Most of you understand "replayability" wrong.
watching the "I Finished a Videogame" essay on Eternal Darkness (one of my absolute favorite games ever), and although I agree with most of the stuff he says in it, I must admit that I never got the criticism about the "true ending" you unlock after finishing it three times.
This ties into a larger conversation about "replayability", or the idea that a game *must* be replayable in order to hold value, but in this specific case, the complaint is directed towards the huge amount of reused "content" (god, I hate that word) that the game contains.
Because, yeah, you visit the same 4 locations over the course of 13 levels, which might seem to be a lot of repetition (never mind that the whole idea here is revisiting places that are changing across history), tripled by the three times you need to finish the game to get the True Ending, but... Did he do all those playthroughs in a row? It seems so.
Is that the mainstream way to judge the replayability of a game? Because that would explain why so many games nowadays are desperate to cram stuff into it to get good word of mouth, even if it is not necessary. Unless you are talking of a multiplayer game or a randomized roguelike that you can run through dozens of times, I always conceived "replayability" as something you do eventually, months or years after, with slight variations and different endings just as a bonus, not as the whole point of it. I *saw* the True Ending of Eternal Darkness after finishing it three times, but that was during a period of years; I just craved the game again, and chose a different god to follow just because. I didn't replay it three times right then and there to extract every last drop of content I could from it, that seems frankly insane to me.
And hear, I get it, sometimes this replayability is important because games are expensive and you want the most value out of your money, but why that return must be immediate? What, you need those $70 dollars worth of game in a single hit? It feels like listening to someone buying a box of candy and then complaining they feel terrible after eating it in one sitting. You are not supposed to do that.
Anyway, I maybe don't have a larger point to make, just that I'm very impatient with the impatience of other people lol. Let's just keep in mind that this demand of content cramming is what brought us to the current hellscape of Games as a Service, microtransactions and predatory DLC we are currently living. And that sucks.
