"We don't talk about whether a movie is re-watchable or not." What? Yes we do. Countless times I've heard an average/disappointing movie described as "worth 1 watch" or "watch it once, never again".
Improving a game's replay value could just mean skippable cutscenes for example, or avoiding forcing me to hold forward on left stick for 30 minutse just to listen to some stuff I've heard before ,some games' tutorial sections are so long that they kill replay value.There are many games that I love but know I will never play again because most of it would be boring. I usually understand replay value as "Is the game a pain in the ass to replay again".
The closest thing I think to inherent "Replay Value" a medium can have (Be it video Games, books, movies, etc.) is the mystery genre. Because mysteries (At least, well written ones) subtly encourage you to re-play/watch/read them to learn subtle clues they've scattered throughout them before the big twist. Though even then, you're likely only going to do that IF you enjoyed it in the first place, so your point still stands!
I once heard a comment from someone that went "I don't like games that I can't replay more than once" which got me to really reconsider how valuable replay value actually is. Does that mean someone could play a game and love it but retroactively hate it because they have no reason to come back to it? So I love the take that replay value is nonsense.
It could very well be true that every game they like, they can (and do) replay more than once. And thus any game they couldn’t was a game they didn’t like. They probably just got the cause and effect backwards (i.e. “I didn’t like the game” => “I won’t replay the game” turned into “I couldn’t replay the game” => “I didn’t like the game”)
Why is that weird? Have you never played a game and liked it but not to the point you want to replay it? Or played a game liked it but there isn’t a reason to play again? Some games have extra content on replays or new games plus. Some have other choices or story stuff that you can’t see on a first play through. Some are just the same game over again. They may still have value or it may not depending on the game. I don’t even understand this argument.
@@nathanhargenrader645 It's weird because why would that change whether I like it or not? If I play through a game and it was really good or fun but not so much that I want to play it over and over again, why would that suddenly make me think the game was bad or decide that I don't like the game?
I wouldn't say it's "hate" for not having a reason to replay it, but just knowing that you won't be able to experience it for the first time again, or worse, that it's not as good as you remember Both can happen more easily in a linear game, especially with a linear progression, since choosing which permanent abilities you get, NG+ content, or giving multiple ways to complete a game can change the way you look at it, and even love it more Of course that's just my two cents from someone that loves replaying a lot of stuff
For me replay value is about skill ceiling, how the game plays once you are near it and if it doesn't have too much unskippable waiting. I don't need extra characters or endings, I want to have the game to be fun even after being familiar with it and discovering all secrets. It also helps if the game is short.
Exactly, the first time I played hollow knight I didn't even attempt the pogo skip to fury, but now I do fireball skips in greenpath and the shade skip to blue lake in almost all of my playthroughs. Gradually going for more and more advanced skips every time I replay it is really fun and it allows me to make my playthroughs as long as I want them to be.
I personally agree although I like playing multiplayer games partly because of the endless content that the players provide because no 2 battles are the same against a human opponent
Good take, but I disagree. I do think replay value exists, and I think the factors that determine it can be objectively quantified and compared between games. Not just games really but other media too. For example, I'd argue platformers that use fixed jumps and movements have less replayable gameplay than games that give more control to the player. There's more room to design interesting levels, and more ways players can navigate them. A specific example of this would be TY the Tasmanian Tiger. When it released it was considered boring and not worth speedrunning, and even to this day some say the games have "bad" controls and level design. The game is perfectly responsive and it's not like any of the level are confusing or hard to navigate, especially for the time. I think the main sticking point is the fixed controls. Ty always jumps at the same height and there isn't really any way to accelerate, so every platforming sequence is purely a spacing challenge. There aren't any ways to make the easier challenges more interesting and there aren't any ways to make the harder ones less rigid. Where in another game you could try to get a running start or try to long jump, in Ty it's the same exact same jump. Every. Single. Time. This has nothing to do with whether or not you like the games, I do quite like the Ty games and I do replay them. It has nothing to do with the amount of content, like I just implied Ty got multiple sequels with decent amounts of content. This is a specific, quantifiable mechanic that affects the enjoyment of repeated playthroughs. And other mechanics and factors like this exist in other genres and even mediums. Of course there's an element of preference, there always is. Most people won't engage with or even notice these nuances, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. You can argue that replayability is overrated, or that the word is abused, and to an extent I agree. But I don't think the case that most replay games purely, or even mainly out of subjective preference holds water.
I don't know that I entirely agree with 'replayability' being a nonsense term, but you do make good points in that whatever replayability means to one individual, it will most assuredly not have the same meaning to another; which does discredit the term quite a bit in its current frequency of use. However, as someone that plays hundreds of titles every year, I know exactly what replayability means to me. And I know precisely what makes me return to a title and what doesn't. My definition of it is highly individual and that's where you make a tremendously good point. Unless contextualized, the term is useless.
Back then I'd argue to the opposite, but then I remembered how shocked I was when one of my favourites, Ace Attorney, which I thought wasn't replayable, had so many cases replayed by many people. I then tried to do so myself, and I was dumbfounded as to how... replayable a story game was, one with linear progression, at that. So many well written dialogue exchanges I'd forgotten about, nuanced takes about characters and their relationships, and a LOT of foreshadowing I had no idea was there at all in my first time through. There are games with a stronger reason to replay, like Pokémon or Persona, but in essence, every game is replayable; the ones that are the most replayable are mostly dependent on what the player enjoys.
I think you've missed the point. The term Replay Value means what it was explained to mean in the wikipedia article. It is a term _applied_ to the concepts of a game having those things. It isn't a term meant to mean the broader definition you're using. It only means that a game has those aspects. For some players games with those features are appealing to them because they want those features. There are four basic reasons a player might want this: 1) They have limited disposable income and so they have to pull the most fun out of a game. They might only be able to buy a new game once a month, or once a year, so they need the games they buy to last a very long time. For them, it is vital that the game has extras for the additional playthroughs exactly because they otherwise wouldn't _want_ to replay it but _have to anyway_ or else they'd be doing nothing. 2) They have limited capacity to learn or experience new games. These are gamers that take a long time to learn games and so want to spend a very long time with a game. Or these are comfort gamers that like to replay a game because it fits their neurodivergence to do so. For a lot of people, new media is difficult. For people that don't experience that kind of anxiety, it sounds ridiculous but for some people starting up a new game is daunting. Be it because they struggle to learn or desire comfort, these gamers want games with long run times and the ability to replay the game over and over in different ways. Those are the games they come back to time and time again. 3) They have a need for long play times. Hidden in the above, but also all on its own, some players merely have a need for long play times. If you're disabled or have a job with a lot of down time, or you are a child; you might have long stretches of time that you need to fill with limited options for filling it. If your preferred method of filling that time is with games, you will gravitate to longer games with more variability when playing again. The above reasons may be the root cause of why you can't move on to other games, but let's say the difference between 1/2 and 3 is the scale. If you have 14 hours a day to fill with games, nobody can afford to fill it with new 2-8 hour $20-60 experiences. Simply isn't economically viable for anyone. 4) They desire relaxation and not stimulation. There are a lot of forever games that are either entirely chill or have long stretches of chill activity. Not everyone plays for challenge or to experience stories. Getting lost in a world or merely wanting to zone out from a long day full of hard choices are powerful play motivators. Games like Animal Crossing, MMORPGs and craftathon games like Valheim, Minecraft or Stardew offer players the option to play thousands of hours or more zoning out on repetitive tasks that slowly move towards a goal. All of these reasons are why the label of Replay Value exists. It lets players know what sort of game they are in for. Now, has this be co-opted and warped by marketing and the industry? Absolutely. But not all parts of a game's marketing are for all people. If you don't show these sorts of players that your game offers this kind of content, they'll pass on your game. It is valid to cater to these sorts of people. In fact, for all of these categories it is vital that the industry does cater to them. Every category I mentioned _needs_ games that have this quality. That's why the quality exists. That's why the label exists.
I'm not sure if i misundertood some of the points in the video but I actually disagree with a lot of it lmao. While there are other ways for a game to justify its value, at 70 bucks time of enjoyment is a popular one because it might take a while for you to be able to buy many others withiut getting broke, so yeah, i think it's a decent selling point. IF. The game isn't hurt by it. I think we are all tired of 100 hour open world games that could be perfectly translated into a linear game and cut 70 hours of boring walking around. Videogames like all entertainment is subjective, and while it's ultimately your decision to replay a game, it doesn't mean that the developer can't do their part to intentionally make it better for the player going back to it. Being able to see new things or unlocking new endings are an example tou mentioned. In some games you need to make different decisions that lead to different content to see a new ending, etc. A good example for me is Dark Souls. 1 is a truly special game for me and while I'd probably replay it once anyway, I don't think i would come back to it nearly as much if there weren't new builds and secrets that ept the game fresh for a lot longer, and unlike graphics or music, it's content explicitly made to incentive you to experience the game again and it works. I now get into Souls games already intending to replay them unless I didn't enjoy them, because them still being fresh after very long is something that i like about them. I also think that saying that "replayability" is not something unique to games it's fair, but it's important to acknowledge that it does manifest differently in games. Some games like Devil May Cry or Ultrakill have replay value by asking the player to master them, while others just have a lot of content. You can't master watching The Truman Show, and ehile you can miss some bits watching only once, it's not to the scale of all the stuff you can do in New Vegas or something. But I do agree that in the end it's more about you liking the game or not. We as humans just like excuses to spend a lot of time with stuff we find special. Replay value is just the devs coming with a very good one for us instead of immediately having to go for challenge runs or things like that
I don't disagree with you, but I don't think it is redundant to say a good game is replayable. Games, unlike other media, are interactive, they mostly demand effort. So it's not that simple. That's why TH-cam videos of cutscenes are so popular. There's even "movies" of games on TH-cam, where all the cutscenes are compiled together in a 4 hour long video, and people watch it, specially those who already played it.
This was fantastic! :) I'm in the camp of "going back to games I love again and again" rather than jumping to the New Hotness, probably because I am in my 40s and never shook those old 8- and 16-bit era habits. VERY long-form response under the cut: I have a myriad of mental problems - incuding ADHD - which affect my ability to remember things I experience unless I have experienced them multiple times and they're encoded into my long-term memory. (I also have Asperger's, which made me write an entire tangent about Disney's Beauty and the Beast and my current D&D character, which I deleted because LOOK AT THIS COMMENT, it's an essay in itself) Additionally I have a deep affection in my heart for quite a few games regardless of length or depth, but I do have a type. I love games with a lot of lore I can binge, even (or espeically?) with my memory problems. Alternatively, if a game just has really fun mechanics and interesting characters, it'll hold my interest (I am an absolute sl*t for a good fighting game). However, I don't like games that are too hard for the sake of being hard - I have one Souls game (Dark Soul II: Scholar of the First Sin), both Nioh games, and Code Vein (the latter three I got through a PS Plus membership), and I will probably never make it to the halfway point of any of them. However, challenge is no barrier if I'm invested enough, or if the game is fun for me. I don't care about a game's online playability unless it's something I want to play with people I care about, and I will play any game with my loved ones that they want to, because even if it sucks we enjoy each other's company enough to make the experience suck less. So with all that out of the way, here's some of the games I go back to again and again, grouped by categories of why I do so: 1) The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: Not so much the vanilla game, but I discovered randomizers through this game and the experience of exploring the same world again and again with a new path and "loadout" each time is amazing. Plus, the randomizer I use lets you swap Link out for any of dozens of characters from across pop culture media. Playing a Zelda game as Zelda, Crono, Luigi, or Sailor Saturn is an absolute trip and I highly recommend it. This is not a game I play for the story - I have the original Nintendo Power manga for that. I play it to explore the worlds I know back-to-front in new and exciting ways. 2/3) Castlevania: Symphony of the Night & Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: Someitmes I use randomizers here as well, but for the most part I love the game exactly as it is. There's something fun about playing in luck mode (use the name X-X!V''Q) and overcoming a MUCH more diffcult early game to become even more of an absolute unit than in the base game. And I like the story and characters here, which is a step up from LttP where it was...fine. Bloodstained, I beat the main game once and then jumped right into Randomizer mode, because it's just that fun to explore the game's world. 4) Skyrim. I CANNOT seem to quit this game. Granted, I only ever play it with mods, as I found the vanilla experience buggy, ugly, and shallow even back in 2011, but the modding community for this game has transformed it again and again into something worth experiencing. If not for the fact that my computer is a decade-old dinosaur of a laptop that struggles with more than 3 episodes of a show on any given streaming site, I would probably redownload the game and the 200+ mods I had installed on it, just to experience my version of it again. Even with the much more limited suite of mods available on PS4, it's still a heck of a game to go back to and tinker with to see what you can turn it into. 5/6) Final Fantasy VII & X. Unlike the other games, which I play with mods or different modes to give myself a new experience, I play these two purely vanilla, because the vanilla experiences were so powerful and formative to me. 7 was the first RPG I ever played to completion, and is still my favorite game of all time. 10 was one of the most narratively fulfilling experiences I've ever had, and I count Yuna as my favorite RPG character ever to this day (even with the...let's say 'different' direction they took her character in the sequel). I replay these games the same way someone rereads a book or rewatches a movie, to explore not the world, but the characters and themes, and my own interpretive twists (especially in the case of FF7 where things like party lineup in cutscenes are a LOT more flexible). But I still love playing them because of the customizability of the characters and the different ways you can interpret them based solely on their sphere path or Materia loadout. 7) Dragon Age: Inquisition . I'll admit, I was very sad when you said you wouldn't likely go back to this game. I've always loved the "Bioware RPG", from KOTOR and Jade Empire all the way through the Dragon Age series (I might even play Mass Effect someday, despite my innate dislike of shooters), and I saw Inquisition as that formula at its most refined. The characters in the party felt like real people, and exploring the world with them felt like exploring with real friends. Even the ones I didn't care for (no names, for I fear the wrath of the DA stans will swoop down upon me, and swooping is bad) I still hung out with outside of battles, and did my best to understand. My core party may not have changed much (Varric & Bianca, Dorian, Iron Bull, and me as a second mage), but the whole cast touched me in different ways (NOTLIKETHAT...well...Iron Bull kinda like that) and I felt sad when the game ended and I had to part ways with them. Between the joy of rereading a favorite book and the fun of exploring new possibilities, I'd say Inquisition is one of the few AAA games that really did hit its mark of the traditional sense of "replay value" for me. 8/9) Hollow Knight & Hades: These two are the 'newest' in my collection, and as such I'm not "replaying" them so much as "playing them for a very long time". I acquired Hollow Knight in 2019 and Hades in the Hell-Year of 2020. These two games have yet to give up all their secrets to me. I am not good at Hollow Knight, however much I enjoy it, and so I haven't technically beaten it yet, despite owning it for 4 years now. But I go back to it with roughly the same frequency as everything else on this list, because it's so very compelling, and because I've gotten farther with it than any other Souls-compared game I've ever tried, and I could actually see myself beating it someday in the far future. Hades, by contrast, I HAVE beaten, i.e. gotten all the way through the game's levels without losing...I just haven't "beaten" it, which is to say 'explored the narrative to its full conclusion'. I know it's possible to achieve a Golden Ending where Zagreus achieves all his goals and achieves peace between all the Olympian Gods (a monumental feat in and of itself if you know ANYTHING about Greek mythology), but I've not gotten there yet, so I keep trying, and keep going, and keep playing. Who knows if achieving the best ending to these two games will cause me to set them aside for something else? Maybe I'll stick with them like I have all the other games on this list. Honorable mentions) Dragon Quest III, IX, and XI: While it pains me to admit it, I haven't beaten a single Dragon Quest game yet. These three are my mentions here because they're my current foci. I started IX first, after getting the 'kinda good' ending of VIII. I was introduced to building and rebuilding my party, changing classes, leveling each character up, speccing them, min-maxing a "perfectly normal amount"...and then still getting my tail handed to me by the final dungeon, let alone the final boss. I walked away from that one numerous times but always went back because "maybe this time"...and then two weeks of grinding later I'd give up again. This time I'm going to try and get a little farther with the characters I have, and try to ignore the boredom and frustration that sets in when I'm doing the same thing for too long at a time with no tangible progress. XI was second, and while I love the cast there as much as I love the cast of DA: Inquisition, I hit a wall with the final boss and realized that I'd forgotten to do something exremely important at the 11th hour mark, so I had to start entirely over, and I'm still plugging away at that second attempt. And finally there's DQ III, which I just started this year and am still playing for the first time. It's taking the bulk of my attention right now, but I know when the 2.5d remake comes out on Switch, I'll be jumping ship for that version, so it WILL be getting replayed, even if I'm still on my first playthrough with the current Switch version. Aaaaand, that's it. Congratulations on making it this far! I know this was a lot, but apparently I have a lot to say about the "replay value" of my favorite games and why I go back to them again and again. Keep up the good work, JC. Seeing a new vid from you is always a treat. ^_^
Great video, but i have to hold my opinion that Replay value both exist, exist for a reasonable reasons, and provides value. It feels like a plea to we shouldn't care, or that the reason we do care is nonsense, when we do care, and the reason we do are sensible. Also we are now entering the value of the medium to including replay value. It may exist in other mediums but its value in the medium of video games is different because it is interactive. You may have a new insight from rereading a book, but the interactive experience also gains that new insight while still being new experience (and we can dive into rereading a book with that new insight is a new experience if you want). Its not leaving the vocabulary, and i would like to believe it may even become more prominent.
This is so true. I even remmember reading game informer in my teens and seeing the "replay value" score under thier review, further persuading readers to give it increasing value.
I'm going to finish watching the video but I have to say that this is a stunning analysis of "replayability" as a concept in video games and why I balked at it so much. I think I should give a little context. I currently have... maybe 350+ games in my immediate reach (because I'm a videogame hoarder) spread between 3 different consoles (1 of which is just me owning a switch lite and a companion switch OLED). This, I concede, is a lot of games. i have so many because I want to experience where we are now and all the things I missed as a child and as an infant born in the mid 90s. GC, we talked about this during one of your streams but I'll likely die before I finish all of these games. This is thousands of hours of games and I'm by no means a fast player. It stands to reason that if I want to at least sample all of these games until I'm satisfied, I have no time to care about replayability or what it means. And what does it mean??? Am I replaying slay the spire, dicey dungeon, loop hero or shiren the wanderer: the dice of fate, or Pokemon mystery dungeon blue if I die before finishing the ultimate objective of the game or don't have the right build for the dungeon? What if I only like running around the Da'at map in SMT 5 or facing off 4 v 4 on a paintball shoot out in splatoon 3, what if I just want to paint in chicory like the colouring book it is? What if i have a good time with a game and simply dont return to it after playing part way? What is replayability for me then? For the most part if I get to an ending I tend not to replay a game. My appetite for it has been satisfied and I can move on to a new experience; I don't need new game +. It does make me admire people who can replay their favourite games and talk about their favourite experiences with the games, not because of some metric or to milk it for every last dollar that they spent but simply out of love or some form of appreciation. I love games whether I play or simply collect them and I think I'd be far more torn up about replayability and not finishing them if I internalized any of it as I came across it and took it as a moral failing.
While I do agree that judging a game based on how fun would it be to play it multiple times doesn't make sense, I also think it's kinda silly to act like it's a problem in games critique. People use replay value as a descriptor for games that can elongate their playtime by offering multiple ways of progressing through it, but I haven't seen anyone bashing a game because it's not replayable, or diminishing its value because of it. 99.9% of critics only care if a game is good or not.
When BOTW came out I thought it's so awesome how because of the near infinite freedom it will have near infinite replay value, but after spending 200h on my first playthrough and nearly everything meaningful, my second playthrough before TOTK sucked. Well not sucked, there was still a lot to appreciate and revisit, but it wasn't 1/10th of the enjoyment of the first playthrough because the challenges and discovery are so heavily knowledge based. Plus, over the 200 hours I perfected the combat system, had my fill of the art direction and world design etc. Considering you can beat BOTW at any time in a sense I DID replay it many many times, maybe not the minute content, but I visited most of the areas multiple times, beat countless camps, etc On the other hand, sure I could beat MGS 6 more times, but after 200 hours of MGS, say after 20 completions, maybe it won't be as exciting for some time too. I mean heck I'd have to watch my favorite films 100 times to get to know them so well. And that's perfectly ok, it doesn't change the fact that my first playthrough of BOTW was the greatest experience I've had with a video game.
As much as I like a certain game, growing old means I have less time to game, so mostly I finished a game, satisfied with it and move on to the next so I can enjoy as much as possible Monster hunter also comes into my mind. I enjoy it, now still but lack of time tells me this grindy game isn't for me Another reason I rarely play online games since it will be a never ending activity, and also I don't have any friends to play, sad Whatever your stance on this, as long as you enjoy the activity, that's that. Enjoy your time everyone!
This video feels like a companion sequel to the not having to finish games video... and I love it! Don't have anything to add besides the greatest example that is the speedrunning community of any game. most people start to speedrun a game because they just wanted to replay a game from their childhood or it's just a favorite of them, and in the process they discover cool tricks and secrets that aren't related to 100% completion and mostly glitches or new tricks to beat certain bosses or parts in the game. May as well drag it in but side quest and extra stuff to do in a game is optional for a reason, it's there as an incentive to keep playing the game if you already enjoy it and want to see what it has to offer. It's never something you have to do unless it's an older RPG and it's there to make the final boss easier (because you really don't need to grind in an RPG).
Obviously before watching. I did always find that nonsensical. Like What, have you NEVER rewatched a movie just because you liked it. Replay value isn't something you can slap a label on. It's extremely subjective. What other may want to replay, you may be a one and doner for
Awesome video idea. Personally I agree with your take. I've played tons of games that claim to have "replay value" however I've played through the story of the last of us like... 8 times or something lol even tho I've played it on every difficulty and got all the collectables etc. Something about that world and characters make me wanna revisit it. Think you really hit the nail on the head! Thx for the content
I think the term "replayability" has become a money cash grab idea, to keep people playing while feeding more content for cash into the game. For me replayability always comes from the game itself and how much I got myself invested. I still play all the classic Mega Man games. It doesn't matter that I have not changed how I approach them for years, always playing the same boss orders. But there is something charming. I can always rely on my memories and trust to find any time what was there before. No new shannanigans. No new content secretly pushed on me.
I was promised convincing and convinced I was. I wanted to say I'm not "plugged in" but the only manner in which I am unplugged is that I am not an electric guitar. But truly, I don't pay much attention to games media and reviews and the like. I see a cool thing, maybe I glance at a number score on Metacritic or how it's favoring on Steam, and I watch it be played before making a decision. That's all to say I had no idea "replay value" was such a hot ticket term in advertisement for games. To me on a personal level it's always been code for "If you still feel like playing this game after you beat it, you can have a different experience with it." Given all of that, the most I get out of any game is from Souls games, I can never just beat them once. I have to beat it with several different characters and master several different styles of play before I can feel content to move on to another game. Arguably, I'm not having that different of an experience, I'm still fighting the same bosses and going to the same areas for the most part, but the style of play shift is enough for me. So, yeah, GC is absolutely right on this one, what makes a game replayable is definitely all a personal metric, and not consistent across games. Hell, I'm not sure I even mentally processed coming back to play a game later as "replay value." I just want to play Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger again. So this really opened me up to think more about the term and indeed the entire case of replaying in the first place!
This is a rather fascinating video the early parts were rambly but towards the end you made banger points. It's funny how a game like Nier Automata made it a nessescity to replay it in order for you to get the "full story" but even after getting all 5 main endings, I still found the story of it to be the most dull and painfully average things ever. The voice acting and the whole "Yoko Taro game finally has good gameplay to carry stories" to be what got me through it. To this day, I have no desire to replay it again and would honestly rather watch the anime instead whenever the dub for the latter finally finishes or if it gets a season 2. Meanwhile games like Twisted Metal Black and Halo 3 were good enough that I replayed them multiple times. TM Black's driver routes can be beaten in an hour especially if you use cheats and the game's gameplay felt so good and the stories for each driver are told so well and does a good job at contextualizing the narrative that I played through all the avaliable ones. Halo 3 is probably the most mechanically rich Halo game ever with some great level design minus the Flood missions that I played it multiple times and now I feel like Heroic is the default difficulty where anyother Halo, I would rather play on Normal. A lot of games I like I often replayed on Normal and just want to write reviews for or refresh my memories on them. I don't like replaying games too much or any media since the diminishing returns starts to eventually kick in. It's like listening to the same song on repeat, what was great the first time loses it's value the more you listen to it within close proxmity of each other.
The entire thing you're missing is that, in the case of a HIT game you find you want to keep replaying, having more content means more of the thing you love. For example, I love the Deus Ex games. I would replay them even if they didn't have things put in explicitly for "replay value", but having all of these things, achievements, different branches to the story, different ways to solve situations-they give me more reasons to revisit the world and spend more time there. Would I have replayed Mankind Divided 4 times without the achievements? Probably. Would I have decided to spend over 260 hours in it if it didn't have all of these extras? Of course not. Having these things kept the experience fresh and enjoyable for me for much longer, and with my disabilities it is getting harder and harder to find games I am capable of not just playing, but loving and being able to spend quality time playing.
God, youre so much fun to just listen to! I have an old video arguing that speedrunning proves all games have infinite replau value, so its very satisfying to hear someone take down the term from a broader and more thorough angle. Great work :)
13:45 I honestly think this is the segment I have the biggest problem with in your video. I think it is redundant to make a one to one comparison between games and other media like movies or books, because games function not only as a piece of narrative art to engage with like a movie or book, but sometimes as a hobby or activity to perform like sports or table top games or playing an instrument, things that are actually expected and sometimes designed to do over and over again for years. And so I think it is perfectly fine for someone to care if this game/activity is something that they will want to come back over and over again. Like if you are trying to learn a new intrument, you try it out and decide if you want to continue with and play it over and over again (sometimes even the same exact song) or if you rather do something else. I care about replay value, I want my very favorite games to be games that I carry with me my whole life and can revisit over and over again. And certain games are just... not very friendly to that idea, particularly (to me) the very big games or games with a lot of grinding or stuff like that. No matter how much I enjoyed the first time, I don't necessarily want to play them ever again. It is way more likely that I will replay a 2 hour game than a 100 hour game, even if I liked them the same. Or maybe games that have some cool speed run mechanics with a big skill ceiling and I want to become good at, and this can only be done with repeat playthroughs, just like with playing an instrument. You cannot become "good" at watching the godfather, but you can become good at a sport or a video game. So again it is not a one-to-one comparison. And granted, my views on what makes a game replayable are not necessarily the same to what the big marketing executives think replay value is, I am not trying to establish any general rules. Just like what they think is "fun" is not necessarily what I think is "fun" but they still can market their game as being "fun", and it is up to me to judge if it will be actually fun to me. I don't know I find this video to feel a little bit hostile towards a subjective topic, some people really care about their games being replayable like me... you don't. And that is okay. Doesn't mean that the concept is "nonsense".
I recently left a game review where I covered replay value "because people care about that sort of thing" while explicitly stating that I think replay value is overemphasized/overvalued in modern game reviews. This video deeply validates me, heck yeah
The first game I finished was Paper Mario on N64. To put into perspective how many times I've finished it, I've done more complete playthroughs of Paper Mario on N64 than all of my other games combined. As in, all my Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Metal Gear, Pokemon, Zelda, etc, together don't reach the amount of times I've finished Paper Mario.
Good video, but I mostly disagree with you. I agree that a media's quality shouldn't be determined by how much you want to experience it again. But I do not agree that replay value is a synonym to preference, or just a will to revisit something you already like. There is one aspect of replay value that is always responsible by the developers, and can be measured, and that is recontextualization. You mentioned how no one measures movies for their "rewatch value". That is not true. I've seen plenty of people discuss movie scenes that evoke different emotions the second time you see them, and it's because that now you know how the movie ends, you realize how many aspects of that scene were designed with the upcoming plot twists and conclusions in mind. Watching a scene while being ignorant of the movie's full narrative versus watching after you're aware of everything becomes a different experience. That's not you wanting to see the movie again. That's the writer rewarding you for watching the movie again. It's giving you reasons to watch the movie a second time, it makes the exact same movie feel different by using nothing but context and ignorance. That's something that can happen in games, too. Not only through narrative, but through gameplay. The devs might decide to teach you new abilities that you always had at the very end of a game, which you could then experiment in the game's beginning. Now that's a thing about replay value. You won't be able to see it until you actually play the game again. And as such, using that as a metric to determine if you should even buy the game in the first place is unfair, to say the least. But I still think it's silly to affirm replay value is just "you want to play the game again, so you do it". Many developers design aspects of their games to enhance a second playthrough, and it's work that should be acknowledged and praised.
This doesn't exactly go against what he said. The critique is about the value being placed on replayability and not the concept of additional viewings or playthroughs holding additional value. Movies get recontextualized with knowledge of the endings and plot twists and can be an extra treat to rewatch, but the value placed on this aspect of the medium is relatively much much smaller. It's practically only brought up when these elements stand out on a second watch as an exciting bonus of the movie, and hardly ever, if ever, brought up when a movie doesn't have it. No one takes points off of the quality of a movie citing, "I watched the movie twice and it didn't add anything for me."
@@RedOphiuchus I agree that games shouldn't need to be replayable, and that people give much more value to replays in games than rewatches in movies. From that perspective, I agree with the video. But that's not quite what I got from the video. He very explicitly states that replay value only exists under the context of you as a person simply deciding to play a game again, and that other more common uses of the term are nonsense. (Or maybe not, it's been a while since I watched this video). The title of the video isn't "Replay Value is Overrated". It's "Replay Value is Nonsense". As in, "it's made up".
13:49 Eeeeeeeh... I feel like that's a swing and miss. Movies are static content. It would be silly to judge them with replay value because they themselves don't usually change; now obviously there's things like extended cuts, remasters, et cetera, but each distinct release is static. Once you experience it once, that version of the product is not going to be any different the next time you experience it. Any differences in opinion you might have about it will stem from either yourself or changes in the context surrounding that product. Games, on the other hand, can be dynamic content, and the different permutations of experience you can achieve upon revisits can impact a player's perception of their subjective quality.
It's funny that you play Paper Mario TTYD the same way every time. Almost everytime I go back to that game I build Mario differently focusing on different badges and stats. Even while using Danger/Peril builds I've taken different angles like focusing on power to end fights quickly or defence/evasion so that Mario takes no damage.
Personally, for me, a lot "replay value" features actively detract from the game. I view a lot of them similarly to gating content behind a grind tbh, and I much prefer to be able to play through a game once and be satisfied. If I like it enough to return to it, I won't need some arbitrary in-game reason. Exceptions exist ofc, especially if a "single playthrough" for a game is very short
I usually envy those who can play the same game multiple times, whereas I have never done so (unless you count playing on the ps2 with no memory card). But now I see that it’s ok, and that replay value isn’t a marketable phrase, only a subjective and personal choice. Heck! Maybe one day I’ll find a game that’s so good, I just gotta play it over and over. Also, I absolutely love your connection of marketing replay value in games to that of movies and literature. Ingenious!
This seems to be using a very narrow view of what is meant by replay value. Instead of looking at this through the lens of story-driven single player games, consider the replayability of gameplay-driven games (i.e. games where the gameplay is the primary driver and the story is either non-existent or inconsequential, such as most puzzle games) or games where the replayability comes from multiplayer (such as fighting games and competitive first person shooters). For those games, the replayability is a byproduct of the game design rather than something tacked on at the end of a game to artificially incentivise players to keep playing.
Great video. Yeah, replay value in gaming is so odd, it's used to mean either post-game content, NG+, alternate runs/builds, or stuff like that - which does have value and can sometimes contribute to doing a replay - but is not what it actually means - it's that you want to play a game again. I just replayed Ikenfell and the experience was mostly the same except for different party choices (although I didn't bother at all with the QTE and actually knew about the instant victory option), right now I'm playing Wandersong now and that has ZERO ability to do a single thing different and it's great.
Replay value seems relative to me. I have to love a game a lot to want to replay it even once. And even then, there’s plenty of great games I have no interest in playing again. But for me replay value comes down to how many ways are there to experience a game and how many of those ways seem fun to me.
I agree with the notion of replay value being one component of a greater whole. What you mentioned regarding replay value being highly praised until around the PS2/PS3 era was confirmed by one of my associates in the gaming industry who worked on Baldur's Gate II, where he said, to paraphrase, that this was a time when replay value was highly praised and the BG series was built to satisfy that goal.
Tangentially related, but I had a spell where I felt really guilty about buying books or games that I wanted to play but just weren’t grabbing me. I would watch a show, read a book, or play a game that was newer than my backlog and it made me feel worse. What they told me was that their purpose is to give you fulfillment, not to be a checklist. If I bounced off of a game it was fine, if I played Risk of Rain again instead of Persona or Borderlands, as long as I was getting my worthwhile, I was in the clear no matter how much dust the they gathered.
I think Gamers TM where the ones driving most of the backlash against “walking simulators” since they saw it as all games will become walking simulators and their “stocks” will deprecate in value. AAA Companies were also more likely just doing and doing the replayability to be seen as more appealing to consumers and get more sales and not to crush smaller competition, it was more that case where companies spend a lot of money to keep on pace with other companies. Also Open World games and Roguelikes aren’t going anywhere considering TotK and the upcoming Hades 2. Still I think it’s good game design and practice to emphasize skill, have a variety of choices, and allow for those invented challenges to exist and flourish because nobody is doing that for The Order 1886. I do love games like Ghost Trick but I think it’s a very good outlier in what I think the general game design ethos should be if I were to look at the medium in general.
replay value supposed to be subjective. I found myself replaying games that the media says have no replay value, 'just cause' it is fun or give me feelings.
I have a preference for longer games, mostly because I get attached to them in different ways I don't want to stop playing or "living" in those worlds. I have replayed From Software games, and I have spent many hours in my farm in Stardew Valley. I got a PS4 in 2020. Before that, I had a PS2, which broke around 2014. I replayed Silent Hill 2 and 3 dozens of times. For me, replay value is not extra content, but just how good a game feels to play again after you finish. Best replay value in games I've experienced: Silent Hill 1, 2 and 3, Dark Souls 1, 2 and 3 (and brothers), Final Fantasy 7 (not remake), Doom and Doom II (not Bethesdooms), Stardew Valley, Disco Elysium, Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas, Dead Cells, Top Gear 2, Horizon Chase Turbo, Blasphemous, Gradius Gaiden. Edit: Oof! (like in roblox), you mentioned the same thing I did. Serves me well for commenting before finishing a game. Anyway, you also made me want to talk about why I replay some specific games: Stardew Valley. I have made three farms and I will make many more. I love the music and colors of the seasons, specially Fall. In Mexico trees don't change their leaves in autumn, they change their greens, so I have never experienced a red fall, only in media. And I love it! And in SDV I can have 30 days of red fall every year, with awesome music and the wind blowing, and the rustling of leaves, and a scary halloween where I always gain the golden pumpkin. Horizon Chase Turbo. It's like I remember Top Gear 2. I played Top Gear 2 in the 90s, and it was awesome. I emulated a few years ago and it was not that good, but HChT is awesome! It feels like my memories! And the music, by the same genius who composed the music for Top Gear 1, Barry Leitch, is like being young again, like being 12, 13, 14 years old (sorry, I need to wipe a drop of water coming out from my eye). But also, because even when I hate cars, I love travel. I hate destinies, I get bored immediately on arrival and wanna go back home. But the travel part, seeing though the window, imagining I live in those forests and other landscapes (forests are best), that's what I love! And playing racing games with stylized graphics and a horizon that it's always there but you never get to, never reach, that's what I love. Dark Souls 2. Is best Dark Souls, what else is there to say? Also, Majula.
Loved the video definitely felt the inventing reasons to play a game I have upwards of 200 hours in ghost of Tsushima not because I 100% the game it’s because I just really enjoy base liberation and constantly replay bases hell I have 100 hours in cyberpunk a game I beat in 30 cause I like the asthetic of night city and yakuza 0 has almost 300 cause I like the funny rhythm games or playing pool and darts with friend and family once again a great video can’t wait for your next one
I’ve been gravitating towards more single player campaign or RPG driven games because it’s given me a personal goal, and once I reach the goal, it’s now a memory for me that I won’t forget. Before it got stale and uneventful like I would with a live service multiplayer game
Im not saying you are wrong, i think you are missing a point, because all this is about preference and from my perspective, replay value its not about if a game is better or not, its about how transcendent it is for YOU, i used to replay games a lot as a child because of my economic situation back then, i am not rich right now but getting new games has never been so easy, yet... when i find a good game i stretch it to the maximum, because if i play something its because i really liked it, when a game is great but there is not a good reason to play it again i just forget about it, so it was good the first time, but the second time it is not, why? i am not able to pin point the reason but i can give some theories, for example:Breath of the wild, more specifically the shrines, they are fun to play the first time but when you already know how to solve them... something is missing, so the second time i played i was not as enthusiastic to play them so i just didnt, i tried to do things in a different order because the open world of botw is inviting for experimentation, so when i was awarded with a shrine since thats one of the game cycle principles, i just activated the TP point but didnt entered. So i just end up speed running and trying harder challenges, but it is not as fun as it is for example in dark souls, where you can play in many different styles, so you get to play the way you want the first time, but then you can try something you are not familiar with and have somewhat of a new experience. I dont know how to finish this large text, but the point i want to make is, replay value is not prosaic, it has value for a certain demografic, you can trivialize it according to your tastes but for me, knowing things can be done in different ways, even in the first playthrough, allow me to play more slow and enjoy the ride, knowing i can save some things for other time.
I've always had this irk with how people talk about replay value, but I could never put it to words. I just liked to play games once and didn't think it made the game worse if I didn't want to play it again. I got the experience and fun from the game that I wanted, and that was that, but so many treat that feeling in a negative light. Watching this video really helped put to words what I was feeling.
5:50 As someone who has spent the last two years playing through the Trails series, I feel this very much. I very much agree with the points you're making, a game's size isn't reflective of the quality of it's content. I love games like The Legend of Heroes: Trails, Xenoblade, Ys, Zelda, Dark Souls or Hollow Knight. these really long games, but I also enjoy games like Vintage Story, Minecraft, Space engineers, and smaller games like Outer Wilds and Tunic, which are both games that you really can't have that same kind of first playthrough again. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'll play any game, as long as it's something that I'll enjoy playing.
Dude, you hit the nail on the head with this video. I buy games for their replay value but never replay them and in many cases never finish. Damn you Steam Sale games
To me, replay value is inherently fun gameplay. I am not a story gamer. My top game is Dota 2 with me having 4.4k hours right now. It is very likely unimaginable to story gamers and the characteristics mentioned slightly before 15:22. My other favourite game is Dying Light 2, which does generate endless amounts of quests which are repeatable somewhat, but the reason I play are not the quests, it's the fun gameplay for which the quests just give me direction for. No secrets, extra characters,...ok, multiple endings make me play DL2 more, but I'm actually not doing the second ending on my playthrough for the gameplay (or whatever I know about what it is later), I'm not triggering the ending now, I'm just enjoying what I have. Really good video giving commentary from different perspectives, but as I said, my answer to replay value is 100% fun gameplay. nothing else can captivate players as much as this. This is why we even play games, right?
If replay value was nonsense, then you wouldn't have people speed running games with high replay value while ignoring games with zero replay value. Donkey Kong Country has replay value. Donkey Kong 64 doesn't. Pretty obvious...
@@Elwood128 yeah... I feel that is a component he didn't see. Games can sometimes be more like a sport or playing an instrument than like a book or a movie. You cannot become "good" at reading lotr. Unlike with games. And some games are designed to have a very high skill ceiling that can only be achieved with multiple playthroughs. And it is perfectly fine for people to look for that in a game, because they are approaching it more like a sport or an instrument rather than a movie.
Reason to replay a game: 1) Nostalgia 2) Different route 3) 100% completion 4) Just bored and want to experience something familiar instead of a new game
Yeah, when I started playing my first choice-oriented RPGs, replay value in the form of having alternate story branches or character builds was an important factor because new games in the genre were rare and old ones were harder to find than they are today. Today, I'm averse to the idea of investing 50-100+ hours into an RPG to begin with, and replaying a game like that 2-5 times is inconceivable. I have like 700 games in my Steam library I haven't even experienced yet, and I'll take a fresh experience (even if it's a 30-year-old game) over replaying something... roughly 98% of the time. I'll gladly play the occasional randomizer run of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, though. That's usually 5-8 hours of alternating between struggling against the algorithm's choices and feeling the satisfaction of discovering an item that just cascades into a series of other discoveries. There's probably a Skinner Box element to it, but the limited length makes it work and consistently leads to a satisfying experience.
My first Dragon Age: Inquisition playthrough was just over 200 hours. I have started a second playthrough. Possibly twice. Didn't make it past the opening scenario before I realized I just didn't want the commitment. (Also, I'd apparently forgotten how to play the game.)
While I don’t disagree that replay value is oversold and relied on as a marketing tactic, replayability should be an inevitable feature in a well crafted CRPG, especially if based on tabletop rulesets. If you play a good CRPG with the approach of completionism, some of that replay value might dwindle. If you play these types of games like a tabletop game and don’t immediately explore every nook and cranny, or take every side quest on, there is generally a good reason to play again. Coming to mind are the recent Pathfinder games, Larian games, and some of the more obscure Obsidian stuff. Playing immersive sims completely changed how I think and approach RPGs. I would argue the real problem is that the concept of RPG has been diluted beyond repair at this point - Action Adventure Base-Building Crafting Farming Apothecary RPG with 6 arcade mini games, a revolutionary new card and dice game. This is often how the replay value argument is sold, instead of quality, world building, story, choice, consequences.
Never really thought about it this way, but I generally have never actually cared much about replay value. I do use the term in the modern context, and I think your video makes a great case to throw that in the trash because you're absolutely right. I replay Pokémon games fairly often (the 3D era ones the most I'd say), and while I do play them slightly differently, I don't replay them for the "replay value". I replay them because they're cozy, linear experiences that take place in a world that I've loved since I was a kid (also because fun). There is no reason for me to actually replay Pokémon X/Y, but I've done it twice in the last couple of years simply because I was bored and the game makes me feel good. That's literally it. Adversely, I played Life is Strange a single time even though it technically has a fair amount of "replay value" with all the different scenarios that can take place depending on your choices. Why? Because I actually don't like when games have a gazillion different outcomes. In terms of experience, it makes it unique, but I'm usually always satisfied with my choices, and have no interest in seeing how things play out in an alternate playthrough. Without spoiling, the ending of that game made me even less interested in replaying it actually. Even worse is when games have no alternate dialogue options, but simply an alternate ending based on a few specific choices, actions, etc. that are impossible to trigger without replaying the entire game. Some games go as far as to lock content behind multiple playthroughs which is...fine if that's what you're into, but I think it's questionable game design at its best, and bad game design at its worst. Nier Automata is one of the very few games that handles multiple endings incredibly well, and many of them are just jokes that require no extra effort or penalties on the part of the player. I would still only replay it for the gameplay, and none of the actual "replay value". All that to say, you're 100% right on this. Great video, honestly.
Excellent arguments! It's so arbitrary seeing people talk about replay value while ignoring how subjective it is and how little it has to do with the actual experience and design of the game. Taking that argument in music and movies, I may not listen to Opeth's Blackwater Park every day, nor do I watch Oldboy frequently, but those are expertly crafted pieces of art that I can revisit in a moment I want the same experience, not with an arbitrary date.
I've always loved to do one big, "definitive" playthrough, where I do as much as I can until I find my interest beginning to wind down, then I can't play the same game for another 10-20 years, however long it takes me to forget. Exploration and discovery are important to me for bigger games. So I was surprised when I saw people saying Elden Ring of all games couldn't be a contender for game of the year because its vastness undermined replayability. Actually, Elden Ring is the one big game that I did a second playthrough of shortly after the first.
I had two thoughts coming into this video and you nailed them both. 1. Replay value is personal (preference) 2. You can't evaluate replay value, since during each replay your conception has changed from or because of the former play-through.
It only took you 3 minutes to address what made me click on the video. But yeah, that was my healthy justification for that. Back then you couldn't just get infinite length games for free, and most free games had a catch, or required a PC which I didn't have. Final Fantasies Phantasy Star and Monster Hunter Games basically carried the crown for games you could buy and enjoy for shameful amounts of time. And I'm incredibly grateful for them.
As someone with an insane backlog of games to play through replay value is my enemy. But it still doesn't stop me from replaying if I enjoy a game since having fun is the objective of gaming.
love this video. im an rpg fan, so growing up in 80s/90s im used to replaying most of my games 4-8ish times because of how few games in the genre there were. felt like i was lucky if there were 3 big titles in a year i wanted to play. now there are so many games releasing that i struggle to find time to play a game a second time, whilst also trying to finish every game i buy because i hate backlogs.
Quite the thought provoking video. It left me with a question: If there's so much alternative content that I start a new playthrough right after I finish the first one, am I even replaying it or is it just one playthrough that's longer than it appears at first glance?
50 years old here and been playing games since literally the beginning of the medium (except for Space War, I'll admit). While "replay value" is something I consider to be a real thing, I suspect the origin of the concept came from an early awareness that many games simply were not that good! But in an evolving medium, the audience may lack the language to explain why something is failing. If a game wasn't that good the first time through you certainly where not going to want to play it again. I also think replay value may have become a common phrase due to the advent of heavily story-based and "cinematic" games because of a misunderstanding. Those kinds of games in particular were a difficult problem to solve in terms of making good use of the medium. Resulting in a fairly visible percentage of them being unengaging - certainly "not something I'd play again". But people tended to blame their lack of appeal on not focusing on the "game" part of the video game medium. Again they had it partly wrong - the games just weren't good.
I've beaten the campaign of Doom Eternal 3 times now across PC and PS4. I love revisiting the first episode of Doom 1993 every now and then. I've beaten EarthBound countless times. I've replayed Legend of Dragoon many times. I greatly enjoyed Omori, Eastward, Spider-Man 2018, and Disco Elysium, but I feel no real need to revisit them (besides coming back to their soundtracks). I just beat Fist of the North Star Lost Paradise the other day and highly enjoyed it, but I don't plan to do too much post-game stuff. I completed Shenmue 1 for the first time earlier this year and though I'm already nostalgic for the streets of Dobuita, I'm probably not gonna play through that adventure again. Or maybe I will in a few years, who knows. I played most of Dragon Quest Builders 2 and sometime last year revisited it up until completion of Furrowfield (my favorite portion of the game, probably). Each experience I just described is equally valid and meaningful to me, despite all of them seemingly having massive differences in replay value and completion percentage.
For games with microtransactions, replay value is also a means to get you back into the game more, where it's statistically proven the more time you spend in the game, the more likely you are to spend money.
You made so many excellent points, GC, and I appreciate all of them so much. The point about ‘replay value’ being nontransferable across other media such as film or books is incredibly telling about how subjective or invented it is as a standard of quality. Even your points about how we spend our time are very poignant. It’s an internal conversation I often struggle with as a full-time artist and trying to understand what ‘balance’ means between life and work. Thank you for this!
Replay value determines for me personally which game becomes one of my favorites. If it is a one and done experience, it might be great but replaying that shit over and over again is what makes it a baller experience for me. Now some games go for huge experiences that last hundreds of hours that taken on a per hour basis, it has you spend many more hours in one playthrough than many shorter games replayed over and over, and in the end it boils down to what the individual prefers. I've heard many people who hate replaying games so replay value has zero value for them. I think at the end of the day though it's just another criteria of why you're more likely to enjoy/recommend a game, it has no inherent value in it, the same could be said about graphics. Good video, made me think about the subject more in depth.
I think the point of the video is that the term is meaningless. The thing that makes you WANT to replay the game is that you enjoyed your time with it, not that it has extras you might have missed the first time around (as a single example) Paper Mario is “replayable” even though nothing changes from replay to replay because it’s a good game, not because there’s something new to see each time you play
Not every game needs to be replayable, some are better off that way, but the games that I hold the dearest are those that I can replay dozens of times in a dozen different ways (from a 50-100 hours long first 100% playthrough to a 1 hour long casual speedrun, as well as all kinds of challenge runs or randomizers) and still get a different experience each time, like hollow knight, celeste or botw. Games like journey or oneshot still left an impact on me, but I'm not gonna look back on them as an integral part of my life like hollow knight.
There is a reason there is an entire category for replay value for most reviewers, most gamers care about it, because not all of us can afford to buy every game we want to play, so replay value is extremely important for ppl who only buy a handful of games a year, if you need to get an entire year out of 5 or so games then replay value is the most important thing
Glad someone could put into words what I only had as a feeling. Not gonna lie, I have thought of and probably mentioned "replay value" not truly realizing that it's misguided. The value in "Replay value" to me is the idea of enjoying something enough that you are willing to revisit it (since otherwise it's unlikely you'd even want to finish). Granted you can enjoy something and not revisit it.
My currently favorite Videogame I played through 15 times just becuse I like it. And Every playthrough I played it pretty much the same way. The game has 3 endings and while I got the normal ending in my first playthrough and the golden ending in all my other playthroughs I will never go fore the bad ending. I dont need to see everything a game has to offer.
Games are expensive so the idea of having more things to do after the story campaign makes me feel like it's money well spent. One example I could think of is GTA V
"Games don't need replay value" is a hot take that is just wrong. Trying to define games or terms under an umbrella term will always be wrong, let me explain with one word: roguelike! Name me one roguelike developer that wants their players to play through their game just once. Roguelike games entirely rely on replay value, that is the core experience. I almost never replay linear games, but I put way more time replaying a roguelike over and over again than I do playing through linear games. The capitalist outlook should be against replay value because buying more games will generate more money than players replaying the same game over and over again, unless there is a subscription or ads or some other way to generate money as people play, otherwise the companies make no money on people putting more hours into their game. I also disagree with your replay value for books or movies, I talk about movies in terms of replay value, if I like a book or movie I will not reread it just because I like it, once I read a story or watch a movie and I know everything it becomes boring no matter how much I enjoyed it the 1st time. What gives a movie replay value is when you can't understand the entire movie in one viewing or having a different perspective when you watch it again. For instance, some movies reveal a detail at the end that completely changes the meaning of everything that came before so that when you know what happens at the end rewatching it will be a completely different experience. Not all games have or need replay value, but other games completely rely on it, really depends on the game and what experience the developer wants the players to have.
Counterpoint: Remnant From the Ashes and Remnant 2 have true replay value. There are stuff you will encounter that you never did before. Helps the campaign is only like 10 hours if you really push your way through it. But the rest of your point is totally valid
I was about to dislike the video but had to stop for a moment, after which I even pressed like. The notion that the term is unnecessary might be a bit misleading. The usage of the term is in most cases wrong, which is where I totally agree with your video. However, there are a lot of games that are designed to have a certain "replay value" to be able to exist. Most of these are roguelik(/t)es or multiplayer games like CS:GO or LoL or hyper casual games like Candy Crush, Tetris or even Minesweeper. Analysing those might be a separate topic I think, but they need to meet a certain threshold of "replay value" to keep players from dropping them immediately and to keep the game alive.
GC, I love all your videos -- and even then, this was a new high. It was a wild roller coaster too, because I went from "YES" to "Hmm... not sure how this --" to "Oh. YES." Love how it all comes together. And I totally agree. So much of the "Short games vs. Long games" discourse kinda just... misses the big picture. This feels like a lovely spiritual sequel to "You Don't Need to Finish Games" and I am all for the hot takes.
I dont think I entirely agree..Take games like Doom Eternal or Dishonored , it's insanely fun replaying the same levels again and again just because of the gameplay strength and then you have games like Deus ex giving you multiple choices in both story and gameplay moments. Honestly I value that a lot. There are games like Last Of us that I love that I will never play more than once cause frankly the gameplay just doesnt hold up once you know the story beats.
Considering I get my games 2-3 years later at $10 or less, replay value isn’t much of a factor. I play the game, have my fun then move on to the next one.
I agree with you, but I think replay value is a thing for shorter games, like a resident evil per say. That said, I think developers can make a game more enjoyable to play a second or third or more times by adding less boring walking sections etc
I find I can only replay games if it's been several years since I last played it. Once I've beat a game the 2nd playthrough feels like some of the magic is lost knowing all that's coming up.
While I agree with a lot of this video, it juxtaposes strangely against the point I ALSO see and largely agree with in movie criticism. That is, that a lot of modern blockbusters are being created to sell big in the theaters but without care about rewatchability. That they're big spectacles that draw you in at first but afterwards leave you not really caring about seeing it over and over again. You're just supposed to move on to the next big blockbuster.
"We don't talk about whether a movie is re-watchable or not."
What? Yes we do.
Countless times I've heard an average/disappointing movie described as "worth 1 watch" or "watch it once, never again".
Agreed. I've felt that way about slasher films where everyone gets killed.
Improving a game's replay value could just mean skippable cutscenes for example, or avoiding forcing me to hold forward on left stick for 30 minutse just to listen to some stuff I've heard before ,some games' tutorial sections are so long that they kill replay value.There are many games that I love but know I will never play again because most of it would be boring. I usually understand replay value as "Is the game a pain in the ass to replay again".
Outer Wilds is one of my favorite games and it's unreplayable by design.
What an incredible game…
But it's endlessly replaying in my mind
Give it 3-4 years and you will
@@DoktorKumpel you'd need to forget everything about I to have the same impact.
The closest thing I think to inherent "Replay Value" a medium can have (Be it video Games, books, movies, etc.) is the mystery genre. Because mysteries (At least, well written ones) subtly encourage you to re-play/watch/read them to learn subtle clues they've scattered throughout them before the big twist. Though even then, you're likely only going to do that IF you enjoyed it in the first place, so your point still stands!
How about deeper stories that become better in hindsight
One Piece has a bunch of that
I once heard a comment from someone that went "I don't like games that I can't replay more than once" which got me to really reconsider how valuable replay value actually is. Does that mean someone could play a game and love it but retroactively hate it because they have no reason to come back to it? So I love the take that replay value is nonsense.
It could very well be true that every game they like, they can (and do) replay more than once. And thus any game they couldn’t was a game they didn’t like. They probably just got the cause and effect backwards (i.e. “I didn’t like the game” => “I won’t replay the game” turned into “I couldn’t replay the game” => “I didn’t like the game”)
Why is that weird? Have you never played a game and liked it but not to the point you want to replay it? Or played a game liked it but there isn’t a reason to play again? Some games have extra content on replays or new games plus. Some have other choices or story stuff that you can’t see on a first play through. Some are just the same game over again. They may still have value or it may not depending on the game. I don’t even understand this argument.
@@nathanhargenrader645
It's weird because why would that change whether I like it or not? If I play through a game and it was really good or fun but not so much that I want to play it over and over again, why would that suddenly make me think the game was bad or decide that I don't like the game?
I wouldn't say it's "hate" for not having a reason to replay it, but just knowing that you won't be able to experience it for the first time again, or worse, that it's not as good as you remember
Both can happen more easily in a linear game, especially with a linear progression, since choosing which permanent abilities you get, NG+ content, or giving multiple ways to complete a game can change the way you look at it, and even love it more
Of course that's just my two cents from someone that loves replaying a lot of stuff
A game you don't come back to isn't a game worth playing in the first place
This video was incredibly refreshing as someone who loves replaying linear games
If I had a dollar for every time I've played Metroid Fusion & Dread
@@X-35173How much money would you have?
@@Elden-BearThere are two types of people: Those that can extrapolate from incomplete information.
@@supC_ I just need a tiny bit of information. Even personal small ones. Then I could make my estimate.
I think this is why people generally like older games. They weren't made with anything like replay value in mind, they just wanted to make good games.
those games hade replay value that is why people went back and played them over and over again. A good game will have replay value a bad one will not.
Not really, games back then had a trend to be arcade games. Which are games to be played alot, on and off gameplay
For me replay value is about skill ceiling, how the game plays once you are near it and if it doesn't have too much unskippable waiting. I don't need extra characters or endings, I want to have the game to be fun even after being familiar with it and discovering all secrets. It also helps if the game is short.
Exactly, the first time I played hollow knight I didn't even attempt the pogo skip to fury, but now I do fireball skips in greenpath and the shade skip to blue lake in almost all of my playthroughs. Gradually going for more and more advanced skips every time I replay it is really fun and it allows me to make my playthroughs as long as I want them to be.
I personally agree although I like playing multiplayer games partly because of the endless content that the players provide because no 2 battles are the same against a human opponent
Good take, but I disagree. I do think replay value exists, and I think the factors that determine it can be objectively quantified and compared between games. Not just games really but other media too.
For example, I'd argue platformers that use fixed jumps and movements have less replayable gameplay than games that give more control to the player. There's more room to design interesting levels, and more ways players can navigate them. A specific example of this would be TY the Tasmanian Tiger. When it released it was considered boring and not worth speedrunning, and even to this day some say the games have "bad" controls and level design. The game is perfectly responsive and it's not like any of the level are confusing or hard to navigate, especially for the time. I think the main sticking point is the fixed controls. Ty always jumps at the same height and there isn't really any way to accelerate, so every platforming sequence is purely a spacing challenge. There aren't any ways to make the easier challenges more interesting and there aren't any ways to make the harder ones less rigid. Where in another game you could try to get a running start or try to long jump, in Ty it's the same exact same jump. Every. Single. Time.
This has nothing to do with whether or not you like the games, I do quite like the Ty games and I do replay them. It has nothing to do with the amount of content, like I just implied Ty got multiple sequels with decent amounts of content. This is a specific, quantifiable mechanic that affects the enjoyment of repeated playthroughs. And other mechanics and factors like this exist in other genres and even mediums. Of course there's an element of preference, there always is. Most people won't engage with or even notice these nuances, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. You can argue that replayability is overrated, or that the word is abused, and to an extent I agree. But I don't think the case that most replay games purely, or even mainly out of subjective preference holds water.
I don't know that I entirely agree with 'replayability' being a nonsense term, but you do make good points in that whatever replayability means to one individual, it will most assuredly not have the same meaning to another; which does discredit the term quite a bit in its current frequency of use. However, as someone that plays hundreds of titles every year, I know exactly what replayability means to me. And I know precisely what makes me return to a title and what doesn't. My definition of it is highly individual and that's where you make a tremendously good point. Unless contextualized, the term is useless.
Back then I'd argue to the opposite, but then I remembered how shocked I was when one of my favourites, Ace Attorney, which I thought wasn't replayable, had so many cases replayed by many people. I then tried to do so myself, and I was dumbfounded as to how... replayable a story game was, one with linear progression, at that. So many well written dialogue exchanges I'd forgotten about, nuanced takes about characters and their relationships, and a LOT of foreshadowing I had no idea was there at all in my first time through.
There are games with a stronger reason to replay, like Pokémon or Persona, but in essence, every game is replayable; the ones that are the most replayable are mostly dependent on what the player enjoys.
As someone who has played a Khajiit every damn time in Skyrim across multiple playthroughs, I approve this message
I think you've missed the point. The term Replay Value means what it was explained to mean in the wikipedia article. It is a term _applied_ to the concepts of a game having those things. It isn't a term meant to mean the broader definition you're using. It only means that a game has those aspects. For some players games with those features are appealing to them because they want those features. There are four basic reasons a player might want this:
1) They have limited disposable income and so they have to pull the most fun out of a game. They might only be able to buy a new game once a month, or once a year, so they need the games they buy to last a very long time. For them, it is vital that the game has extras for the additional playthroughs exactly because they otherwise wouldn't _want_ to replay it but _have to anyway_ or else they'd be doing nothing.
2) They have limited capacity to learn or experience new games. These are gamers that take a long time to learn games and so want to spend a very long time with a game. Or these are comfort gamers that like to replay a game because it fits their neurodivergence to do so. For a lot of people, new media is difficult. For people that don't experience that kind of anxiety, it sounds ridiculous but for some people starting up a new game is daunting. Be it because they struggle to learn or desire comfort, these gamers want games with long run times and the ability to replay the game over and over in different ways. Those are the games they come back to time and time again.
3) They have a need for long play times. Hidden in the above, but also all on its own, some players merely have a need for long play times. If you're disabled or have a job with a lot of down time, or you are a child; you might have long stretches of time that you need to fill with limited options for filling it. If your preferred method of filling that time is with games, you will gravitate to longer games with more variability when playing again. The above reasons may be the root cause of why you can't move on to other games, but let's say the difference between 1/2 and 3 is the scale. If you have 14 hours a day to fill with games, nobody can afford to fill it with new 2-8 hour $20-60 experiences. Simply isn't economically viable for anyone.
4) They desire relaxation and not stimulation. There are a lot of forever games that are either entirely chill or have long stretches of chill activity. Not everyone plays for challenge or to experience stories. Getting lost in a world or merely wanting to zone out from a long day full of hard choices are powerful play motivators. Games like Animal Crossing, MMORPGs and craftathon games like Valheim, Minecraft or Stardew offer players the option to play thousands of hours or more zoning out on repetitive tasks that slowly move towards a goal.
All of these reasons are why the label of Replay Value exists. It lets players know what sort of game they are in for.
Now, has this be co-opted and warped by marketing and the industry? Absolutely. But not all parts of a game's marketing are for all people. If you don't show these sorts of players that your game offers this kind of content, they'll pass on your game. It is valid to cater to these sorts of people. In fact, for all of these categories it is vital that the industry does cater to them. Every category I mentioned _needs_ games that have this quality. That's why the quality exists. That's why the label exists.
Any game can have replay value if you like it enough to replay it.
Yeah, i think you missed the point, buddy, and this comment leads me to believe you didn't watch the video.
I'm not sure if i misundertood some of the points in the video but I actually disagree with a lot of it lmao.
While there are other ways for a game to justify its value, at 70 bucks time of enjoyment is a popular one because it might take a while for you to be able to buy many others withiut getting broke, so yeah, i think it's a decent selling point. IF. The game isn't hurt by it. I think we are all tired of 100 hour open world games that could be perfectly translated into a linear game and cut 70 hours of boring walking around.
Videogames like all entertainment is subjective, and while it's ultimately your decision to replay a game, it doesn't mean that the developer can't do their part to intentionally make it better for the player going back to it. Being able to see new things or unlocking new endings are an example tou mentioned. In some games you need to make different decisions that lead to different content to see a new ending, etc. A good example for me is Dark Souls. 1 is a truly special game for me and while I'd probably replay it once anyway, I don't think i would come back to it nearly as much if there weren't new builds and secrets that ept the game fresh for a lot longer, and unlike graphics or music, it's content explicitly made to incentive you to experience the game again and it works. I now get into Souls games already intending to replay them unless I didn't enjoy them, because them still being fresh after very long is something that i like about them.
I also think that saying that "replayability" is not something unique to games it's fair, but it's important to acknowledge that it does manifest differently in games. Some games like Devil May Cry or Ultrakill have replay value by asking the player to master them, while others just have a lot of content. You can't master watching The Truman Show, and ehile you can miss some bits watching only once, it's not to the scale of all the stuff you can do in New Vegas or something.
But I do agree that in the end it's more about you liking the game or not. We as humans just like excuses to spend a lot of time with stuff we find special. Replay value is just the devs coming with a very good one for us instead of immediately having to go for challenge runs or things like that
I don't disagree with you, but I don't think it is redundant to say a good game is replayable. Games, unlike other media, are interactive, they mostly demand effort. So it's not that simple. That's why TH-cam videos of cutscenes are so popular. There's even "movies" of games on TH-cam, where all the cutscenes are compiled together in a 4 hour long video, and people watch it, specially those who already played it.
This was fantastic! :) I'm in the camp of "going back to games I love again and again" rather than jumping to the New Hotness, probably because I am in my 40s and never shook those old 8- and 16-bit era habits.
VERY long-form response under the cut:
I have a myriad of mental problems - incuding ADHD - which affect my ability to remember things I experience unless I have experienced them multiple times and they're encoded into my long-term memory. (I also have Asperger's, which made me write an entire tangent about Disney's Beauty and the Beast and my current D&D character, which I deleted because LOOK AT THIS COMMENT, it's an essay in itself)
Additionally I have a deep affection in my heart for quite a few games regardless of length or depth, but I do have a type.
I love games with a lot of lore I can binge, even (or espeically?) with my memory problems. Alternatively, if a game just has really fun mechanics and interesting characters, it'll hold my interest (I am an absolute sl*t for a good fighting game).
However, I don't like games that are too hard for the sake of being hard - I have one Souls game (Dark Soul II: Scholar of the First Sin), both Nioh games, and Code Vein (the latter three I got through a PS Plus membership), and I will probably never make it to the halfway point of any of them. However, challenge is no barrier if I'm invested enough, or if the game is fun for me.
I don't care about a game's online playability unless it's something I want to play with people I care about, and I will play any game with my loved ones that they want to, because even if it sucks we enjoy each other's company enough to make the experience suck less.
So with all that out of the way, here's some of the games I go back to again and again, grouped by categories of why I do so:
1) The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: Not so much the vanilla game, but I discovered randomizers through this game and the experience of exploring the same world again and again with a new path and "loadout" each time is amazing. Plus, the randomizer I use lets you swap Link out for any of dozens of characters from across pop culture media. Playing a Zelda game as Zelda, Crono, Luigi, or Sailor Saturn is an absolute trip and I highly recommend it. This is not a game I play for the story - I have the original Nintendo Power manga for that. I play it to explore the worlds I know back-to-front in new and exciting ways.
2/3) Castlevania: Symphony of the Night & Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: Someitmes I use randomizers here as well, but for the most part I love the game exactly as it is. There's something fun about playing in luck mode (use the name X-X!V''Q) and overcoming a MUCH more diffcult early game to become even more of an absolute unit than in the base game. And I like the story and characters here, which is a step up from LttP where it was...fine. Bloodstained, I beat the main game once and then jumped right into Randomizer mode, because it's just that fun to explore the game's world.
4) Skyrim. I CANNOT seem to quit this game. Granted, I only ever play it with mods, as I found the vanilla experience buggy, ugly, and shallow even back in 2011, but the modding community for this game has transformed it again and again into something worth experiencing. If not for the fact that my computer is a decade-old dinosaur of a laptop that struggles with more than 3 episodes of a show on any given streaming site, I would probably redownload the game and the 200+ mods I had installed on it, just to experience my version of it again. Even with the much more limited suite of mods available on PS4, it's still a heck of a game to go back to and tinker with to see what you can turn it into.
5/6) Final Fantasy VII & X. Unlike the other games, which I play with mods or different modes to give myself a new experience, I play these two purely vanilla, because the vanilla experiences were so powerful and formative to me. 7 was the first RPG I ever played to completion, and is still my favorite game of all time. 10 was one of the most narratively fulfilling experiences I've ever had, and I count Yuna as my favorite RPG character ever to this day (even with the...let's say 'different' direction they took her character in the sequel). I replay these games the same way someone rereads a book or rewatches a movie, to explore not the world, but the characters and themes, and my own interpretive twists (especially in the case of FF7 where things like party lineup in cutscenes are a LOT more flexible). But I still love playing them because of the customizability of the characters and the different ways you can interpret them based solely on their sphere path or Materia loadout.
7) Dragon Age: Inquisition . I'll admit, I was very sad when you said you wouldn't likely go back to this game. I've always loved the "Bioware RPG", from KOTOR and Jade Empire all the way through the Dragon Age series (I might even play Mass Effect someday, despite my innate dislike of shooters), and I saw Inquisition as that formula at its most refined. The characters in the party felt like real people, and exploring the world with them felt like exploring with real friends. Even the ones I didn't care for (no names, for I fear the wrath of the DA stans will swoop down upon me, and swooping is bad) I still hung out with outside of battles, and did my best to understand. My core party may not have changed much (Varric & Bianca, Dorian, Iron Bull, and me as a second mage), but the whole cast touched me in different ways (NOTLIKETHAT...well...Iron Bull kinda like that) and I felt sad when the game ended and I had to part ways with them. Between the joy of rereading a favorite book and the fun of exploring new possibilities, I'd say Inquisition is one of the few AAA games that really did hit its mark of the traditional sense of "replay value" for me.
8/9) Hollow Knight & Hades: These two are the 'newest' in my collection, and as such I'm not "replaying" them so much as "playing them for a very long time". I acquired Hollow Knight in 2019 and Hades in the Hell-Year of 2020. These two games have yet to give up all their secrets to me. I am not good at Hollow Knight, however much I enjoy it, and so I haven't technically beaten it yet, despite owning it for 4 years now. But I go back to it with roughly the same frequency as everything else on this list, because it's so very compelling, and because I've gotten farther with it than any other Souls-compared game I've ever tried, and I could actually see myself beating it someday in the far future. Hades, by contrast, I HAVE beaten, i.e. gotten all the way through the game's levels without losing...I just haven't "beaten" it, which is to say 'explored the narrative to its full conclusion'. I know it's possible to achieve a Golden Ending where Zagreus achieves all his goals and achieves peace between all the Olympian Gods (a monumental feat in and of itself if you know ANYTHING about Greek mythology), but I've not gotten there yet, so I keep trying, and keep going, and keep playing. Who knows if achieving the best ending to these two games will cause me to set them aside for something else? Maybe I'll stick with them like I have all the other games on this list.
Honorable mentions) Dragon Quest III, IX, and XI: While it pains me to admit it, I haven't beaten a single Dragon Quest game yet. These three are my mentions here because they're my current foci. I started IX first, after getting the 'kinda good' ending of VIII. I was introduced to building and rebuilding my party, changing classes, leveling each character up, speccing them, min-maxing a "perfectly normal amount"...and then still getting my tail handed to me by the final dungeon, let alone the final boss. I walked away from that one numerous times but always went back because "maybe this time"...and then two weeks of grinding later I'd give up again. This time I'm going to try and get a little farther with the characters I have, and try to ignore the boredom and frustration that sets in when I'm doing the same thing for too long at a time with no tangible progress. XI was second, and while I love the cast there as much as I love the cast of DA: Inquisition, I hit a wall with the final boss and realized that I'd forgotten to do something exremely important at the 11th hour mark, so I had to start entirely over, and I'm still plugging away at that second attempt. And finally there's DQ III, which I just started this year and am still playing for the first time. It's taking the bulk of my attention right now, but I know when the 2.5d remake comes out on Switch, I'll be jumping ship for that version, so it WILL be getting replayed, even if I'm still on my first playthrough with the current Switch version.
Aaaaand, that's it. Congratulations on making it this far! I know this was a lot, but apparently I have a lot to say about the "replay value" of my favorite games and why I go back to them again and again.
Keep up the good work, JC. Seeing a new vid from you is always a treat. ^_^
Great video, but i have to hold my opinion that Replay value both exist, exist for a reasonable reasons, and provides value. It feels like a plea to we shouldn't care, or that the reason we do care is nonsense, when we do care, and the reason we do are sensible.
Also we are now entering the value of the medium to including replay value. It may exist in other mediums but its value in the medium of video games is different because it is interactive. You may have a new insight from rereading a book, but the interactive experience also gains that new insight while still being new experience (and we can dive into rereading a book with that new insight is a new experience if you want).
Its not leaving the vocabulary, and i would like to believe it may even become more prominent.
This is so true. I even remmember reading game informer in my teens and seeing the "replay value" score under thier review, further persuading readers to give it increasing value.
I'm going to finish watching the video but I have to say that this is a stunning analysis of "replayability" as a concept in video games and why I balked at it so much.
I think I should give a little context. I currently have... maybe 350+ games in my immediate reach (because I'm a videogame hoarder) spread between 3 different consoles (1 of which is just me owning a switch lite and a companion switch OLED). This, I concede, is a lot of games. i have so many because I want to experience where we are now and all the things I missed as a child and as an infant born in the mid 90s. GC, we talked about this during one of your streams but I'll likely die before I finish all of these games. This is thousands of hours of games and I'm by no means a fast player. It stands to reason that if I want to at least sample all of these games until I'm satisfied, I have no time to care about replayability or what it means.
And what does it mean??? Am I replaying slay the spire, dicey dungeon, loop hero or shiren the wanderer: the dice of fate, or Pokemon mystery dungeon blue if I die before finishing the ultimate objective of the game or don't have the right build for the dungeon? What if I only like running around the Da'at map in SMT 5 or facing off 4 v 4 on a paintball shoot out in splatoon 3, what if I just want to paint in chicory like the colouring book it is? What if i have a good time with a game and simply dont return to it after playing part way? What is replayability for me then? For the most part if I get to an ending I tend not to replay a game. My appetite for it has been satisfied and I can move on to a new experience; I don't need new game +. It does make me admire people who can replay their favourite games and talk about their favourite experiences with the games, not because of some metric or to milk it for every last dollar that they spent but simply out of love or some form of appreciation. I love games whether I play or simply collect them and I think I'd be far more torn up about replayability and not finishing them if I internalized any of it as I came across it and took it as a moral failing.
While I do agree that judging a game based on how fun would it be to play it multiple times doesn't make sense, I also think it's kinda silly to act like it's a problem in games critique. People use replay value as a descriptor for games that can elongate their playtime by offering multiple ways of progressing through it, but I haven't seen anyone bashing a game because it's not replayable, or diminishing its value because of it. 99.9% of critics only care if a game is good or not.
When BOTW came out I thought it's so awesome how because of the near infinite freedom it will have near infinite replay value, but after spending 200h on my first playthrough and nearly everything meaningful, my second playthrough before TOTK sucked. Well not sucked, there was still a lot to appreciate and revisit, but it wasn't 1/10th of the enjoyment of the first playthrough because the challenges and discovery are so heavily knowledge based. Plus, over the 200 hours I perfected the combat system, had my fill of the art direction and world design etc.
Considering you can beat BOTW at any time in a sense I DID replay it many many times, maybe not the minute content, but I visited most of the areas multiple times, beat countless camps, etc
On the other hand, sure I could beat MGS 6 more times, but after 200 hours of MGS, say after 20 completions, maybe it won't be as exciting for some time too. I mean heck I'd have to watch my favorite films 100 times to get to know them so well. And that's perfectly ok, it doesn't change the fact that my first playthrough of BOTW was the greatest experience I've had with a video game.
As much as I like a certain game, growing old means I have less time to game, so mostly I finished a game, satisfied with it and move on to the next so I can enjoy as much as possible
Monster hunter also comes into my mind. I enjoy it, now still but lack of time tells me this grindy game isn't for me
Another reason I rarely play online games since it will be a never ending activity, and also I don't have any friends to play, sad
Whatever your stance on this, as long as you enjoy the activity, that's that. Enjoy your time everyone!
Some movies have "rewatch value"! Especially those where the plot twist was hinding in plain sight the whole time!
This video feels like a companion sequel to the not having to finish games video... and I love it!
Don't have anything to add besides the greatest example that is the speedrunning community of any game. most people start to speedrun a game because they just wanted to replay a game from their childhood or it's just a favorite of them, and in the process they discover cool tricks and secrets that aren't related to 100% completion and mostly glitches or new tricks to beat certain bosses or parts in the game.
May as well drag it in but side quest and extra stuff to do in a game is optional for a reason, it's there as an incentive to keep playing the game if you already enjoy it and want to see what it has to offer. It's never something you have to do unless it's an older RPG and it's there to make the final boss easier (because you really don't need to grind in an RPG).
Obviously before watching. I did always find that nonsensical. Like What, have you NEVER rewatched a movie just because you liked it. Replay value isn't something you can slap a label on. It's extremely subjective.
What other may want to replay, you may be a one and doner for
Awesome video idea. Personally I agree with your take.
I've played tons of games that claim to have "replay value" however I've played through the story of the last of us like... 8 times or something lol even tho I've played it on every difficulty and got all the collectables etc.
Something about that world and characters make me wanna revisit it. Think you really hit the nail on the head! Thx for the content
Thank you!
I think the term "replayability" has become a money cash grab idea, to keep people playing while feeding more content for cash into the game. For me replayability always comes from the game itself and how much I got myself invested. I still play all the classic Mega Man games. It doesn't matter that I have not changed how I approach them for years, always playing the same boss orders. But there is something charming. I can always rely on my memories and trust to find any time what was there before. No new shannanigans. No new content secretly pushed on me.
I was promised convincing and convinced I was. I wanted to say I'm not "plugged in" but the only manner in which I am unplugged is that I am not an electric guitar. But truly, I don't pay much attention to games media and reviews and the like. I see a cool thing, maybe I glance at a number score on Metacritic or how it's favoring on Steam, and I watch it be played before making a decision. That's all to say I had no idea "replay value" was such a hot ticket term in advertisement for games. To me on a personal level it's always been code for "If you still feel like playing this game after you beat it, you can have a different experience with it."
Given all of that, the most I get out of any game is from Souls games, I can never just beat them once. I have to beat it with several different characters and master several different styles of play before I can feel content to move on to another game. Arguably, I'm not having that different of an experience, I'm still fighting the same bosses and going to the same areas for the most part, but the style of play shift is enough for me. So, yeah, GC is absolutely right on this one, what makes a game replayable is definitely all a personal metric, and not consistent across games. Hell, I'm not sure I even mentally processed coming back to play a game later as "replay value." I just want to play Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger again. So this really opened me up to think more about the term and indeed the entire case of replaying in the first place!
This is a rather fascinating video the early parts were rambly but towards the end you made banger points.
It's funny how a game like Nier Automata made it a nessescity to replay it in order for you to get the "full story" but even after getting all 5 main endings, I still found the story of it to be the most dull and painfully average things ever. The voice acting and the whole "Yoko Taro game finally has good gameplay to carry stories" to be what got me through it. To this day, I have no desire to replay it again and would honestly rather watch the anime instead whenever the dub for the latter finally finishes or if it gets a season 2.
Meanwhile games like Twisted Metal Black and Halo 3 were good enough that I replayed them multiple times. TM Black's driver routes can be beaten in an hour especially if you use cheats and the game's gameplay felt so good and the stories for each driver are told so well and does a good job at contextualizing the narrative that I played through all the avaliable ones.
Halo 3 is probably the most mechanically rich Halo game ever with some great level design minus the Flood missions that I played it multiple times and now I feel like Heroic is the default difficulty where anyother Halo, I would rather play on Normal.
A lot of games I like I often replayed on Normal and just want to write reviews for or refresh my memories on them. I don't like replaying games too much or any media since the diminishing returns starts to eventually kick in. It's like listening to the same song on repeat, what was great the first time loses it's value the more you listen to it within close proxmity of each other.
I’m super interested in what your take on this is…
The entire thing you're missing is that, in the case of a HIT game you find you want to keep replaying, having more content means more of the thing you love. For example, I love the Deus Ex games. I would replay them even if they didn't have things put in explicitly for "replay value", but having all of these things, achievements, different branches to the story, different ways to solve situations-they give me more reasons to revisit the world and spend more time there. Would I have replayed Mankind Divided 4 times without the achievements? Probably. Would I have decided to spend over 260 hours in it if it didn't have all of these extras? Of course not. Having these things kept the experience fresh and enjoyable for me for much longer, and with my disabilities it is getting harder and harder to find games I am capable of not just playing, but loving and being able to spend quality time playing.
God, youre so much fun to just listen to! I have an old video arguing that speedrunning proves all games have infinite replau value, so its very satisfying to hear someone take down the term from a broader and more thorough angle. Great work :)
Wow, thanks!
13:45 I honestly think this is the segment I have the biggest problem with in your video.
I think it is redundant to make a one to one comparison between games and other media like movies or books, because games function not only as a piece of narrative art to engage with like a movie or book, but sometimes as a hobby or activity to perform like sports or table top games or playing an instrument, things that are actually expected and sometimes designed to do over and over again for years.
And so I think it is perfectly fine for someone to care if this game/activity is something that they will want to come back over and over again. Like if you are trying to learn a new intrument, you try it out and decide if you want to continue with and play it over and over again (sometimes even the same exact song) or if you rather do something else.
I care about replay value, I want my very favorite games to be games that I carry with me my whole life and can revisit over and over again. And certain games are just... not very friendly to that idea, particularly (to me) the very big games or games with a lot of grinding or stuff like that. No matter how much I enjoyed the first time, I don't necessarily want to play them ever again. It is way more likely that I will replay a 2 hour game than a 100 hour game, even if I liked them the same. Or maybe games that have some cool speed run mechanics with a big skill ceiling and I want to become good at, and this can only be done with repeat playthroughs, just like with playing an instrument. You cannot become "good" at watching the godfather, but you can become good at a sport or a video game. So again it is not a one-to-one comparison.
And granted, my views on what makes a game replayable are not necessarily the same to what the big marketing executives think replay value is, I am not trying to establish any general rules. Just like what they think is "fun" is not necessarily what I think is "fun" but they still can market their game as being "fun", and it is up to me to judge if it will be actually fun to me.
I don't know I find this video to feel a little bit hostile towards a subjective topic, some people really care about their games being replayable like me... you don't. And that is okay. Doesn't mean that the concept is "nonsense".
I recently left a game review where I covered replay value "because people care about that sort of thing" while explicitly stating that I think replay value is overemphasized/overvalued in modern game reviews. This video deeply validates me, heck yeah
The first game I finished was Paper Mario on N64. To put into perspective how many times I've finished it, I've done more complete playthroughs of Paper Mario on N64 than all of my other games combined. As in, all my Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Metal Gear, Pokemon, Zelda, etc, together don't reach the amount of times I've finished Paper Mario.
Good video, but I mostly disagree with you.
I agree that a media's quality shouldn't be determined by how much you want to experience it again. But I do not agree that replay value is a synonym to preference, or just a will to revisit something you already like.
There is one aspect of replay value that is always responsible by the developers, and can be measured, and that is recontextualization.
You mentioned how no one measures movies for their "rewatch value". That is not true. I've seen plenty of people discuss movie scenes that evoke different emotions the second time you see them, and it's because that now you know how the movie ends, you realize how many aspects of that scene were designed with the upcoming plot twists and conclusions in mind. Watching a scene while being ignorant of the movie's full narrative versus watching after you're aware of everything becomes a different experience.
That's not you wanting to see the movie again. That's the writer rewarding you for watching the movie again. It's giving you reasons to watch the movie a second time, it makes the exact same movie feel different by using nothing but context and ignorance.
That's something that can happen in games, too. Not only through narrative, but through gameplay. The devs might decide to teach you new abilities that you always had at the very end of a game, which you could then experiment in the game's beginning.
Now that's a thing about replay value. You won't be able to see it until you actually play the game again. And as such, using that as a metric to determine if you should even buy the game in the first place is unfair, to say the least.
But I still think it's silly to affirm replay value is just "you want to play the game again, so you do it". Many developers design aspects of their games to enhance a second playthrough, and it's work that should be acknowledged and praised.
This doesn't exactly go against what he said. The critique is about the value being placed on replayability and not the concept of additional viewings or playthroughs holding additional value.
Movies get recontextualized with knowledge of the endings and plot twists and can be an extra treat to rewatch, but the value placed on this aspect of the medium is relatively much much smaller. It's practically only brought up when these elements stand out on a second watch as an exciting bonus of the movie, and hardly ever, if ever, brought up when a movie doesn't have it. No one takes points off of the quality of a movie citing, "I watched the movie twice and it didn't add anything for me."
@@RedOphiuchus I agree that games shouldn't need to be replayable, and that people give much more value to replays in games than rewatches in movies. From that perspective, I agree with the video.
But that's not quite what I got from the video. He very explicitly states that replay value only exists under the context of you as a person simply deciding to play a game again, and that other more common uses of the term are nonsense. (Or maybe not, it's been a while since I watched this video).
The title of the video isn't "Replay Value is Overrated". It's "Replay Value is Nonsense". As in, "it's made up".
13:49 Eeeeeeeh... I feel like that's a swing and miss. Movies are static content. It would be silly to judge them with replay value because they themselves don't usually change; now obviously there's things like extended cuts, remasters, et cetera, but each distinct release is static. Once you experience it once, that version of the product is not going to be any different the next time you experience it. Any differences in opinion you might have about it will stem from either yourself or changes in the context surrounding that product. Games, on the other hand, can be dynamic content, and the different permutations of experience you can achieve upon revisits can impact a player's perception of their subjective quality.
It's funny that you play Paper Mario TTYD the same way every time. Almost everytime I go back to that game I build Mario differently focusing on different badges and stats. Even while using Danger/Peril builds I've taken different angles like focusing on power to end fights quickly or defence/evasion so that Mario takes no damage.
Personally, for me, a lot "replay value" features actively detract from the game. I view a lot of them similarly to gating content behind a grind tbh, and I much prefer to be able to play through a game once and be satisfied. If I like it enough to return to it, I won't need some arbitrary in-game reason. Exceptions exist ofc, especially if a "single playthrough" for a game is very short
I usually envy those who can play the same game multiple times, whereas I have never done so (unless you count playing on the ps2 with no memory card). But now I see that it’s ok, and that replay value isn’t a marketable phrase, only a subjective and personal choice. Heck! Maybe one day I’ll find a game that’s so good, I just gotta play it over and over.
Also, I absolutely love your connection of marketing replay value in games to that of movies and literature. Ingenious!
This seems to be using a very narrow view of what is meant by replay value. Instead of looking at this through the lens of story-driven single player games, consider the replayability of gameplay-driven games (i.e. games where the gameplay is the primary driver and the story is either non-existent or inconsequential, such as most puzzle games) or games where the replayability comes from multiplayer (such as fighting games and competitive first person shooters). For those games, the replayability is a byproduct of the game design rather than something tacked on at the end of a game to artificially incentivise players to keep playing.
Great video. Yeah, replay value in gaming is so odd, it's used to mean either post-game content, NG+, alternate runs/builds, or stuff like that - which does have value and can sometimes contribute to doing a replay - but is not what it actually means - it's that you want to play a game again. I just replayed Ikenfell and the experience was mostly the same except for different party choices (although I didn't bother at all with the QTE and actually knew about the instant victory option), right now I'm playing Wandersong now and that has ZERO ability to do a single thing different and it's great.
Replay value seems relative to me. I have to love a game a lot to want to replay it even once. And even then, there’s plenty of great games I have no interest in playing again. But for me replay value comes down to how many ways are there to experience a game and how many of those ways seem fun to me.
I agree with the notion of replay value being one component of a greater whole. What you mentioned regarding replay value being highly praised until around the PS2/PS3 era was confirmed by one of my associates in the gaming industry who worked on Baldur's Gate II, where he said, to paraphrase, that this was a time when replay value was highly praised and the BG series was built to satisfy that goal.
Tangentially related, but I had a spell where I felt really guilty about buying books or games that I wanted to play but just weren’t grabbing me. I would watch a show, read a book, or play a game that was newer than my backlog and it made me feel worse. What they told me was that their purpose is to give you fulfillment, not to be a checklist. If I bounced off of a game it was fine, if I played Risk of Rain again instead of Persona or Borderlands, as long as I was getting my worthwhile, I was in the clear no matter how much dust the they gathered.
I think Gamers TM where the ones driving most of the backlash against “walking simulators” since they saw it as all games will become walking simulators and their “stocks” will deprecate in value. AAA Companies were also more likely just doing and doing the replayability to be seen as more appealing to consumers and get more sales and not to crush smaller competition, it was more that case where companies spend a lot of money to keep on pace with other companies. Also Open World games and Roguelikes aren’t going anywhere considering TotK and the upcoming Hades 2.
Still I think it’s good game design and practice to emphasize skill, have a variety of choices, and allow for those invented challenges to exist and flourish because nobody is doing that for The Order 1886. I do love games like Ghost Trick but I think it’s a very good outlier in what I think the general game design ethos should be if I were to look at the medium in general.
replay value supposed to be subjective. I found myself replaying games that the media says have no replay value, 'just cause' it is fun or give me feelings.
Exactly. I still play many old games for one reason alone. The one you mentioned. Games are either fun or they are not.
I have a preference for longer games, mostly because I get attached to them in different ways I don't want to stop playing or "living" in those worlds. I have replayed From Software games, and I have spent many hours in my farm in Stardew Valley. I got a PS4 in 2020. Before that, I had a PS2, which broke around 2014. I replayed Silent Hill 2 and 3 dozens of times. For me, replay value is not extra content, but just how good a game feels to play again after you finish.
Best replay value in games I've experienced: Silent Hill 1, 2 and 3, Dark Souls 1, 2 and 3 (and brothers), Final Fantasy 7 (not remake), Doom and Doom II (not Bethesdooms), Stardew Valley, Disco Elysium, Fallout 1, 2 and New Vegas, Dead Cells, Top Gear 2, Horizon Chase Turbo, Blasphemous, Gradius Gaiden.
Edit: Oof! (like in roblox), you mentioned the same thing I did. Serves me well for commenting before finishing a game. Anyway, you also made me want to talk about why I replay some specific games:
Stardew Valley. I have made three farms and I will make many more. I love the music and colors of the seasons, specially Fall. In Mexico trees don't change their leaves in autumn, they change their greens, so I have never experienced a red fall, only in media. And I love it! And in SDV I can have 30 days of red fall every year, with awesome music and the wind blowing, and the rustling of leaves, and a scary halloween where I always gain the golden pumpkin.
Horizon Chase Turbo. It's like I remember Top Gear 2. I played Top Gear 2 in the 90s, and it was awesome. I emulated a few years ago and it was not that good, but HChT is awesome! It feels like my memories! And the music, by the same genius who composed the music for Top Gear 1, Barry Leitch, is like being young again, like being 12, 13, 14 years old (sorry, I need to wipe a drop of water coming out from my eye). But also, because even when I hate cars, I love travel. I hate destinies, I get bored immediately on arrival and wanna go back home. But the travel part, seeing though the window, imagining I live in those forests and other landscapes (forests are best), that's what I love! And playing racing games with stylized graphics and a horizon that it's always there but you never get to, never reach, that's what I love.
Dark Souls 2. Is best Dark Souls, what else is there to say? Also, Majula.
This video greatly explains why being labeled with great replay value, means nothing if you only find enjoyment in 1 or even less runs.
Loved the video definitely felt the inventing reasons to play a game I have upwards of 200 hours in ghost of Tsushima not because I 100% the game it’s because I just really enjoy base liberation and constantly replay bases hell I have 100 hours in cyberpunk a game I beat in 30 cause I like the asthetic of night city and yakuza 0 has almost 300 cause I like the funny rhythm games or playing pool and darts with friend and family once again a great video can’t wait for your next one
I’ve been gravitating towards more single player campaign or RPG driven games because it’s given me a personal goal, and once I reach the goal, it’s now a memory for me that I won’t forget. Before it got stale and uneventful like I would with a live service multiplayer game
Im not saying you are wrong, i think you are missing a point, because all this is about preference and from my perspective, replay value its not about if a game is better or not, its about how transcendent it is for YOU, i used to replay games a lot as a child because of my economic situation back then, i am not rich right now but getting new games has never been so easy, yet... when i find a good game i stretch it to the maximum, because if i play something its because i really liked it, when a game is great but there is not a good reason to play it again i just forget about it, so it was good the first time, but the second time it is not, why? i am not able to pin point the reason but i can give some theories, for example:Breath of the wild, more specifically the shrines, they are fun to play the first time but when you already know how to solve them... something is missing, so the second time i played i was not as enthusiastic to play them so i just didnt, i tried to do things in a different order because the open world of botw is inviting for experimentation, so when i was awarded with a shrine since thats one of the game cycle principles, i just activated the TP point but didnt entered. So i just end up speed running and trying harder challenges, but it is not as fun as it is for example in dark souls, where you can play in many different styles, so you get to play the way you want the first time, but then you can try something you are not familiar with and have somewhat of a new experience. I dont know how to finish this large text, but the point i want to make is, replay value is not prosaic, it has value for a certain demografic, you can trivialize it according to your tastes but for me, knowing things can be done in different ways, even in the first playthrough, allow me to play more slow and enjoy the ride, knowing i can save some things for other time.
I clicked on this video thinking it was going to dunk on the @ReplayValue youtube channel (somehow), but this makes more sense...
I've always had this irk with how people talk about replay value, but I could never put it to words. I just liked to play games once and didn't think it made the game worse if I didn't want to play it again. I got the experience and fun from the game that I wanted, and that was that, but so many treat that feeling in a negative light. Watching this video really helped put to words what I was feeling.
5:50 As someone who has spent the last two years playing through the Trails series, I feel this very much.
I very much agree with the points you're making, a game's size isn't reflective of the quality of it's content. I love games like The Legend of Heroes: Trails, Xenoblade, Ys, Zelda, Dark Souls or Hollow Knight. these really long games, but I also enjoy games like Vintage Story, Minecraft, Space engineers, and smaller games like Outer Wilds and Tunic, which are both games that you really can't have that same kind of first playthrough again.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'll play any game, as long as it's something that I'll enjoy playing.
Dude, you hit the nail on the head with this video. I buy games for their replay value but never replay them and in many cases never finish. Damn you Steam Sale games
To me, replay value is inherently fun gameplay. I am not a story gamer. My top game is Dota 2 with me having 4.4k hours right now. It is very likely unimaginable to story gamers and the characteristics mentioned slightly before 15:22. My other favourite game is Dying Light 2, which does generate endless amounts of quests which are repeatable somewhat, but the reason I play are not the quests, it's the fun gameplay for which the quests just give me direction for. No secrets, extra characters,...ok, multiple endings make me play DL2 more, but I'm actually not doing the second ending on my playthrough for the gameplay (or whatever I know about what it is later), I'm not triggering the ending now, I'm just enjoying what I have.
Really good video giving commentary from different perspectives, but as I said, my answer to replay value is 100% fun gameplay. nothing else can captivate players as much as this. This is why we even play games, right?
4:42 HOLY FRICK, WHICH IS GAME IS THIS, it looks like the Minecraft 2 i have been waiting for
This is Dragon Quest Builders 2!
@@GCVazquez diff trying out this one soon
If replay value was nonsense, then you wouldn't have people speed running games with high replay value while ignoring games with zero replay value. Donkey Kong Country has replay value. Donkey Kong 64 doesn't. Pretty obvious...
@@Elwood128 yeah... I feel that is a component he didn't see. Games can sometimes be more like a sport or playing an instrument than like a book or a movie.
You cannot become "good" at reading lotr. Unlike with games.
And some games are designed to have a very high skill ceiling that can only be achieved with multiple playthroughs.
And it is perfectly fine for people to look for that in a game, because they are approaching it more like a sport or an instrument rather than a movie.
TRUTH. Plus IMO the more a game publisher tries to "optimize for replay value" the less I tend to want to replay it
Reason to replay a game:
1) Nostalgia
2) Different route
3) 100% completion
4) Just bored and want to experience something familiar instead of a new game
Also different builds
Challenge runs
MODS
Endings
Collectibles
I have a few favorite games that I occasionally replay. Replay value doesn't make me like a game, but it does make some of my favorites even better.
Yeah, when I started playing my first choice-oriented RPGs, replay value in the form of having alternate story branches or character builds was an important factor because new games in the genre were rare and old ones were harder to find than they are today.
Today, I'm averse to the idea of investing 50-100+ hours into an RPG to begin with, and replaying a game like that 2-5 times is inconceivable. I have like 700 games in my Steam library I haven't even experienced yet, and I'll take a fresh experience (even if it's a 30-year-old game) over replaying something... roughly 98% of the time.
I'll gladly play the occasional randomizer run of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, though. That's usually 5-8 hours of alternating between struggling against the algorithm's choices and feeling the satisfaction of discovering an item that just cascades into a series of other discoveries. There's probably a Skinner Box element to it, but the limited length makes it work and consistently leads to a satisfying experience.
My first Dragon Age: Inquisition playthrough was just over 200 hours.
I have started a second playthrough. Possibly twice. Didn't make it past the opening scenario before I realized I just didn't want the commitment. (Also, I'd apparently forgotten how to play the game.)
While I don’t disagree that replay value is oversold and relied on as a marketing tactic, replayability should be an inevitable feature in a well crafted CRPG, especially if based on tabletop rulesets.
If you play a good CRPG with the approach of completionism, some of that replay value might dwindle. If you play these types of games like a tabletop game and don’t immediately explore every nook and cranny, or take every side quest on, there is generally a good reason to play again. Coming to mind are the recent Pathfinder games, Larian games, and some of the more obscure Obsidian stuff.
Playing immersive sims completely changed how I think and approach RPGs. I would argue the real problem is that the concept of RPG has been diluted beyond repair at this point - Action Adventure Base-Building Crafting Farming Apothecary RPG with 6 arcade mini games, a revolutionary new card and dice game. This is often how the replay value argument is sold, instead of quality, world building, story, choice, consequences.
Never really thought about it this way, but I generally have never actually cared much about replay value. I do use the term in the modern context, and I think your video makes a great case to throw that in the trash because you're absolutely right. I replay Pokémon games fairly often (the 3D era ones the most I'd say), and while I do play them slightly differently, I don't replay them for the "replay value". I replay them because they're cozy, linear experiences that take place in a world that I've loved since I was a kid (also because fun). There is no reason for me to actually replay Pokémon X/Y, but I've done it twice in the last couple of years simply because I was bored and the game makes me feel good. That's literally it. Adversely, I played Life is Strange a single time even though it technically has a fair amount of "replay value" with all the different scenarios that can take place depending on your choices. Why? Because I actually don't like when games have a gazillion different outcomes. In terms of experience, it makes it unique, but I'm usually always satisfied with my choices, and have no interest in seeing how things play out in an alternate playthrough. Without spoiling, the ending of that game made me even less interested in replaying it actually. Even worse is when games have no alternate dialogue options, but simply an alternate ending based on a few specific choices, actions, etc. that are impossible to trigger without replaying the entire game. Some games go as far as to lock content behind multiple playthroughs which is...fine if that's what you're into, but I think it's questionable game design at its best, and bad game design at its worst. Nier Automata is one of the very few games that handles multiple endings incredibly well, and many of them are just jokes that require no extra effort or penalties on the part of the player. I would still only replay it for the gameplay, and none of the actual "replay value".
All that to say, you're 100% right on this. Great video, honestly.
Excellent arguments! It's so arbitrary seeing people talk about replay value while ignoring how subjective it is and how little it has to do with the actual experience and design of the game. Taking that argument in music and movies, I may not listen to Opeth's Blackwater Park every day, nor do I watch Oldboy frequently, but those are expertly crafted pieces of art that I can revisit in a moment I want the same experience, not with an arbitrary date.
I have played through Bloodborne 14 times.
Baby numbers
Those rookie numbers. You gotta push them up.
@@PopcornMax179 I guess I could make an effort and finish all those other playthroughs I started and never finished.
Another day of hot GC video game takes. I love it!
You know it!
I've always loved to do one big, "definitive" playthrough, where I do as much as I can until I find my interest beginning to wind down, then I can't play the same game for another 10-20 years, however long it takes me to forget. Exploration and discovery are important to me for bigger games. So I was surprised when I saw people saying Elden Ring of all games couldn't be a contender for game of the year because its vastness undermined replayability. Actually, Elden Ring is the one big game that I did a second playthrough of shortly after the first.
I had two thoughts coming into this video and you nailed them both. 1. Replay value is personal (preference) 2. You can't evaluate replay value, since during each replay your conception has changed from or because of the former play-through.
It only took you 3 minutes to address what made me click on the video.
But yeah, that was my healthy justification for that. Back then you couldn't just get infinite length games for free, and most free games had a catch, or required a PC which I didn't have. Final Fantasies Phantasy Star and Monster Hunter Games basically carried the crown for games you could buy and enjoy for shameful amounts of time. And I'm incredibly grateful for them.
replay value never made sense to me. If I really enjoy the game I will play it again and this is different for everyone.
As someone with an insane backlog of games to play through replay value is my enemy. But it still doesn't stop me from replaying if I enjoy a game since having fun is the objective of gaming.
love this video. im an rpg fan, so growing up in 80s/90s im used to replaying most of my games 4-8ish times because of how few games in the genre there were. felt like i was lucky if there were 3 big titles in a year i wanted to play. now there are so many games releasing that i struggle to find time to play a game a second time, whilst also trying to finish every game i buy because i hate backlogs.
Quite the thought provoking video. It left me with a question: If there's so much alternative content that I start a new playthrough right after I finish the first one, am I even replaying it or is it just one playthrough that's longer than it appears at first glance?
50 years old here and been playing games since literally the beginning of the medium (except for Space War, I'll admit). While "replay value" is something I consider to be a real thing, I suspect the origin of the concept came from an early awareness that many games simply were not that good! But in an evolving medium, the audience may lack the language to explain why something is failing. If a game wasn't that good the first time through you certainly where not going to want to play it again. I also think replay value may have become a common phrase due to the advent of heavily story-based and "cinematic" games because of a misunderstanding. Those kinds of games in particular were a difficult problem to solve in terms of making good use of the medium. Resulting in a fairly visible percentage of them being unengaging - certainly "not something I'd play again". But people tended to blame their lack of appeal on not focusing on the "game" part of the video game medium. Again they had it partly wrong - the games just weren't good.
I've beaten the campaign of Doom Eternal 3 times now across PC and PS4. I love revisiting the first episode of Doom 1993 every now and then. I've beaten EarthBound countless times. I've replayed Legend of Dragoon many times. I greatly enjoyed Omori, Eastward, Spider-Man 2018, and Disco Elysium, but I feel no real need to revisit them (besides coming back to their soundtracks). I just beat Fist of the North Star Lost Paradise the other day and highly enjoyed it, but I don't plan to do too much post-game stuff. I completed Shenmue 1 for the first time earlier this year and though I'm already nostalgic for the streets of Dobuita, I'm probably not gonna play through that adventure again. Or maybe I will in a few years, who knows. I played most of Dragon Quest Builders 2 and sometime last year revisited it up until completion of Furrowfield (my favorite portion of the game, probably). Each experience I just described is equally valid and meaningful to me, despite all of them seemingly having massive differences in replay value and completion percentage.
For games with microtransactions, replay value is also a means to get you back into the game more, where it's statistically proven the more time you spend in the game, the more likely you are to spend money.
Borderlands 2 is a game where the term replay value actually fits and makes sense
You made so many excellent points, GC, and I appreciate all of them so much. The point about ‘replay value’ being nontransferable across other media such as film or books is incredibly telling about how subjective or invented it is as a standard of quality. Even your points about how we spend our time are very poignant. It’s an internal conversation I often struggle with as a full-time artist and trying to understand what ‘balance’ means between life and work. Thank you for this!
Replay value determines for me personally which game becomes one of my favorites. If it is a one and done experience, it might be great but replaying that shit over and over again is what makes it a baller experience for me. Now some games go for huge experiences that last hundreds of hours that taken on a per hour basis, it has you spend many more hours in one playthrough than many shorter games replayed over and over, and in the end it boils down to what the individual prefers. I've heard many people who hate replaying games so replay value has zero value for them. I think at the end of the day though it's just another criteria of why you're more likely to enjoy/recommend a game, it has no inherent value in it, the same could be said about graphics. Good video, made me think about the subject more in depth.
I think the point of the video is that the term is meaningless. The thing that makes you WANT to replay the game is that you enjoyed your time with it, not that it has extras you might have missed the first time around (as a single example)
Paper Mario is “replayable” even though nothing changes from replay to replay because it’s a good game, not because there’s something new to see each time you play
Not every game needs to be replayable, some are better off that way, but the games that I hold the dearest are those that I can replay dozens of times in a dozen different ways (from a 50-100 hours long first 100% playthrough to a 1 hour long casual speedrun, as well as all kinds of challenge runs or randomizers) and still get a different experience each time, like hollow knight, celeste or botw. Games like journey or oneshot still left an impact on me, but I'm not gonna look back on them as an integral part of my life like hollow knight.
There is a reason there is an entire category for replay value for most reviewers, most gamers care about it, because not all of us can afford to buy every game we want to play, so replay value is extremely important for ppl who only buy a handful of games a year, if you need to get an entire year out of 5 or so games then replay value is the most important thing
Glad someone could put into words what I only had as a feeling. Not gonna lie, I have thought of and probably mentioned "replay value" not truly realizing that it's misguided. The value in "Replay value" to me is the idea of enjoying something enough that you are willing to revisit it (since otherwise it's unlikely you'd even want to finish). Granted you can enjoy something and not revisit it.
Great script here, GC Vazquez! Really fun intro! And really interesting video topic here as well!
Much appreciated!
My currently favorite Videogame I played through 15 times just becuse I like it. And Every playthrough I played it pretty much the same way.
The game has 3 endings and while I got the normal ending in my first playthrough and the golden ending in all my other playthroughs I will never go fore the bad ending.
I dont need to see everything a game has to offer.
Games are expensive so the idea of having more things to do after the story campaign makes me feel like it's money well spent. One example I could think of is GTA V
"Games don't need replay value" is a hot take that is just wrong. Trying to define games or terms under an umbrella term will always be wrong, let me explain with one word: roguelike! Name me one roguelike developer that wants their players to play through their game just once. Roguelike games entirely rely on replay value, that is the core experience. I almost never replay linear games, but I put way more time replaying a roguelike over and over again than I do playing through linear games. The capitalist outlook should be against replay value because buying more games will generate more money than players replaying the same game over and over again, unless there is a subscription or ads or some other way to generate money as people play, otherwise the companies make no money on people putting more hours into their game.
I also disagree with your replay value for books or movies, I talk about movies in terms of replay value, if I like a book or movie I will not reread it just because I like it, once I read a story or watch a movie and I know everything it becomes boring no matter how much I enjoyed it the 1st time. What gives a movie replay value is when you can't understand the entire movie in one viewing or having a different perspective when you watch it again. For instance, some movies reveal a detail at the end that completely changes the meaning of everything that came before so that when you know what happens at the end rewatching it will be a completely different experience.
Not all games have or need replay value, but other games completely rely on it, really depends on the game and what experience the developer wants the players to have.
all good games have significant replay value.
and most games that claim to have replay value, don't.
Counterpoint: Remnant From the Ashes and Remnant 2 have true replay value. There are stuff you will encounter that you never did before.
Helps the campaign is only like 10 hours if you really push your way through it.
But the rest of your point is totally valid
Great video. Thinking back I’ve played the original Resident Evil 4 countless times under the same conditions just because it was fun to play.
I was about to dislike the video but had to stop for a moment, after which I even pressed like.
The notion that the term is unnecessary might be a bit misleading.
The usage of the term is in most cases wrong, which is where I totally agree with your video.
However, there are a lot of games that are designed to have a certain "replay value" to be able to exist.
Most of these are roguelik(/t)es or multiplayer games like CS:GO or LoL or hyper casual games like Candy Crush, Tetris or even Minesweeper.
Analysing those might be a separate topic I think, but they need to meet a certain threshold of "replay value" to keep players from dropping them immediately and to keep the game alive.
GC, I love all your videos -- and even then, this was a new high. It was a wild roller coaster too, because I went from "YES" to "Hmm... not sure how this --" to "Oh. YES." Love how it all comes together.
And I totally agree. So much of the "Short games vs. Long games" discourse kinda just... misses the big picture. This feels like a lovely spiritual sequel to "You Don't Need to Finish Games" and I am all for the hot takes.
I wrote it as a spiritual sequel to that video, so it makes me very happy that you see it that way!
What's that turn-based game with the ghosts near the beginning?
That's the Outbound Ghost!
I dont think I entirely agree..Take games like Doom Eternal or Dishonored , it's insanely fun replaying the same levels again and again just because of the gameplay strength and then you have games like Deus ex giving you multiple choices in both story and gameplay moments. Honestly I value that a lot.
There are games like Last Of us that I love that I will never play more than once cause frankly the gameplay just doesnt hold up once you know the story beats.
Agreeed
Considering I get my games 2-3 years later at $10 or less, replay value isn’t much of a factor. I play the game, have my fun then move on to the next one.
I agree with you, but I think replay value is a thing for shorter games, like a resident evil per say. That said, I think developers can make a game more enjoyable to play a second or third or more times by adding less boring walking sections etc
The best video games I’ve ever played I’ve often only played once. Alan Wake being an example.
I find I can only replay games if it's been several years since I last played it. Once I've beat a game the 2nd playthrough feels like some of the magic is lost knowing all that's coming up.
While I agree with a lot of this video, it juxtaposes strangely against the point I ALSO see and largely agree with in movie criticism.
That is, that a lot of modern blockbusters are being created to sell big in the theaters but without care about rewatchability. That they're big spectacles that draw you in at first but afterwards leave you not really caring about seeing it over and over again. You're just supposed to move on to the next big blockbuster.