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Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Almost all of the “Top 10 most replayable games” I have are Indie games, especially in the last 10 years.

They’re games like Factorio or Project Zomboid which I keep getting back to a year or two after I last played so much of it that I got fed up.

Glitzy AAA open-world-ish games have beautiful visuals but their replayability is near zero, worse so for games which seem open-world but are in fact linear.

Mind you, some older AAA jewels in that style (such as Oblivion) do get me to come back eventually, but it takes something like 5+ or more as I basically have to forget most of the story before it’s interesting to play such a game again.

If price matched “hours of fun”, the AAA stuff would be way cheaper whilst many Indie games would be far more expensive.

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BurgerBaron@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The developer of Barony is insane like the Stardew Valley guy, and just. never. stops. updating. I’ll play the game forever at this point.

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- Quantenteilchen@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Similar to “we absolutely swear this will be the last major update!! For reals this time!” ReLogic. I still wonder how in the hell they are still making enough/any money to keep their studio working on games after all this time?
  
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UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Glitzy AAA open-world-ish games have beautiful visuals but their replayability is near zero

I mean, I gotta disagree, at least in part. Some of these games don’t age well. But I still know folks who line up for the “WoW Classic” experience. Hell, I know people who have been playing since the game came out in '02/'03(?) and now they’re out playing with their kids. I know one family who plays with their grandmother, ffs.

I think one thing that really gave Blizzard titles staying power was the choice to deliberately tack towards the cartoon-y style of art. When you’re not going for that hyper-real experience, the games age better. Hard to pick up a vintage Laura Croft or Devil May Cry without feeling its age. But Wind Waker? Mario 64? They do just fine.

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- Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  For me it really depends on the game and whilst the “glitzy” is often an indirect indicator of a game which is limited in its replayabiliy - I suppose because often they’re games were there was much more investment in looks than gameplay - I should have added “highly curated” to that sentence since for me games with a story meant to be experienced in a certain way are pretty much “play once”.
  
  Most of the games which I keep coming back to again and again in quite short cycles have emergent gameplay elements and even the entire game area is different from play to play - not just Indie Games like Factorio, Don’t Starve, The Lone Dark in Survival mode and Project Zomboid but also something like The Sims - whilst of “story” games, there are very few I go back to (as I mentioned Oblivion but also Fallout New Vegas and Fallout 3) and when I do it’s after much more time, I suppose because I have to forget most of the story for it to be fun again.
  
  My impression that in the last decade AAA has focused mostly on just two kinds of games - “Glitzy AAA open-world-ish” RPGs and multiplayer battle games - and for me the first have limited replayability unless they’re a world with A LOT of depth were the story is but a small part of the game, whilst I can’t be arsed to play the latter ever since online battlefields were swamped by kids in consoles as I really don’t have the patience to babysit somebody else’s ill behaved kids (still waiting for game makers to figure out that Adult Only servers would be immensely popular).
  
  It’s not that AAA can’t do games with massive replayability, it’s that the AAA part of the industry seems to have gone down the route of games being either “curated experiences” or massive multiplayer were the emergent gameplay comes the actions of other players, whilst many Indies - having way smaller budgets - have gone down routes were the gameplay is “self-assembling” emergent, often with the game area being procedurally generated, which adds up to something less predictable were two runs of the game whilst sharing some similarities are in practice sufficiently different not to feel repetitive.
  
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  - UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I gotta. The Rogue-like genre being the classic example of the indie game
    
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Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Fallout New Vegas still hooks me in.

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