The Case Against Gameplay Loops (2024)

> For indies, the pressure to clear the 2 hour mark was hung ominously overhead when Valve updated their policy to allow refunds up to that threshold.

If the game is good, I doubt most people would return it. “The Dark Queen of Mortholme”¹ comes to mind. I didn’t really find it enjoyable (good idea, boring execution) but the reviews praise it and I do get why.

The game takes 30 minutes from beginning to end. Maybe you’ll do 90 minutes if you want to try multiple things, but you can do everything in under two hours. And yet it’s a success, not a return fest.

¹ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3587610/The_Dark_Queen_of...

Games fundamentally require loops because they require skill. You learn through failure and repetition.

Games have the trouble that users have very different appetites for the gameplay. Some want short games, some want 1000s of hours for their $50. Devs do their best to provide a reasonable amount of content. This means that the reality is that most will not 100% complete your game and so you need to tune accordingly.

Its not fundamentally wrong to play a game until you're satisfied. Ideally the game can be structured in a way that the core story thread can be finished by then but sometimes that just doesn't work out.

If we are bring reductive, the grand theft auto games were drive here, shoot that kind of deal. Call of duty was shoot till objective completes until 4 came around. Those never felt repetitive to me because there was a story going on, there was a deep lore to the characters and places in the map and those were changing with me.

I can still replay them to completion. Feel relieved when help arrives after securing the little hill after normandy beach in call of duty 2. It takes so long but it’s worth it.

I’ve only ever felt the core gameplay loop repetitive on strategy games where every new challenge is the same one as last but bigger with a more complex inventory if that makes sense.

This is a good, thoughtful article.

Fun fact: Jeff Gardiner, who is quoted in the article, was hired by me for his first job in the video games as a junior level designer. Yay me!

A lot of modern games have put a lot of time into their gameplay loop, and in part, this is why a lot of modern games feel like work. Focusing on this too much really can crowd out spontaneous fun. A gameplay loop also does not guarantee that a game is fun. Your loop might be: deploy --> shoot bad guys --> loot things --> come home --> process loot. None of this guarantees that the game is actually fun. Maybe the enemy design sucks, or the weapons feel bad, or the game just feels grindy.

In this way, it feels a lot like modern movies: in a lot of cases, cinematography seems to be some sort of objective science which has mostly just improved. And nowadays even a fairly bad movie will have great cinematography. It's just that the writing / plot / acting / etc. are quite poor.

That is, a proven gameplay loop can still fall flat quite badly. Easy examples would be all the modern hero shooters / looter shooters.

It's also worth noting that the definition of what constitutes a "gameplay loop" is pretty loosely defined. 1993 Doom clearly has a gameplay loop in the strict sense of the word: start level --> get weapons / ammo --> get keys --> kill monsters --> exit level. But this feels much less mechanical and gameified than your average modern game which almost certainly incorporate things such as RPG mechanics / stats / level-ups / FOMO events, etc. The latter feels much more artificial and forced, whereas Doom feels like "just playing a game."