The Best Indicator For Quality In a Video Game Is My Willingness To Replay It
Here’s a thought: the best indicator for quality in a video game is my willingness to first finish and then replay it. How many games have you replayed once? Or even twice? Or how about simply finishing it in the first place. I catch myself giving up on games that tend to drag on much faster than I used to for a few key reasons: (1) having less time and patience, and (2) my quality bar has been raised significantly compared to my youth when I had to make due with less. For me, that means the act of simply finishing a game is already a big step towards meeting that bar. Getting enthused by the thought of replaying it is an even bigger sign of quality. Do you replay a game as part of a yearly tradition? I know folks who do yearly runs of Jazz Jackrabbit: Holiday Hare to soak up the Christmas holiday atmosphere at the end of the year. I guess we can categorise games you play just to get in a holiday mood as an exception: these Jazz episodes can hardly be called qualitative. What does replaying a game actually mean in context of never-ending games such as roguelikes, city builders, and MMORPGs? I have played endless hours of Zeus: Master of Olympus and completed countless Mephisto Diablo II hell runs hoping to farm some good necromancer gear. I spent hours and hours shaking fruit trees and visiting other’s villages in Animal Crossing: Wild World to try and pay off my loan without properly “restarting” by creating a new savegame. As an interesting exercise, I analysed the top 25 games listed in my Top 100 (the A and S tier) and counted them by my replay rate. Replayed 5+ times : Commandos 2 , Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow , Super Mario World , Animal Crossing: Wild World , Sonic 3 , Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield , Zeus: Master of Olympus , Wizardry 8 , Baldur’s Gate II . Replayed 3-5 times : Goblins Quest 3 , Age of Empires II , The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past , Wario Land 3 , Monkey Island 2 . Replayed 1-2 times : Tactics Ogre: Reborn , The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker , Super Metroid , Duke Nukem 3D , Paper Mario 2 , Deus Ex . Yet to replay : Hollow Knight , Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga , Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones , Pizza Tower . What are the games that have yet to be replayed doing in that tier list? Good question! A few reasons I can come up with: recency bias ( Hollow Knight , Pizza Tower ) & what I’d like to call “RPG fatigue” ( Superstar Saga ): replaying a (j)RPG is a massive undertaking that often requires too much commitment compared to playing something shiny and new. Superstar Saga is “only” 20 hours long which is 10 hours shorter than Hollow Knight so my reasoning doesn’t really stand here, but it surely is the reason why I wouldn’t attempt to do yet another run-through of Baldur’s Gate II any time soon. Or touch v3, for that matter. It might be interesting to calculate the correlation between the game length and my willingness to replay a game but we’d then have to take the “old playthroughs” out of the equation. Looking at Baldur’s Gate II again, these replays were done when I was young and didn’t have anything else to do. Shadows of Amn and the expansion Throne of Bhaal together require almost 90 hours to finish which would simply be impossible now. My bias towards shorter games now might affect how I evaluate the quality of a game. The longer it gets, the faster I’m fatigued by it, even though it can be very engaging. I don’t think my attention span shortened: it’s just that I can only dedicate a few hours a day for hobby projects, including gaming. There are reasons not to replay a game, even if you think it’s exceptional. For instance, you probably don’t want to immediately replay a story-driven narrative game you just finished since the story is still in your head. Another example I can think of is that you love the game’s atmosphere and general gameplay but hate the boss encounters. Hollow Knight fits that bill for me: while the bosses were amazing, I do not want to slog through that “git gud” fest again any time soon. There are reasons to replay a game over and over again, even if you think it’s crap. For instance, just to pass the time with nothing more but your phone, you might be seduced to play a Bejeweled -like that’s addictive and just gets you going, even though you hate it. Maybe the point I am trying to get across makes less sense than it did when I started writing this… What do others have to say about replayability? Dan Kline thinks that without replayability, your game is boring . Why would replayability be a core aspect of a game? I can think of 2 reasons off the top of my head. First, all the prominent games of history are replayable. Sports, chess, board games, children’s games, are all at their core replayable concepts. Second, rulesets that create interesting choices (another frequent game definition) seems to require replayability. This is an interesting point. Replayability is the fallout of interesting choices. If the choices aren’t replayable, then they, by definition, weren’t interesting enough to explore. If you can predict the outcome of all possible rule permutations, then you aren’t playing a game. The rules are trivial. I’m not sure if this is true for all possible cases. Replaying adventure games usually means retracing your exact steps, making the exact same choices the game expects you to make to progress. And yet I’ve replayed Monkey Island 2 more than three times because I love the atmosphere. I know most puzzles by heart but I don’t care. And contrary to a chess session, finishing Monkey Island 2 now is exactly like finishing it 20 years ago; there are no branching paths or other ways to finish it that theoretically increase its replayability factor. As discussed in this tilde.net thread on replayability , many folks consider games to be replayable if there are branching paths you can explore in another playthrough. And while that’s a very obvious approach, by that same approach Monkey Island 2 would not be replayable at all. Yet I replay it. Often. Also, simply the presence of branching paths does not automatically mean it’s a high quality game. Aki-Petteri Meskanen names the engaging and charming world as a reason to revisit a game . Besides that, co-op play is also a big reason to reinstall to a previously completed game. That’s the reason why Raven Shield and even Commandos 2 score so high on my list: my best memories of these games stem from local networked play sessions with a friend despite already having finished the single player campaign several times. My willingness to replay a game is an indicator for quality. That personal statement has less to do with the theoretical definition of replayability and more with my own recent experiences with video games. Also, as I mentioned, sometimes I’m simply not willing to (re)invest the time, even though the first playthrough was a superb experience. I don’t think I will ever replay Hollow Knight , but as James Bond says: never say never again! All that being said, I think this idea can be expanded to re-watching movies and re-listening to audio albums as well! Related topics: / games / By Wouter Groeneveld on 15 March 2026. Reply via email .
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