The correlation between positive reviews, playtime, design and game mechanics in souls-like role-playing video games

Abstract

The “Souls-like” role-playing video game genre was inadvertently created due to the influence of the “Souls franchise”. However, each game has different twists which can be new gameplay mechanics, graphical style, etc. while maintaining the core elements of the “Souls franchise”. The goal of this study is to understand which gameplay mechanics are more liked by comparing reviews of these games to each other. Thus, different game design elements and game mechanics are investigated in 21 “Souls-like” video games to see how the users reacted to them and whether they positively reviewed them. All (993,932) reviews were scraped from the Steam webpage regarding these games in the middle of April 2021 using the steam_reviews Python package. These reviews contain the playtime at review, whether a positive or negative rating is given, and a textual component among others. Overall, 11 various game design elements and game mechanics were set up for the investigation: the setting, graphical dimensions as well as style, level design, and whether there are difficulty settings, multiplayer features, upgradeable weapons/armor, equipment durability, in-game map, extra penalties upon death, and a classic level-up system. Based on data distributions, either the t-test or the Mann-Whitney-Wilcoxon test was used for the analysis. The syuzhet package, which uses Natural Language Processing methods, was used in the statistical program package R along with the NRC Emotion Lexicon to evaluate the textual parts. According to the results, a slight-to-moderate correlation exists between positive reviews and the users’ playtimes: more playtimes mean a larger chance of having positive reviews. Significant differences also exist in the percentages of positive reviews among these games: Hollow Knight is the most liked game. Out of the investigated 11 factors, significant differences exist among all of them: drawn graphics (96.48%) and 2D style (95.61%) are the two most liked factors, while pixel graphics (87.11%) and a futuristic setting (86.74%) are the two least liked ones. Almost every factor can significantly affect all eight basic emotions (anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, trust). The exceptions are graphical dimensions, weapon/armor upgradability, in-game map, and extra penalties upon character death as no significant differences exist in case of trust (p = 0.85), anger (p = 0.24), sadness (p = 0.21) and disgust (p = 0.095), respectively when the average sentiments per review were examined. Future “Souls-like” game design and development can be influenced by the results as game developers can more easily choose from the factors they want to implement or whether they want them at all in their games.