medieval Madness or Tales of the Arabian Nights. And some pinball engines, like Visual Pinball, let you create your own pinball boards. But I still feel like the fact that the gameplay mechanics don’t change that much is going to fundamentally limit this one.
    • Mount and Blade: Warband. Suggested by a respondent. I think that this isn’t the worst choice out there – it’s got a lot of replayability, and I’ve spent a lot of time playing it. And there are some extensive mods. I also like the core gameplay loop that the game has. But I don’t feel like the mods change the core gameplay much. Take Prophecy of Pendor, which is a large, popular mod that I’ve played, adds a lot of additional stuff to work on, like building up your own knighthood order. You can spend a lot of hours completing the new tasks that it creates. But it and similar mods really alter the parts of the game outside of the core gameplay loop, and I feel like I’d really burn out on that core gameplay loop.
    • Tetris or similar. These are games that have a good core gameplay loop and which you can come back to and play over and over. In a different contest – one where mods weren’t available, say, and only the base game is – I might rate these higher. But for me, the lack of mod content and DLC and such is a major limitation – I really want to take advantage of stuff that other people have created.
    • Popular action roguelites, like The Binding of Isaac, Hades, Risk of Rain, Vampire Survivors, Cult of the Lamb, or Noita. These are all good games that enjoy the roguelite/roguelike high degree of replayability, and usually have a wide range of goals that would take a long time to complete. They aren’t, I think, bad choices. But my thinking is that learning to play “action” games, teaching your muscle memory, tends to have less-replayability than teaching your high-level thinking, which is where turn-based games tend to focus; for my roguelite/roguelike pick, I went with a turn-based one. Much as I love The Binding of Isaac, and much as I’ve played the game, I’ve gotten to the point where I can basically play the muscle-memory part of the game on autopilot, without paying a lot of attention to what’s going on, and then start to zone out during the game. I’m pretty sure that if it were one of a tiny handful of games that I had for a very long time, that I’d go way, way past that point.

    I still haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3, which was another popular choice, finally got around to installing it this week. I had not considered it as a competitive choice here, though a number of people here chose it. So I’m hoping that it’ll be fun, given all the folks endorsing it here!