Curious as to what people think has the most replay potential.
Rules:
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The "desert island" aspect here is just to create an isolated environment. You don't have to worry about survival or anything along those lines, where playing the game would be problematic. This isn't about min-maxing your situation on the island outside of the game, or the time after leaving.
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No live service games unless the live service aspect is complete and it can be played offline -- that is, you can't just rely on the developer churning out new material during your time on the island. The game you get has to be in its complete form when you go to the island.
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No multiplayer games -- can't rely on the outside world in the form of people out there being a source of new material. The island is isolated from the rest of the world.
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You get existing DLC/mods/etc for a game. You don't get multiple games in a series, though.
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Cost isn't a factor. If you want The Sims 4 and all its DLC (currently looks like it's $1,300 on Steam, and I would guess that there's probably a lot more stuff on EA's store or whatever), DCS World and all DLC ($3,900), or something like that, you can have it as readily as a free game.
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No platform restrictions (within reason; you're limited to something that would be fairly mainstream). PC, console, phone, etc games are all fine. No "I want a game that can only run on a 10,000 node parallel compute cluster", though, even if you can find something like that.
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Accessories that would be reasonably within the mainstream are provided. If you're playing a light gun game, you can have a light gun. You can have a game controller, a VR headset and controllers, something like that. No "I want a $20 million 4DOF suspended flight sim cockpit to play my flight sim properly".
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You have available to you the tools to extend the game that an ordinary member of the public would have access to. If there are modding tools that exist, you have access to those, can spend time learning them. If it's an open-source game and you want to learn how to modify the game at a source level, you can do that. You don't have access to a video game studio's internal-only tools, though.
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You have available to you existing documentation and material related to the game that is generally publicly-available. Fandom wikis, howtos and guides, etc.
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You get the game in its present-day form. No updates to the game or new DLC being made available to you while you're on the island.
What three games do you choose to take with you?
Modding a Bethesda game nowadays is actually fairly accessible. So the number one most obvious choice has to be:
Casual playtime with characters that feel like friends? Excellent choice! Might help you from going insane at the same time.
The big ones are out of the way. Those two can probably prop up the five years on their own if you stretched them a bit and did some other activities, like exercise, you bums. People will claim driving games, Elden Ring, fighting titles, etc. I wonder though...what about...
I'm not familiar with Rocksmith, but is it still legally-available in any form in 2024? Looking at Steam, it looks like Rocksmith was taken down. There's a Rocksmith 2014 Remastered Edition that got taken down. There's a Rocksmith+, which is free-to-play and has an Overwhelmingly Negative rating on Steam and a description about how it's the continuation of the earlier games in the series because music licensing rights expired on them...I'm not sure what's going on there.
Ah hamburgers. 2014 Remastered is such a good fucking pick. I didn't realize they removed it since i already have it
It's a licensing issue : Ubisoft is only able to commercialise the songs for a number of years. They recently had to take down the 2014 version because of it. People who bought it can still play it. It's an absolutely awesome product, too bad Ubisoft is making thee brand shit with the latest iteration.
Long story short: Licensing the songs.
The game was unique and the costs too high.
Shame too. I was looking into it as a way of learning guitar without the usual boring procedure of plucking out and recognizing chords for the next year. Be fun to learn how to play songs alongside learning on the standard curve.
If they aren't selling it, pirating isn't stealing it
I think you are the winner. Rocksmith is also easily moddable, giving you a near infinite supply of songs