Curious as to what people think has the most replay potential.

Rules:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. You get existing DLC/mods/etc for a game. You don’t get multiple games in a series, though.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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”.

  8. 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.

  9. You have available to you existing documentation and material related to the game that is generally publicly-available. Fandom wikis, howtos and guides, etc.

  10. 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?

  • reinei@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 month ago

    Uff this started out for me as being “easy! Minecraft, Factorio and a third one!”

    And then quickly and only devolved into an abyss of deliberation…

    • Do I take EU4+DLC+Anbennar because then I would finally have an excuse to actually learn and play this damn game? (Plus having base game and Anbennar basically doubles the replayability)
    • Do I take VintageStory so I can finally learn to actually play it well and start creating meaningful mods for it?
    • Should I take Noita or Caves of Qud? Should they be replacements for DF?
    • Is either of Civ V or Civ VI replayable about for me for this much time?

    And from there the more basic questions:

    • Does any of the three games need to be entertaining enough to basically always run or could/should it suffice to simply rotate between them?
    • How much time would I reasonably want to spend playing vs creating?
    • Also am I allowed to spend some time basically daydreaming every day (aka the games are meant more to actually keep me sane rather than get people to recommend good games they have given thought and time to?) or should they/would I want them to keep me occupied basically 15/7?

    So yeah, Minecraft probably still stands as there are way too many mods and building ideas for it to (probably?) become truly stale in a lifetime!

    And Factorio because I still want to actually finish an AB run for once, or a SE run, or … You get the idea. Buut the third slot would likely be a make or break for this whole endeavor and now it’s back to square one again!