Staying power: What keeps a game in discussion?

Something I find fascinating is the "shelf life" of a single game, in the limelight. The community is, of course, always freshest when its released, but then after a lengthy period of time, the discussion just isn't that active anymore. That doesn't mean those games are bad, and it might become a fast favorite that you'll revisit for years to come, but what's always a treat is a game that stays talked about. Years after release, people were still sharing personal stories about X-Com games gone wrong, or recent escapades in a modded session of Fallout/The Elder Scrolls.

Games that tend to encourage those emergent little play-driven moments tend to be the ones with staying power, but then something like Last of Us or Undertale happens. The latter is a relatively short game, yet the characters, and little story tricks stuck so hard with fans that they're still sharing fanart, fan theories, and the like. Meanwhile, something like To The Moon (Not really the same but shut up) a short, and heart-wrenching story, is something we don't talk about anymore. It doesn't make it less meaningful to the people that it touched. It's just that everything that could be said has been said.

All forms of art can produce masterpieces that are discussed long after the original creator is gone, but it's just amazing how many ways, and how hard certain games stick with people. Sometimes it's even less about the base content itself and more about the healthy modding scene that turns a fantastic game into something with practically infinite value. What are games that manage to stick with you guys, and why? Not just games that you'll always load up and have a great time with, but games where you never stop finding new things to discuss about.

edited 28th Feb '16 8:21:26 AM by mrsunshinesprinkles

A gew things will keep a game alive years after release:

1. Mods. This is number 1 because you can do almost anything in the world to a game with them, which makes creating rich new experiences easy.

2. Multiplayer. Games are sometimes kept alive thanks entirely to the ability to play with friends or random people online. Even the last of us has an active community thanks to multiplayer.

3. Replay value. It's as subjective as all get out, but usually having many different ways to progress through a game you own will make it worth playing years down the line.

4. Story. At the bottom because not every is going to be captivated by a game's plot or characters, but for those that are you can enjoy many different discussions about them.

Factional conflict between fans of the games' various, well, factions keeps a game in the mind, I feel. Reasons why the player chose one and therefore why the other or others are just wrong and objectively so. Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim are the best exemplars of that - if you've ever hung around our threads on the games, you'd know why I said that - every faction has at least something going for it, even if it's just reasons to give it a kicking.

Fallout 4's biggest failure is that none of the factions are worth anything other than a brief declaration of why they all suck. There's no way of stealing the game and the Wasteland it's set in from underneath them all either, taking it for yourself like you could do in New Vegas. It's the biggest narrative step backwards from New Vegas that could possibly occur and it comes perilously close to ruining the game for me.

The Metal Gear Solid games have staying power due to both it's story and gameplay.

Story-wise, it's creator Hideo Kojima is known for adding in a bunch of odd and often subtle implications and double-meanings both within the gameplay and story. Most people are probably going to miss them unless they've got a well-read and sharp eye or understand the series lore, for better or worse. Of all his titles, MGS 2 exemplifies it the best; you're either gonna love or hate Raiden and what his character represents, find the story's message about information-control and memes confusing or brilliant, find the Patriots to be deviously creepy and awesome or an annoying space wedgie that wasn't necessary for the plot.

Admittedly the latest game (MGSV) failed to effectively communicate it's ideas and is by far considered to have the weakest story in the series yet, but that's where the gameplay comes in. Metal Gear titles always find the most obscure yet cool uses for items you'd never think of, ranging from cardboard boxes, water guns, empty gun magazines, inflatable decoys, or even porn mags. Or sometimes, it's the amount of thought that goes into specific mechanics or situations in the games that almost no other developer would ever think of programming into the game.

The best example of this can be found in MGS 3. If you were to kill a guard, let a vulture eat it's corpse for a bit, and then eat said vulture, later on during the "undead river" sequence against The Sorrow, you'll find the spirit of the guy, and he'll scream "YOU ATE ME!!!" How many games ever put in that much thought into their mechanics? Very few, and that's what keeps people discussing the MGS games long after they've been released.

Way back in the day, the Earth2150 series was a big name on the RTS scene. Once the sequel came out, however, it pretty much killed the franchise. Now, fans will probably say it's because of 2160's questionable quality but that's not all.

What really killed the franchise is the mod support. See, there was an official modder toolkit, but it was never made publicly available. Instead, the modding teams had to directly ask Topware to receive the toolkit and the devs only gave it out to teams with prior modding experience and history of released projects. Thus, everyone outside the small circle of elite modders was completely and utterly locked out of modding the game: the elites had access to the official toolkit which satisfied their own needs, thus none of them ever saw the need to make an unofficial one for the common folk to use.

This idiotic business decision was kept up with 2160 as well, meaning that the game never reached its full potential because people couldn't mod the game so they lost interest and stopped playing, followed by the modders who actually could mod the game leaving for lack of players to make mods for, followed by everyone else leaving as well for lack of mods.

edited 29th Feb '16 6:09:23 AM by amitakartok

I think a few factors have a hand in this:

1. Recency: More people will be talking about a newer game than a game that is over a year old. More people will talk about Fallout 4 compared to, say, Mario Kart 8
2. Multiplayer: Some games (or genres) are kept alive by having an active multiplayer community. Example: Super Smash Bros. Melee
3. Is the game still active: If a game is being supported by DLC for over a year after its release, it will still be talked about by those still playing it. Example: Super Smash Bros for 3DS/Wii-U.

Glad I'm not the only one who still remembers that series. And why the heck hasn't anybody tried to make a proper remake or sequel to that series (or Warzone 2100 for that matter)?!

Well, for a game like say, Splatoon, it's a fun, addictive game which nearly anyone can pick up and play. Then, the regular free updates kept the game fresh for far longer than just releasing all the content at once at launch. So in that sense, Nintendo's long-term plan was well thought out, and I'd have to imagine that other game companies have taken notice. The Splatfest events definitely give people added incentive to invest time in the game as well.

But on top of that, the game's central concept, character designs and 'Hip-Hop-Jet Set Radio-street-art-and-fashion' vibe were instantly iconic and caught people's imaginations from the start. The fan artists just went nuts for it, and I'd say that the Miiverse community that has sprung up around the game has kept it surprisingly vibrant and relevant even now.

So I'd say that it's not enough for a game just to be good in a purely mechanical sense. It needs to have a 'soul' or a distinct personality that draws people to it. I'd imagine Undertale is sticking around for the same reason.

edited 1st Mar '16 4:42:35 AM by edvedd

Having a thriving mod scene to keep a game alive helps, too. Each Elder Scrolls and Fallout title continues to get support from fans improving, changing, and even revamping the game right up until (and in many cases, even after) the next in the series gets released, on top of the reasons already provided for why those games still having thriving communities.

As far as I'm concerned, a remake using the physics engine of one of the recent Red Faction games would be awesome. We have the computational power to do large-scale terrain deformation in real time now, not just merely altering terrain height and making tiles impassable if the difference in relative height towards a neighboring tile is above a certain value.

edited 1st Mar '16 6:01:19 AM by amitakartok