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?
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 five years on a desert island might give me time to try and shoot for Coda.
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.
I primarily play competitive fighting games, so I’d just be looking for a steady stream of opponents to challenge myself against. That’s something I can grind for five years.