Over the past few weeks, I have gone back and played Borderlands 2 and have been obsessed with it. For those of you who don’t know, Borderlands is a game where you play as a “vault hunter”, whose goal is to go to a planet called Pandora and hunt for a mysterious “vault” that houses a hell of a lot of loot. You pick a class and you can level up your character getting better and better loot as you go along, while fighting harder and harder enemies.
One of the best parts about this game is its endless amount of replayability. As one character, you play through the campaign a total of three times (Normal mode, True Vault Hunter mode, and Ultimate Vault Hunter mode), each of these times, the enemies get harder and in Ultimate Vault Hunter mode, the enemy merely scales to your level so every enemy will be either your level or higher. Through each of these runs of the campaign, you have a chance of getting legendary gear which is a collector’s dream. There is a seemingly endless amount of guns in the game, however, a few stand out to the average player. Similar to “gotta catch them all” in pokemon, the Vault Hunter wants to “Own them all”.
Now you are probably thinking, “playing the campaign three times?! That has to get old after a while”. Actually Gearbox studios handles this perfectly. This game has a certain twist of humor that makes you laugh everytime you hear a certain line of dialog. Also, all side quests are unique to themselves. It’s not like Fallout 4, where “another settlement needs your help”. However there is a huge array of side quests, ranging from killing a certain creature or protect some supplies or even shooting a guy in the face(literally, look up the Face McShooty side quest and prepare to laugh a lot).
There are very few games that I can play as much as i did in Borderlands and still be excited to play it with my friends. Which makes me wonder, what makes a game replayable in your opinion. Is it the plethora of quests to do like Fallout or Skyrim? or an extremely large task that will take months to complete like 100% Binding of Isaac or getting dark matter in Call of Duty?
Replayability, the concept of playing a game even though you have played/beat the game in the end. I personally have mixed feelings of replaying games. Yes, I will play a FIFA soccer over and over or I will play Counter Strike many times but in the sense you are talking about is a bit different. I very rarely play a game twice after I have finished it. As I like playing games for the story they have, just playing it again just sounds like torture. As I know the plot and the end I choose not to play it again.
Moving on the reason might be because I have never really found a game that can pull me back again. There are a few games that have pulled me back and the reasons why is because how they had the game engines such as the moves that the player was able to do. However though usually in an hour I get bored and leave the game.
Although reading your review on Bordelands I think I’ll try playing that game, maybe I’ll have a different experience.
I think a number of factors can encourage someone to play a game, depending on both the game and the player. Games like Fallout and Elder Scrolls seem to be replayable largely because of their gigantic scope, which afford a high amount of diversity in player choice, not to mention it’s easy to miss things the first time through and delight in finally finding them, even hundreds of hours into a new game.
This brings me into discovery as another important factor. Journey is a relatively short game, yet I kept playing through it again and again, simply because I uncovered another layer of depth on each subsequent journey. Having that sort of complexity to a game can help make playing through it an all the more compelling experience, almost like a puzzle to unravel.
Of course, great story lines are another thing that bring me back; games like the Witcher and Dishonored, which are arguably very story driven, invite me to return and inhabit their worlds once again, even if I’ve already been through the games for the umpteenth time.
Finally, if a game is just plain fun, I’ll keep playing it for as long as it continues to be fun. Sniper Elite V2 does this for me, for example; there’s just nothing more satisfying than nailing the perfect shot from half the map away, and watching the almost balletic carnage that ensues.
I’ve recently had a similar experience playing Fallout 4. When the game had first come out I played it for countless hours on end until I had finished the campaign. After completing the story I wanted to continue on to explore the rest of the game but a hard drive failure had deleted my save file. After that problem I didn’t return back to the game until recently. In this new play through I created a different type of character, on that does more sneaking and sniping. I also have completely stayed away from the main story and have been exploring the world that I didn’t get a chance to after my first play through. I’ve been doing this for the last two weeks and I’m enjoying the game just as much as I did the first time I picked it up.
These are the qualities of a game that I use to justify the $60 purchase. The fact that I can go back and do this with a game makes the money I spend on the game much more worth it. In the past I have also had this situation with games like Borderlands, Counter Strike and Fallout: New Vegas.