Curious as to what people think has the most replay potential.
Rules:
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The “desert island” aspect here is just to create an isolated environment. You don’t have to worry about survival or anything along those lines, where playing the game would be problematic. This isn’t about min-maxing your situation on the island outside of the game, or the time after leaving.
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No live service games unless the live service aspect is complete and it can be played offline – that is, you can’t just rely on the developer churning out new material during your time on the island. The game you get has to be in its complete form when you go to the island.
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No multiplayer games – can’t rely on the outside world in the form of people out there being a source of new material. The island is isolated from the rest of the world.
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You get existing DLC/mods/etc for a game. You don’t get multiple games in a series, though.
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Cost isn’t a factor. If you want The Sims 4 and all its DLC (currently looks like it’s $1,300 on Steam, and I would guess that there’s probably a lot more stuff on EA’s store or whatever), DCS World and all DLC ($3,900), or something like that, you can have it as readily as a free game.
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No platform restrictions (within reason; you’re limited to something that would be fairly mainstream). PC, console, phone, etc games are all fine. No “I want a game that can only run on a 10,000 node parallel compute cluster”, though, even if you can find something like that.
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Accessories that would be reasonably within the mainstream are provided. If you’re playing a light gun game, you can have a light gun. You can have a game controller, a VR headset and controllers, something like that. No “I want a $20 million 4DOF suspended flight sim cockpit to play my flight sim properly”.
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You have available to you the tools to extend the game that an ordinary member of the public would have access to. If there are modding tools that exist, you have access to those, can spend time learning them. If it’s an open-source game and you want to learn how to modify the game at a source level, you can do that. You don’t have access to a video game studio’s internal-only tools, though.
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You have available to you existing documentation and material related to the game that is generally publicly-available. Fandom wikis, howtos and guides, etc.
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You get the game in its present-day form. No updates to the game or new DLC being made available to you while you’re on the island.
What three games do you choose to take with you?
- SMT III Nocturne
- SMT Strange Journey Redux
- Grandia I
The Shin Megami Tensei games have some replayability between multiple routes, NG+ and coming up with the perfect team. Grandia is just one of the first jrpgs I really got in to, and I still love the characters today.
I didn’t go into this with anything in mind, and while I often comment on my posts, wanted to avoid doing so until other people had taken a shot.
I think I’d probably go with at least one game that can be drastically modded or otherwise extended, because I am pretty sure that no matter the game, with only three games for five years, I’m going to run dry on gameplay prior to the term on the island expiring.
So I think my three would be:
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Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. On its own, it’s a roguelike with a procedurally-generated world that I have kept coming back to for years, so there’s already a lot of replayability there. It has very complex mechanics compared to most roguelikes, has been extended a lot. There aren’t actually all that many mods, but that’s because most people just add their mods into the core game – the only reason something becomes a mod is if the devs feel that it’d drastically alter the balance or structure of the game (no total remakes), make it too large (e.g. there’s only one small soundpack included with the base game), or if they have some other kind of issue (e.g. the modder hasn’t been following copyright). So the base game has…a lot of stuff. I’ve done work on the code before, have the knowledge to do so, and I feel like that’d be a game that I’d be willing to add features to over five years, has a fair bit of potential there.
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Skyrim, for the existing mod content. Of people who have responded so far, this was a popular choice. I think that of Bethesda’s games, in 2024, this is probably the game with the most-extensive collection of mods, though maybe down the line Starfield or something else will become bigger. There are very few games that have such an extensive library of mods and can be played in as many ways. I don’t, in 2024, have a lot of the expertise necessary to do most of the interesting modding of it (e.g. texturing, audio, and animation), though I suppose I could pick it up. I regret not having in-game building that Bethesda’s later games support – I feel like having a sandbox-style game really would help longevity of play – but as of 2024, all of Bethesda’s later titles range from being somewhat-more-limited in mods (Fallout 4) to vastly-more-limited (Fallout 76). Skyrim also isn’t the prettiest of the bunch – or, even, my favorite to play not-on-a-desert-island – but I feel like the importance of graphics and audio quality falls off a lot over time if you keep playing a game. The extent of the mods let the game fill multiple genres: the game can be played as an RPG (with modders drastically extending or even remaking that aspect) , a survival game with difficulty that can be ramped way up, a sexy adult game, a territorial conquest game, you name it. I think that the sheer amount of hand-crafted content that modders have put out will probably last for a long, long time.
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Minetest. I wanted a sandbox game that has few limits on how far a given run can expand, think that that probably has the most potential to remain interesting. Minecraft has far more mod content created by others, would be better to play, but I can patch the core Minetest game (and have in the past), and I think that for me, that tradeoff would give Minetest the edge. I also think that it’d be possible to, without adding a lot of complexity from a mod standpoint, make something that would be fun to play oneself – I think that most Skyrim mods aren’t really fun to play for their creators, because they’re about experiencing handcrafted content, and if you’ve created it, I think that it’s hard to enjoy yourself. But games with a procedurally-generated or evolving world…you can create the levers and still have fun pulling them.
Some things I considered but didn’t do, or things that other people have suggested and, upon consideration, I don’t think that I would do:
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Some sort of conventional (non-video) game that it’s demonstrated that people can spend many years on becoming expert in, like chess or Go, and taking one of the video games that implements it, has an AI to play against. I can believe that it’s possible to become deeply immersed in those games for many years because, well, there’s an established track record of people doing so. They probably aren’t the worst choice, but I don’t, as things stand, really enjoy any of those enough to want to be doing them for that period of time.
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Factorio was a widely-popular choice. I’ve played it, like it, and I agree that you can spend a lot of time building out a system; there aren’t a lot of limits on what you can do. But my thinking is that the core gameplay loop just isn’t that complicated. And I feel like Minecraft-type games have more potential for very large creations.
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Games with a lot of fancy DLC. Of the responses so far, these were not a popular choice, even though I totally removed cost from the equation, which I’d kind of expected might favor them. I suppose that the real story here is that the DLC that any one developer has put out, even if it’s a lot, kind of pales in comparison to what modders have produced…especially in terms of gameplay. Most developers don’t radically expand how a game plays in DLC, but a lot of modders have in their mods.
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A solitaire engine that has the rules of many games implemented, something like PySol; I don’t feel like that breaks the “only one game” rule, as I think that most people consider a solitaire engine to be a single game and probably the majority of solitaire engines out there implement multiple solitaire games. I’ve spent a lot of time playing solitaire games, even if I don’t get wildly excited about them, and particularly like Eight Off, which is a bit like an easier Freecell. But it doesn’t tick a lot of the other boxes that I feel would be important, like being interesting to mod – I don’t really want to create new solitaire games – or being a sandbox game.
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Kerbal Space Program. I thought about this one. That was picked by some other folks here, and I think that it’s a good choice, as it’s got a sandbox aspect, a lot of mods, has a lot of long, hard stuff to accomplish in-game, has successfully held my interest for long periods in the past. Just didn’t edge out the ones that I did pick.
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Terraria or Starbound. A lot of mod content, and they benefit from the sandbox aspect. And I think that they’re good games; I personally favor Starbound, as Terraria is a bit more story-oriented and I think that that aspect would lose value when the game is played a great deal. I also think that there’s more mod content for Starbound out there. But they lack the ability to create much by way of automated environments, the sort of way the Minecraft genre has, and I think that that limits a lot of what one can do to creating large projects that are cosmetically-interesting. That’s okay too, but the ability to create large projects that do things, I think, has more potential.
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City-builders like Cities: Skylines. That was chosen by some people here, and I certainly don’t think that it’s the worst choice. Problem is that I think that a lot of those are about experiencing the content, and that you’re gonna run out of that before all that long, and that the core gameplay doesn’t get wildly extended via mods or DLC. I think that there’s a point where one’s pretty resoundingly beaten the game and that it’s less-amenable to pure-sandbox stuff, like creating fantasy cities, than something like a Minecraft-type game is.
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Dwarf Fortress. One respondent so far has chosen it. It’s not a bad choice. But Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead ticks a lot of the same boxes and for me, edges it out (even if Dwarf Fortress is mostly about simulating a colony of dwarves with some limited single-character-oriented content that was added and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is mostly about single-character-oriented-content that added some limited colony-oriented stuff). And I really want at least one game that I can personally hack on, because that opens up a lot of potential to be interesting.
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Oxygen Not Included and Rimworld. I love both these games. Also popular choices, and a lot of gameplay potential. Not the worst choice. The mechanics are simpler than something like Dwarf Fortress, though, and I don’t know how easy it’d be to extend them in interesting ways. From memory, the existing mod libraries mostly don’t radically change the way that the game is played. Like, they’ll add more animals, more factions with different appearance and slightly different stats, something like that. I think that having large mod libraries that make the game playable in significantly-different ways would tend to add more to replayability.
[continued in child]
Ah man this really is tough, your post details a lot of what’s on my mind, but I think ultimately these three win out;
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Minecraft - especially given the fact that we have access to the entire modding sphere, it’s just plain silly how much creativity has been poured into this, and the game is pure nostalgia for me. I could get lost in it for aeons.
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Dwarf fortress - wins out to CDDA because I’m a strategy nerd. What has ended up killing me in the past with this game is how much time it takes, but on a deserted Island? Well, time isn’t an issue.
The last one is perhaps the most difficult, but assuming that I have access to a sufficiently high-end pc, I’d want KoboldAI (United) with all currently available local models downloaded. This is only borderline a “game”, but I am able to modify the software, and the possibilities are simply endless for creativity. It’d definitely ease up the loneliness a fair bit.
This is only borderline a “game”,
I think that you can probably count KoboldAI as a game. Well, maybe more the “toy” category than “game” – stuff like SimEarth, Conway’s Game of Life or such might fall into that category. They don’t have any real goals, are pretty much a pure sandbox, but “toys” like that are often-enough described as “games” to count.
The other day, I picked up something on Steam that was basically a spirograph, Zen Trails. That really falls into the “toy” category, but it’s classified as a game on Steam, and I don’t think that that’d be terribly-controversial for someone to call it a game.
I’ll allow “toys”.
Though I’m sure that there’s some kind of line there. Like, thinking of the spirograph immediately brings to mind a class of software packages that are designed to let one play around with L-systems and suchlike, to make pretty pictures, stuff like that. Is Context Free a toy? Maaaybe. But I don’t think I’d call Asymptote or Logo a toy, though both are certainly useful for making spirograph-like images and one can happily play around with them doing that. Somewhere a “toy” crosses the line from a “toy” to a “tool”.
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[continued from parent]
- A pinball game. There are some pinball games that implement many tables, and “all DLC and mods” will buy a lot here. Many people have shown that they can happily come back and keep enjoying a pinball table for many decades – it’s an easy-to-learn, hard-to-master game. And I’ve been able to come back over a long period of time and enjoy pinball games, especially some of my favorite tables, like Medieval Madness or Tales of the Arabian Nights. And some pinball engines, like Visual Pinball, let you create your own pinball boards. But I still feel like the fact that the gameplay mechanics don’t change that much is going to fundamentally limit this one.
- Warband: Mount and Blade. Suggested by a respondent. I think that this isn’t the worst choice out there – it’s got a lot of replayability, and I’ve spent a lot of time playing it. And there are some extensive mods. I also like the core gameplay loop that the game has. But I don’t feel like the mods change the core gameplay much. Take Prophecy of Pendor, which is a large, popular mod that I’ve played, adds a lot of additional stuff to work on, like building up your own knighthood order. But it and similar mods really alter the parts of the game outside of the core gameplay loop, and I feel like I’d really burn out on that core gameplay loop.
- Tetris or similar. These are games that have a good core gameplay loop and which you can come back to and play. In a different contest – one where mods weren’t available, say, and only the base game is – I might rate these higher. But for me, the lack of mod content and DLC and such is a major limitation – I really want to take advantage of stuff that other people have created.
I still haven’t played Baldur’s Gate 3, which was another popular choice, finally got around to installing it this week. I had not considered it as a competitive choice here, though a number of people here chose it. So I’m hoping that it’ll be fun, given all the folks endorsing it here!
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Minecraft, Satisfactory and not sure if I have time for a third one, but I’d pick Terraria.
Three copies of Dwarf Fortress
considering the mods aspect, gotta go with Skyrim and Minecraft for my first two. (do i get multiple versions of the game? if i have to pick just one, i’d have to browse some mod lists to decide for minecraft). and maybe a Dance Dance Revolution arcade machine of some sort.
edit: dwarf fortress is also a strong contender as well
Tiny tina’s wonderlands, Baldur’s gate enhanced edition, and soulcaliber.
Swap between them here and there, and I’m happy.
I love this hypothetical. I think mine would be:
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X-Plane 12 flight sim. Plenty to do and lots of variation between areas, weather patterns, etc. (Unlike MSFS, it is not a live service.)
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Automation: the car company tycoon game. It serves very well as a creative outlet when designing your own cars.
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Probably some strategy game. Old World? One of the Civs? Maybe Anno 1800, assuming I could get past Ubi Connect or whatever the hell they call it now. 😁
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- Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead
- Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup
- This is a hard one… Minetest, maybe? Would be the most interesting one to hack.
Skyrim
Borderlands 2
Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
I probably would have picked Mass Effect over Odyssey if you hadn’t specified no series. There’s really no point in playing just one ME.
There’s really no point in playing just one ME.
Huh. Speaking as someone who has that series on their “never played, but have it on their backlog list”, could you explain why?
Might need to note that I am ignoring Andromeda here. Personally I see all three games as one long game because the story is so involved. Maybe someone else has no problem just playing one by itself but I can’t, in the same way that I’m never going to watch just one LOTR movie.
- Skyrim with a ton of mods
- Stellar is with a ton of mods
- Minecraft with a ton of mods
I would pick Baldur’s Gate 3 if I can bring my wife to play with me, then we may actually get to act 3 by the 5th year and not even need another game.
Damn, no multiplayer hurts like hell.
Slay the Spire - I could grind Packmaster forever. And everything else on the Workshop. And vanilla.
Stepmania - You said I have access to all existing mods and content, so I’ve basically got a trillion charts to play. Maybe I’ll even have time to actually get good at a rhythm game?
Crypt of the Necrodancer - Had to think long and hard about a third game. Been a long time since my Cadence speedrunning days, but I guess three years on a desert island might give me time to try and shoot for Coda.
Damn, no multiplayer hurts like hell.
Yeah, I know. There’s a library of good, replayable multiplayer games out there. I was originally going to have “you can bring a few people, and can play multiplayer games locally with them”.
The fundamental problem that I hit is that people are interesting, bring a lot of content with them in their heads. I think that it’s really easy for someone to play out a game’s content, and then basically use the game as a path to just hang out with other people; the extreme case is something like a MUSH or any number of subsequent systems primarily aimed at just letting people chat with each other, where people can use the thing regularly for years. I’m pretty sure that that’s what I’d personally wind up doing with a lot of games, if I had access to other people – just using it to communicate with them. And I’m looking for something where the game itself has content that’s so compelling that it could stand on its own, and trying to draw a reasonable line to be more inclusive was difficult.
Maybe someone can figure out a set of rules that work to permit trying to pick the most-replayable multiplayer game and can do their own post.
Maybe this is cheating but RPG maker, ACC or maybe ACE if it’s out in time with a great rig, and probably Minecraft.
RPG maker
That’s a clever idea.
For those not familiar, RPG Maker is a popular engine – or series of engines, really – used to let people make easy-to-use games. The company that makes them also sells some libraries of assets to make games. So, in a sense, one could think of all games made using one of the RPG Maker engines as maybe being a “mod” – some commercial, some not; BallShapedMan is aiming to walk off with the entire library of RPG Maker games under the rules as given.
ponders
I think that from a standpoint of the rules I set, I’d probably not allow it.
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People don’t normally think of RPG Maker games as being mods, but as stand-alone games. And, yeah, I know that there’s gray area there, and by using something like Skyrim, which has seen very heavy modding (is Enderal a different game or a huge Skyrim mod?), one is edging into that gray area. But there’s gotta be some kind of line, and I think that at least as the term conventionally is used, RPG Maker games don’t fall into the “mod” camp.
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RPG Maker is definitely not normally considered to be a game on its own. It’s an authoring environment; if you buy it on Steam, it’s listed as an “Application”, not a “Game”. Something like Skyrim is unquestionably a game, even if people have taken it and used it as a platform to build a lot of stuff.
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Speaking purely in terms of designing this post to be interesting to read, I’m hoping to get a list of super-replayable games. But if RPG Maker gets allowed, then the post just devolves to a list of widely-used game engines. Unity or Unreal Engine has an authoring environment and such too…are all games that use Unity or Unreal Engine “one game”? I think that it probably wouldn’t be a very interesting question.
I’ll give an upvote for cleverness in analyzing and aiming to game the system, though. ;-)
Gimmie a quick sec to make a Godot add-on that plays snake in the editor lmao - can I play sonic colors now?
Lol thank you! Though I hadn’t considered the whole library. I should have though. I was more thinking of making my own game as a game. Then I could make anything I could think of and then play it. I’ve always wanted to make a video game, this would be a good time to start I guess.
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Having actually run something fairly close to this experiment I think I can say Satisfactory, Subnautica and West of Loathing. Yes Satisfactory has the capability of being multiplayer but it’s not exactly Fortnite.
- SSBM, I don’t need an opponennt for tech skill
- Bloodborne, if chalices aren’t a live service?
- Bowsers Fury, because I speedrun that and it’d be nice to have time to practice just that.
- Valheim
- All the mods I currently use
- modding tools to make more mods
