Thoughts on Replayability, or All Paths to the Same End
(Originally posted on May 3, 2024)
I played Slay the Princess recently. It's a neat little game, inspired by the likes of The Stanley Parable and Disco Elysium. The core conceit is that you - the player character - are entrusted with the eponymous task, lest the Princess destroy the world... somehow. For the purposes of this post, it got me thinking about some other games and how they're formatted in such a way to encourage or discourage replaying.
(Broad spoilers on the game's structure to follow, by the way.)
The Steam page directly mentions time loops (and hopefully if you're like me and read text slightly quicker than you actually parse it, you are now properly warned of spoilers), so as you might expect, whether you slay the princess or refuse (as well as actions taken before and during your confrontation with her) lead to varying story branches. Once a branch concludes, you're sent back to the top to try again.
When you reach the end of a branch, the game locks you out of following that precise same path. After you complete five branches total, you're shuffled to the real ending, which briefly acknowledges which routes you saw but otherwise plays out the same way no matter how you got there. There's something like 20-25 different story paths, and the devs plan to patch in more.
You can't do a "completionist" playthrough of Slay the Princess. You necessarily have to play the game multiple times to see them all, and the game is set up specifically to encourage that.
(Aside: This is part of why the game didn't quite hit for me. I wasn't really bought into the final emotional climax, probably due to the specific routes I saw. It landed a little better after I played a second time and saw five totally different routes, but I also knew exactly what was coming.)
This structure reminded me of I guess I'm staying on brand here the Neverwinter Nights premium module Kingmaker.
Kingmaker opens with your adventuring party getting killed in a battle outside a fortress city. The NWN engine only supports two companions, so your first task is to pick which two of four companions to revive. This obviously depends not only on whom you like the most after briefly speaking to their ghost, but also how you've specced out your own character. For example, you might want to revive the wizard, but she's also a pompous lawful neutral jerk.
The structure of the actual module involves running in the lord's election for the fortress. There are three candidates (including you), and nine guildmasters who cast votes. Each naturally has a quest for you to secure their vote, which might naturally lead into other quests or otherwise be better suited to certain party compositions. There's only just enough time to do three, maybe four quests before the election. After that, it's the final dungeon and the module wraps up.
So, again, you can't really do a "completionist" playthrough of Kingmaker; you necessarily have to play it multiple times to do every quest and explore the different dialogue between party members... if uh, if that's your thing.
This strikes me as an elegant way to allow for a higher degree of reactivity in a game (especially a smaller scale one) without tracking like a thousand different choices across the whole experience. It also makes me bristle a bit, because it's generally not how I engage with video games.
I'm a serial completionist, often to my own detriment. I put off story missions until I exhaust almost all available sidequests. I try to empty out my quest log, do everything perfectly, get the pat on my head that says I did a good job (I'm not an achievement hunter though, weirdly enough). I love big RPGs with tons of variation, but if I wind up something like Pillars of Eternity for another go around, I feel like I have to do every quest. This is why I have 230 hours in Baldur's Gate 3 and 100-150 hours in both of Owlcat's Pathfinder games even though I don't particularly like any of them! The kind of time commitment for this mindset ranges somewhere from "irresponsible" to "impossible".
Slay the Princess tries to mitigate the feeling of "missing out" on other routes by constructing a playlist at the end (that is, the musical themes from the variations you saw in that playthrough in order), adding weight to the idea of a playthrough being Your Special And Unique Playthrough, Never To Be Replaced. Which it is to an extent - considering the number of pieces, probably no other single person got (or will ever get) the precise combination of routes I did in the precise order - but I find an odd tension in putting that at the end of a game that otherwise seems specifically built to encourage replays.
It makes sense to me that a big honkin' CRPG would have the ending slides talking about all the specific things you did, because I imagine most people don't play those games more than once. Even if they do, they probably aren't sickos like me who try to do a completionist run every time. Comparatively, Slay the Princess takes maybe 90-120 minutes to reach the end; I played it twice through in one morning.
Supergiant's Pyre is an excellent example here, I think. There's a huge amount of variation in the minutiae of any given playthrough, and the game almost always comments on the specific combination of variables you've put together. Who do I field for the Rite this time? Who is even still in my party? Which team am I up against, and what do they have to say about my answers to the previous two questions?
The narrative of Pyre is all about moving forward through bad times and not letting mistakes or regrets drag you down. When the game busts out the ending slides and the custom credits track at the end of a playthrough where you explicitly did not have time to do everything or save everyone, you feel the sanctity of Your Special And Unique Playthrough, Never To Be Replaced. I can only imagine that weaving this rope of dozens of threads was a gargantuan effort.
With this in mind, it makes a lot of sense that their next game was Hades, which has a similar amount of reactivity to minutiae but on a treadmill where most people who play long enough will see a majority of possible combinations. The development resources don't go to (heavy scare quotes) "waste". I dunno.
I hold that sort of tension between letting a game lay or replaying it within myself, too. I'm a completionist, but isn't the point of 100%ing a game to make it so that you never have to play it again? Do I really need to spend another ten hours or whatever to get a new five minutes at the end of it? Is it so wrong to just look up a wiki or a youtube video or whatever and see what I missed?
Maybe this is why I've always been drawn to comprehensive Let's Plays, where I can trust someone else to put in the work and show me stuff I would have never thought to do, but which nevertheless feels necessary for some vaguely "complete" experience (aside: I ain't gonna show you all 16 Stands for the JoJo LP though, absolutely fucking not).
I dunno. I feel like I replay games less often these days in general, and that may or may not be related to how much more aware I've become that the exchange rate between time and money is arcane and fucked and unfair. But I also think replay value is good (probably)! More bang for your buck! I think it's cool how smaller-scale projects come up with ways to add replay value that don't involve like, battle-passes or whatever!
Just, I also uninstalled Slay the Princess after two runs and then skimmed a list of the options I didn't take. Maybe the dialogue in some of those would have really hit me in a way that the others didn't. Maybe it's one they'll patch in later. Maybe I'll forever think of that game as "hey, neat" and not "yeah that was great", and maybe that's fine. We all have limited time on this Earth, after all. All our paths lead to the same end, too.
---