Replayable Narratives: Does Anyone Even Play a Game Once?

[TychoCelchuuu]

So check this out. It's nothing surprising or amazing if you've paid attention to, for instance, Steam achievements, but it's timely because Ken Levine just committed studio seppuku so he can make video games that you can play three times without getting bored. People barely even play through a game once, and Levine (who is far from alone) wants the game to hold up on repeat playthroughs.

But is this a goal that game developers should have? We can divide the issue into two questions. First, should a narrative be something such that you can experience it multiple times? I think the answer here is obviously yes: books and movies can be good no matter how many times you read and watch them, and there's no reason games can't be like this. But... games are so long, most of the time. We're not just talking about Gunpoint, which has a fun little story you can experience again when you replay the game later. We're also talking about BioShock Infinite (which is on the short end of these sorts of things), which takes you hours and hours to get through every time you play it. If 2001: A Space Odyssey were 9 hours long, would anyone want to rewatch it? Or even want to finish it? Because it seems like not everyone wants to finish games like The Walking Dead.

The second question is whether the narrative should change when you go through it multiple times. By their very nature, most games have a narrative that varies at least a bit. Even a straightforwardly linear game like Infinite has stuff you won't see if you don't look around, diaries that you might not find, lines that Elizabeth might not say if you don't rodeo her near the specific item, etc. This looks like an even sketchier idea in a world where lots of people don't even beat your game once. Alpha Protocol got slammed in reviews by people who would probably have been blown away if they played it four more times. Are these reviewers just idiots (idiots like the rest of us)? Or is this Alpha Protocol's fault for having a stupid goal in the first place? Who cares if your game is different the third time through if nobody makes it through the first time?

I think this tweet by friend of the show JP "The Breton" LeBreton sums up one view pretty well:

https://twitter.com/vectorpoem/status/437628277344047105

What we want are choices that matter, right? So when someone say "you can replay my game three times," this means our choices matter in one of three ways, because they had one of three results on the story. So is this the value of things like branching narratives? They imbue choices with meaning?

That tweet is just a tweet, so it can't be very detailed, but I think saying "non-canned" is not the best way of putting it. Sometimes choices with "canned" results can be really interesting. The Walking Dead understands this, I think - people give it shit about how if you replay the game, it turns out a lot of the choices you make just bring you back to the same location, but that's beside the point. What matters is what set of choices you make, not whether someone making different choices sees something different. In the context of The Walking Dead, those choices matter a lot to the narrative, and although if you look at them from outside the context of the narrative, it seems less impressive, that's not really important.

On the other hand, though, Alpha Protocol is such an amazing game because choice is everything in that game. You can play it five times and get a completely different narrative all five times. This isn't just a choose your own adventure game, it's a fundamentally different way of making a game.

But this brings us back to the elephant in the room, which is that a lot of people never see this stuff. One thing you might say is "fuck those people." Books aren't written for people who stop reading halfway through, movies aren't shot for people who turn them off or leave the theater, and games aren't made for people who play halfway through Portal and say to themselves "welp, I guess it's just test chambers forever, might as well peace out." Game narratives should be about what they can be, not what people tend to experience when they play them.

On the other hand, I think there are good reasons people don't beat games. Games take a long fucking time. Portal, a short game, is longer than every movie except, say, Sátántangó. Alpha Protocol, a fairly short game, is still five to eight hours per playthrough. BioShock Infinite takes longer, Deus Ex takes longer, and holy fuck can you imagine playing through Dragon Age enough times to see all the differences between the various origins? Don't game developers need to get over themselves and realize that getting someone to play a game once through is a coup, let alone getting them to play it multiple times, and the effort should be put into something like what The Walking Dead does, which is making the main narrative compelling even if the branching is limited, rather than adding a lot of branches that people are never going to see?

My personal opinion is that it's a mistake to divorce the narrative from the systems. (Levine fucked up Infinite by doing this, I think, so I'll be interested in seeing if he fucks up his next game.) When I think of games I want to replay, I don't think of Dragon Age or The Walking Dead. Dragon Age is a slog and The Walking Dead is a story that happens, once, and I'm not interested in seeing it again, especially because I'd have to sit through the game again. Games I want to replay are Deus Ex and Pac-Man. Why these games? Because they're fun! And in replaying Deus Ex because it's fun, you discover all sorts of interesting narrative branching that you don't find in Pac-Man. That's okay for Pac-Man, of course, but it's also great for Deus Ex. What we need are games that are fun to play through multiple times, because these are the games that can support the weight of divergent narratives being bolted on to them.

But in some sense this is a very unsatisfying solution. Games with the complexity of Deus Ex can handle branching narratives, but only to a degree. It takes a more locked down game like Alpha Protocol to branch for real. Maybe the solution is to make something as fun as Deus Ex with the narrative of Alpha Protocol. That would be hard. But perhaps it's the holy grail of replayable game narratives.

Maybe The Breton is right. Maybe replayability has nothing to do with it. I've admitted as much when it comes to The Walking Dead - can I admit as much when it comes to a game that branches much more? Can I leave those branches unexplored and be happy with the choices presented to me in the narrative because I could have done otherwise? I don't know. That to me sounds like playing through Alpha Protocol once. The more a narrative varies based on what you do, the less impressive it is on a single playthrough.

Another solution is just to make games shorter. I mean, Jesus Christ. Does every game have to be 8+ hours? This is why I love Twine games. You can branch the fuck out of your Twine game and I don't mind, I can play it again to see the other branch. I wish that were the future of games. If I want to play a game for 80+ hours I'll play Titanfall or BF4. If you're trying to tell me a story there's no excuse to take 8+ hours to do that shit. Figure out what's good about your game and pack it into a few hours.

Will this work? I can picture AAA studio heads vomiting explosively at the thought of sinking millions of dollars into a two and a half hour game. BioShock Infinite would've benefited from being one quarter the length, but that wouldn't have cut its budget by one quarter. Can games with production values far in excess of Twine games ever cut their play time down to something reasonable?

I think so. Gaming culture right now thinks short games are the worst thing in the world, and there's not enough of a market to make them sustainable, but I think this can change. You can dump millions of dollars into an effects-laden Hollywood blockbuster and nobody complains when it's only an hour and a half. (People get antsy if it's too long!) Games can be like this. It'll take a change in gaming culture - games will have to stop being made for teenage boys with too much time on their hands - but we're already fucking there! Remember? This post started with an examination of how lots of people don't finish these fucking games already. Game developers need to catch up to this. Once they stop making 8+ hour games for people who stop playing after 4+ hours, that's when we're going to see some seriously good stuff. And that's also when gaming is going to get even more popular. Because right now, one of the biggest barriers to entry for gaming is how if I want to show someone a masterpiece like, say, Deus Ex, they need 20 to 40 hours to sink into that. And that's fucking nuts. Nobody who isn't already a gamer wants to do that. So I show them Twine games instead. There's nothing wrong with that, but I yearn for a future where I can show people narrative games with all the shiny graphics of BioShock Infinite without knowing they're never going to slog through the couple of hours it takes to even meet Elizabeth, let alone the 8+ it takes to make it to the end. Ain't nobody got time for that.

[Erkki]

I agree completely. Also, thanks for pointing out Sátántangó, I'm going to attempt to view it if I can get my hands on it.

 

Someone mentioned The Last Express as a game that might be replayable, in the responses to The Breton's tweets. I think that's interesting -- I don't remember how much content in it you could miss due to you being elsewhere, but I think there was some of it? The Last Express is a singular game, but if there were other narrative games that were "real-time" with content you can miss just by not being able to be in two places at the same time, I imagine in those cases the replayability and meaningfulness of choices seems rather the same thing.

[pkirkner]

The part I find seductive about the "narrative LEGO blocks" concept isn't replay-ability, it's the potential for the one play-through that I'm actually likely to complete being novel and my own, and the conversations that it's likely to spark with other folks who have played the game.

 

As to whether or not re-playable narrative is something that game developers should strive for more broadly, I don't think there's a yes or no answer to the question. Developers should pursue the avenues of game design that interest them. Sometimes what results will be a success and sometimes a failure, but that process is what grows and matures the medium.

[gregbrown]

I think responsive games that reward your play style (like Deus Ex, or even The Walking Dead) are more important than any "branching" or "replayable" characteristics.

Whether I'll replay a game or not has less to do with unique content and more to do with the richness of the experience, and the varied personal reactions to the game. Despite the temptation to focus on games' interactivity, I'm not sure why we'd use a different criterion than we would for movies we'd rewatch, or books we'd reread.

[Bjorn]

What about collaborative/cooperative story telling games?  Like Sleep is Death?  This is a genre that has barely been explored, except for SiD, kind of Neverwinter Nights (I never played it with others)...and nothing else I can think of.  I'm not going to say its simple, but if you wanted to explore replayable narrative, giving players an interesting toolkit to work with and allowing players to influence the stories being told to one another would be a fascinating avenue.

 

I suppose you could make an argument that the D Souls games are exploring this in a very minor way.  Player actions affected World Tendency in the first game, which ended up being a rather broken system since it tended towards neutrality, but there has to be an interesting way that the global community of players could affect narrative.  And in both games, the ghosts and messages create a kind of odd secondary mini-narrative to an area. 

 

So yeah, I suspect that the solution to a narratively replayable game is not to look at the traditional single player narrative game, but to branch out and consider what current technology would empower that hasn't been explored narratively. 

 

On traditionally narrative games, the only ones I can think of that I like replaying are either classics that I go back to replay years later, or games with such tremendously strong mechanics that I want to spend more time with it, in which case a branching narrative is a bonus.

Two series I can think of that match that are Dead Rising and the D Souls games.  There are people who bounce off the mechanics of both those games, and that's fine.  But for me, I wanted to spend more time in those worlds screwing around with the mechanics, and the fact that I could experience different story content along the way was a terrific extra goodie.

[aperson]

The Last Express is a singular game, but if there were other narrative games that were "real-time" with content you can miss just by not being able to be in two places at the same time, I imagine in those cases the replayability and meaningfulness of choices seems rather the same thing.

 

Off the top of my head Night Trap and Deadly Premonition are both examples of similar games, where events unfold in real-time and you can miss them by not being around. And Lightning Returns. And some Zelda games.

 

I agree that "replayability" often doesn't really mean that, but if you aim to make a game replayable and instead you make a game people play once then talk about and remember fondly that sounds good to me.

---

 

As far as the stats on percentage completion - when these numbers were popularized it became fashionable to draw dubious conclusions from them. I was going to write something very long about this but I'll make it short: the fact that many people don't finish many games doesn't necessarily indicate that games are too long, nor does it indicate consumer dissatisfaction. People can consume half a game, move on to something else and be perfectly satisfied, then go out and buy the sequel to the game they didn't finish. There are also issues like that most games require some amount of mastery, and the fact that developers train players not to finish games by mailing in the latter portion because they know many players won't see it anyway.

 

According to the linked piece only 46% of players finished Portal, and 56% finished Mass Effect 2. So is game length the problem?

 

I suspect that many people don't finish a lot of the books they start. I suspect, especially with the advent of Netflix, that a lot of people don't even finish a lot of movies they start. But I'm not sure that's a problem and not just a function of how people consume content.

---

 

There are already narrative games designed to be replayed. 999 for example. This is not a system-driven game, but it's a game you play through 2, 3 maybe 5 or 6 times. Systems-driven narrative is really hard. (Talk to Chris Crawford) The idea that you can have pieces and the AI can assemble them into quality fiction - it's tough. Very hard to imagine that not just turning into awkward noise.

 

But, I don't see the harm in trying. And maybe, even if that approach doesn't work out, they'll hit on a hybrid or something else cool. This Eurogamer piece reminds me of "that guy" in a brainstorming meeting who immediately shoots down everything that isn't standard cover-based-shooter mechanics. A guy who writes about games admonishing a creator for trying something risky and experimental - what?

 

As interesting a challenge as replayability and procedural stories are, there are bigger problems to deal with right now. First, let's master telling game stories worth both playing and replaying.

 

Why are you guys working on this weird 3D Mario game? It's fundamentally flawed - when you project a 3D space onto a 2D plane the viewer has no depth perception. I can't even tell if I'm standing underneath this block! Let's master 2D Mario first!

[elmuerte]

I used reply games a lot. But these days there's too much other games I first have to finish. The games I replayed were not just short games. I can't replay games (or movies) that have a story with a big reveal. For example, I cannot watch the Usual Suspects for a second time. I like to explore worlds, but if a world has little to offer the replayability quickly reduces. I've played the LBA games a lot of times, probably 20+ times. I've replayed Anachronox quite a few times (there's so much going on in that world). Games these days are really focused. There's not much going on besides whats needed for the story. I don't feel like replaying a game just to accomplish the same thing in a different way.

Then again... there's Spec Ops. I want to replay that game. It will be the same gameplay, same story, and even the same big reveal. But it will probably be a completely different experience now I know what's going to happen.

I'm not sure where I am going with this. All I know is that I lack time to replay, or not motivated enough.

[Sno]

There's a thing i've always loved about Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series. You can go in there and have a complete adventure in around ten-twenty hours, if you want. None of the individual quest paths are massive investments of time. There isn't some massive, intimidating 80 hour narrative thread you're always chained to.

 

I will say that i replay games a lot less now that i'm older, but the games that i end up replaying are not actually shorter games, and i wouldn't want them to be shorter. (Not really out of a desire for games to be longer, i just want to see the game be whatever length the developer thought was appropriate.) When i end up replaying a game a bunch of times, it's usually because it either excels at encouraging mastery or encouraging experimentation.

 

I've probably played through both Deus Ex and System Shock 2 each a dozen times or more over the years. Now, yeah, Deus Ex is a 20-40 hour game, so take from that what you will. (While SS2 can easily be completed in around ten hours.)

The reason i find these games so immensely replayable is because of what is largely sandbox mission design working with broad sets of systems that allow extremely varied playthroughs, and in the case of Deus Ex, allowing a narrative that even subtly adapts to your choices and actions. (Without, it's probably worth noting, necessarily requiring wildly divergent story paths.) One of the things that is really important to me about these games is that, even though they're absolutely packed with story, they're never bogged down in scripted narrative. You're always expressing some small player action, so you never resent the story being told to you as something taking you out of the game.

Now, back to one of those first points, more recent games that i've replayed multiple times? Purely speaking with an eye towards narratively-focused games, it would be the BioShock games and, even more recently, Human Revolution.

[SecretAsianMan]

I think responsive games that reward your play style (like Deus Ex, or even The Walking Dead) are more important than any "branching" or "replayable" characteristics.

Whether I'll replay a game or not has less to do with unique content and more to do with the richness of the experience, and the varied personal reactions to the game. Despite the temptation to focus on games' interactivity, I'm not sure why we'd use a different criterion than we would for movies we'd rewatch, or books we'd reread.

 

This is it for me.  If the choices or decisions I made the first time didn't give me a satisfying result, I'm not likely to do it again in hopes of a better one.  If I did get something I found rewarding, then on a second play I'd probably do it again.  I don't like the notion of seeing game content simply because it's there.  I made my choices the first time for a reason.  If I'm doing it differently a second time, it's only because it's there, not because it has any meaning to me.  I'll still do it though, which is why I often don't replay games like this because I don't want to dilute the experience.

[kaputt]

I agree completely.

A story, for me, happens once. I think that replaying a game with the clear intent of of finding what happens in the other path of the story only ruins it, it makes the story lose it's identity and "soul".

I know that a reason to play games is to have some kind of escapism, to use an avatar in a certain world and to build your story in there, but I don't think that engineering a story to happen exactly how you wanted is truly appealing, or more appealing than a game in which the creator actually tried to say something. When I experience a story crafted by someone else, I want to be surprised, to find stuff that compels me in unexpected ways, and not to have things happening in a way exactly how I planned.

This is why I'm not exactly a fan of games with branching narratives, they usually don't feel like that they're trying to tell anything, just that they exist to match the expectation of player who wanted the story to take a certain direction. I don't think that there's anything compelling in this, hence why I don't replay any game just to see what could've happened if I took another direction. But I never played Alpha Protocol, maybe it is a nice game in that sense.

I usually replay games that are merely fun to play. Like, I've put way more hours on Uncharted 2 and Animal Crossing than on Journey, Gone Home and The Last of Us, which in my opinion are better games. This metric of hours is really crazy, it doesn't make sense really. That can make narrative based games more replayable, just to revive those moments.

[syntheticgerbil]

Because of OCD, I will play a game with branching narrative multiple times, but it definitely is a chore. I had to play Walking Dead three times over because of this, but at least I was laughing the whole time when I did my silent playthrough. I'm really not a fan in general though, because I feel like gamers say they want branching narratives to feel they have an individual story crafted to who they are, but it seems like that's just something that's been said for years as a way to elevate games. Usually I've felt games with a well crafted narrative with one path tend to be my favorities. Although it is good that there are games with narrative choices and there always should be, even if though in many cases the choices seem to be tacked on because that's just what you do.

[Merus]

I generally feel that it might be more fruitful to build gameplay systems that explicitly have a view of the world in them, that are shaped in a way that stories will fall out. Minecraft has the general shape of a story, in that you have a situation and a goal, and you go into the mines to get what you're looking for, something unexpected happens, and you come back out changed somewhat. If you could systematise learning a life lesson, it'd work even better. But I don't think that's possible.

 

But that's kind of the reason why people want to tell stories in games, anyway: they want to impart some kind of meaning to the proceedings. You have to build an intention into the system for it to be there. Trying to make truths of the universe fall out of an algorithm is never going to happen; computer output can be unexpected, but never unconscious. I don't think there's anything wrong with the impulse to convey meaning, and meaning can be conveyed in different ways. But not conveying meaning at all, I think, will be a hard sell. One of the things I think the Stanley Parable mod does better than the final release is touch on that impulse, on the idea that developers feel like they should be capable of conveying meaning, as imperfect as their methods are.

[CaptainFish]

I can't really speak to the larger goals of replayable narrative. I do know that personally I love replaying short digestible chunks of game narrative. The Stanley Parable represents the extreme of it: incredibly brief chunks of narrative that lead to quick payoff that basically dares you to jump back in. Actually, the real extreme is Aisle. It's probably my preference for short stories, but when a single playthrough is shortened, or rather the idea of "A Playthrough" is extended to repeatedly trying everything in a fairly dense narrative space I can't help but engage over and over until the content is exhausted. Maybe if more games attempted to tell story through separate character vignettes (like I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, or TWD 400 Days) and focused on the idea that it's not really what you choose to happen that matters, but rather the entire space of choices. Then, someone like me would certainly run through each one over and over, and still get a full story/message/idea at the end.

 

 

That isn't to say I don't like extended narrative games. I loved Alpha Protocol's mechanics of choice and played through it several times. It was done in such a way that you could feel comfortable to explore choices and not feel like they had anything to do with either a binary morality system, or a binary reward system (either rewards now/later like in Bioshock, or less rewards for doing the right thing like in a lot of games).

[youmeyou]

Stanley Parable is an example I'd like to see repeated elsewhere in games. As has been said, it offers ultra-short vignettey experiences that leave you wanting more (and easily obtaining it due to said length). It's the best of both worlds as it offers variety of play without filler.

[feelthedarkness]

I'm probably the wrong person to express an opinion on this, as I finish just about everything and replay nothing.

 

I greatly prefer a "responsive system" like the Fallouts where I can experience just about everything, but get some input in how things turn out, with a nice cap at the end that plays out the effects of those stories. Developers don't have to spend a ton of energy generating content nobody will see, because the not seen part is a narrated tag. 

[Bjorn]

There's been an element of the argument around achievements and game length that's been bugging me. I agree overall that more games would be better if they were shorter.  I love short games that can be finished in a single sitting, or in just a few evenings of light play.  But it feels disingenuous to compare completion rates between movies and games.  The comparison is almost always made to movies about how few people finish games.  Why is that the comparison?  Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to compare games to TV shows or mini-series?

 

What percentage of people watch part of a TV show, but never finish it?  Even shows with narrative arcs, like Game of Thrones or Walking Dead?   If you're comparing it to books, what percentage of people never finish a series of books that's 3-10 books long? 

 

TV is also a better comparison for the argument around replayability.  How many people actually rewatch the entirety of a TV show?  Probably a tiny percentage of the overall viewership.  But, people are probably far more likely to rewatch particular episodes.  Perhaps there is a lesson there for developers.  Unlock the entirety of the game after completion (or even from the beginning).  Let people jump in and play any part of the game they want, without having to cultivate their own save games to do so. 

 

It's an odd thing about games.  If I just want to read the first and last chapters of a murder mystery, I can (and have met people who do).  If I want to just watch the final season of a TV show, I can do that.  But if you want to play the end of a game, fuck you, you're playing the entire thing. 

[sclpls]

I have no idea what Ken Levine has in mind because as he's currently formulated things everything is still quite vague. However the idea of a replayable narrative is maybe not that valuable a thing. It is possible that part of what makes something worth replaying is a sort of absence of narrative. If we simply consider the word itself, "replayable", what becomes clear is that what someone wants is to repeat a mode of play, not necessarily have a new narrative experience. The games that we do associate with a sort of endless replayability are the same games that don't have much narrative content -- strategy games, roguelikes, etc.

 

I just finished playing the Novelist. It took me about three hours to play. If I wanted to I'm sure I could play through it a few more times to get different story outcomes, but I'm not sure that' would be worthwhile. By playing the game once I get to own the narrative I experienced. If I start playing it over and over then I get to experience some different outcomes, but that also means that I lose the singularity of that experience, which cheapens it a bit.

 

The singularity of a narrative is important. What makes a narrative worth revisiting is getting older, picking up on nuances that you couldn't appreciate when you were younger and didn't know as much. If you want people to replay narrative games, the key is to write better, more meaningful narratives. Replayable narratives is one of those things that sounds great on paper, but is potentially more problematic upon scrutiny.

[TheLastBaron]

What are you guys' thoughts on something like Opposing Force and Blue Shift where you are replaying the same story, but from a different perspective?

[Dewar]

There's been an element of the argument around achievements and game length that's been bugging me. I agree overall that more games would be better if they were shorter.  I love short games that can be finished in a single sitting, or in just a few evenings of light play.  But it feels disingenuous to compare completion rates between movies and games.  The comparison is almost always made to movies about how few people finish games.  Why is that the comparison?  Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to compare games to TV shows or mini-series?

 

What percentage of people watch part of a TV show, but never finish it?  Even shows with narrative arcs, like Game of Thrones or Walking Dead?   If you're comparing it to books, what percentage of people never finish a series of books that's 3-10 books long? 

 

TV is also a better comparison for the argument around replayability.  How many people actually rewatch the entirety of a TV show?  Probably a tiny percentage of the overall viewership.  But, people are probably far more likely to rewatch particular episodes.  Perhaps there is a lesson there for developers.  Unlock the entirety of the game after completion (or even from the beginning).  Let people jump in and play any part of the game they want, without having to cultivate their own save games to do so. 

 

It's an odd thing about games.  If I just want to read the first and last chapters of a murder mystery, I can (and have met people who do).  If I want to just watch the final season of a TV show, I can do that.  But if you want to play the end of a game, fuck you, you're playing the entire thing. 

 

The other way that it's a poor comparison is that there's no direct interaction required to finish a movie or TV episode. I could have started playing around with my tablet 10 minutes in and yet still say that I "finished" the movie.

 

As for the replayability aspect, I am not interested in replaying a game and experiencing a different story due to making different choices. Like others have already said, I made those choices and I generally stand by them. What interests me is a story built from different puzzle pieces that are assembled different ways regardless of my choices. For instance:

 

The first time I play I walk into a room and there's a stand-off going on between two other characters. I make the choice on who to side with and the story moves on. The next time I play and walk into that same room, instead one character has already killed the other, or maybe they're working together this time, or maybe it's completely empty and I meet those characters some other way later. Maybe who's "bad" and who's "good" changes every time you play so you can't rely on the same choices you made last time.

 

Those are the sorts of replayable narative that intrests me. Basically Spelunky, but instead of randomized platform tiles pasted together, it's random story tiles.

[mikemariano]

As for the replayability aspect, I am not interested in replaying a game and experiencing a different story due to making different choices. Like others have already said, I made those choices and I generally stand by them. What interests me is a story built from different puzzle pieces that are assembled different ways regardless of my choices. For instance:

 

The first time I play I walk into a room and there's a stand-off going on between two other characters. I make the choice on who to side with and the story moves on. The next time I play and walk into that same room, instead one character has already killed the other, or maybe they're working together this time, or maybe it's completely empty and I meet those characters some other way later. Maybe who's "bad" and who's "good" changes every time you play so you can't rely on the same choices you made last time.

 

Those are the sorts of replayable narative that intrests me. Basically Spelunky, but instead of randomized platform tiles pasted together, it's random story tiles.

 

The Blade Runner game from 1997 took a stab at this and did a decent job.  Some characters are Replicants during one playthrough and human during another.  This doesn't affect the available story paths, but it does affect which ones you might choose.

 

The game also left some gutsy ambiguity: No matter what ending you get, the game never reveals if the player is really a Replicant or not.  You could be a human who believes he's a Replicant, a human who believes he needs to help Replicants, a Replicant who denies his true nature, etc.

 

All the endings gave a concrete story resolution, but character resolution only happened in the mind of the player.  I don't know if most players saw that as an incentive for replayability—maybe they always thought, "Huh, guess I'm a robot."  But I only discovered this story structure after playing through multiple times.

[feelthedarkness]

I'm sure finish rates are not great, but one thing the article points out is that they don't seem to have a metric to separate "bought" vs "played." I have a shameful number of GREAT DEALS that i haven't even downloaded, and a few I've downloaded but haven't started.

 

I'd like to see the list correlated against certain basic-plot achievements like X% of players that got the 10% achievement got the 50% and then the 100%. 

[mikemariano]

I'd like to see the list correlated against certain basic-plot achievements like X% of players that got the 10% achievement got the 50% and then the 100%. 

 

The little bit of detail that's in the article is still astounding to me.

 

More recently, how about The Walking Dead? Starting with 81.8 per cent of players who picked up its first achievement, only 65.8 per cent stuck around to finish even Episode 1. By the finale, ignoring the DLC, only 38.5 per cent of players are demonstrably hanging around ...

 

Whether or not that's purchasers who never install or people who have booted up the game, that's still nearly 1 out of every 5 players not even getting through what is basically the opening cutscene.  Crazy!  I know you want to see more of that but I'm scared to see how that number breaks out if you dig deeper.

[Bjorn]

Whether or not that's purchasers who never install or people who have booted up the game, that's still nearly 1 out of every 5 players not even getting through what is basically the opening cutscene.  Crazy!  I know you want to see more of that but I'm scared to see how that number breaks out if you dig deeper.

 

Part of that is trading cards.  Unfortunately they have probably broken the value in deriving any real information from Steam achievements for games that have them.  I have a bunch of games from bundles and sales that I have started and let run in the background to harvest their cards, but never started an actual game of.   And I have more that I messed around with for a few minutes, getting the first achievement, but then alt-tabbed into the background to go back to what I was doing.

 

Over time, the review feature is probably doing the same thing, where you have to at least have launched the game to leave a review.  Probably doesn't skew it as much as cards, but I'm sure it happens. 

[TheLastBaron]

I've been thinking about it and a game with the narrative generating elements of CK2 would be really cool. Basically CK2 is already a great replayable narrative in a game, but the strategy aspect turns a lot of people off so something with similar systems and random events (I.e. The AAR discussed on the Sons of Abraham episode of 3MA where a Jean d'Arc was born and then the spawn of Satan became Queen and so on). This would be cool.

[Badfinger]

While I generally agree with the point of the OP, it's funny that one of the games specifically referenced and called back to a number of times is Dragon Age. I personally went through after I finished the game and played every single starter area so i could see how all the introduction stories played out before it starts to give you the full open world. It's also a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate, and a certain section of communities find that game infinitely replayable. There's a 3000+ thread rolling on Something Awful right now for the Infinity Engine games, which follows what I believe was a 20k post thread for BG2. After all, they're basically extremely bespoke (SAT WORD), crafted D&D experiences and if you pick different classes they play quite differently.

 

I think there are absolutely types of games with a narrative focus that should be replayable, or lend themselves well to being replayable. With that said, not replaying a game that caters to that audience doesn't make it a failure. Not finishing a game doesn't make it a failure.

 

The little bit of detail that's in the article is still astounding to me.

 

 

Whether or not that's purchasers who never install or people who have booted up the game, that's still nearly 1 out of every 5 players not even getting through what is basically the opening cutscene.  Crazy!  I know you want to see more of that but I'm scared to see how that number breaks out if you dig deeper.

 

I'm one of those people. I started playing it with an SO who didn't play games. We really enjoyed it, but it was never an activity we went back to and now I'm not seeing her anymore. I have ever intention of playing it, but it never feels like the "right" time to do it. I don't actually know what "the right time" means but hey.