I think the game I personally found had the most replay value in recent years was Portal, even though you finished the game, and it was short, there can be a thousand other ways to finish it, or there was a subtle undertone to the storytelling which could have been missed on the first play though.. It took me at least 5 runs to truly appreciate the game and what it provided, and I still occasionally pop back to it when I've forgotten enough to give it another run through. This is the type of chocolate sauce I'm a fan of!
Agreed. There isn't anything wrong with promoting replay of your game, but not by withholding content.
A game that that did it right is Diablo 2. The story wasn't that great, and once you've played it through, there's not much reason to keep playing again, except for the gameplay. There are so many combinations of skills, and more importantly, gear, that you can, and often do, play through the game over and over again, and never have it play out the same way.
Yeah, you should also invite your girlfriend over for cake...
OT It's true, I've played Resi 4, or Sonic 3, or Resistance 3, over and over because it's such a complete and delicious experience on it's own. Most games with binary choice systems and such I never get more than a third through my second playthrough. Partially because it feels like grinding for the content I never got, rather thand elving in for a taste of the delicious and fulfilling experience I got the first time round...
Achievements, outside of the usual "game progress" or "do something an arbitrarily large number of times" types, are often another easy way to add chocolate sauce to a delicious sundae.
On the topic of gratification as replay value, I just realized how much I would love to replay Farcry 3 if only I started with all of my tataus and the wingsuit, but just thinking of being whiny Jason with his trusty starter handgun make me really not in the mood. Hell, this week alone I picked up the game and cleared every Wanted mission just to see if I could get some of the endgame base conquest thrill back. It was a pretty great experience, though most wanted missions are on top of hills so not much flying squirrel action was available. So at the end of the day Farcry marked me in the exact opposite way as The Cave marked Yahtzee. I wanted more and the game was being held over my head just far enough for me to not reach it.
This is also a prime example of how nobody needs options to replay something. I never redid any Mass Effects and god knows if you stretched all of that game's conversation options in some sort of straight sonar line that line would be longer than all the air time ever allocated to Two and a Half Men. Take this as an idea. If Farcry gave you the option to replay the entire game except instead of sounding like wimp Jason Brody, you'd sound like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, would you do it?
While I agree with the basic point, that splitting up content is not the same thing as true "replay value", I wouldn't go as far as to say that splitting up content is a "design flaw".
If there are multiple genres that are traditionally established by their custom of presenting content in separate playthrough, and people are actively expecting that, I wouldn't call that a flaw, it' more like a quirk of the medium.
Take this as an idea. If Farcry gave you the option to replay the entire game except instead of sounding like wimp Jason Brody, you'd sound like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, would you do it?
Take this as an idea. If Farcry gave you the option to replay the entire game except instead of sounding like wimp Jason Brody, you'd sound like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, would you do it?
Clint Eastwood was more of a metaphor for kicking incredible amounts of ass. Think escaping from being kidnapped with your brother at the start except with your arms replaced with automatic rocket launchers. Whoooole different story.
EDIT: wait I completely misunderstood you. Oh well, might as well emphasize my point.
This really made me think of The Walking Dead, with its choices and different characters that can live or die and Lee that can be a complete dick if you so choose... but that game never made me feel like it was hiding content to make me replay the game. In fact, perhaps a bit bafflingly, the game almost seems like it doesn't want me to replay it. The first playthrough focuses on the finality of your decisions, while
Subsequent playthroughs emphasize the inevitability of fate, by having the same relationships fall apart and the same people die (albeit for different reasons), creating a tightly-woven (and I'm positive it was deliberate) dichotomy between free will and fate.
But no matter what choices you make, it never feels like it's trying to trick you into playing again so you can make the other ones. Maybe you will, and maybe you won't, but the choices were clearly designed not just so the player could feel involved in the story for the sake of making the game more interactive, but like they're actually a part of the story, giving the player in-universe emotional ties which not only can't be recaptured in a second run, but actively and undo them from the first run.
No wonder the game got nominated for so many awards.
Ugh. Chocolate sauce sucks and anybody who thinks otherwise is a dirty proto-hippie communistic heretical mutant chaos dwarfgobling hobo of the lowest caliber.
But replay value is nice to have. Yes.
I'm so subtle.
Breast massages are much like cult films. If you sit there and study how to make the perfect cult film, it'll suck because it comes across as incredibly forced. Breast massages are the same; it needs to feel organic, not something tacked on to hide the fact that the main event is actually pretty thin.
Um. That went to a weird place. The point is that attempting to force replay value is now primarily a tool to extend the life of a game; as opposed to, say, just making a longer game - a task which requires a greater effort than a lot of developers can be arsed with.
I feel like the new Devil May Cry did replay value both right and wrong. Right, because it lets you take all your unlocked skills and weapons into new, more challenging difficulty levels where you can really show off, but wrong because you have to play the game at least once to get to get to the real challenge.
Also wrong because most of the costumes are DLC and there aren't even that many.
I'm replaying Deus Ex: Human Revolution to get different outcomes to the side missions (and the achievements that go with them). That's a good example of chocolate sauce, right?
And this article got me thinking of massaging boobs with chocolate sauce. Anyone else hear that saxophone music?
Hmm I wonder how a game like Yoshi's Story or Starfox 64 fits in with this?
Meaning the game is shorter than the number of levels available, so you have to play through it multiple times to see all the levels. I've always felt that style of game progression works really well. With the binary morality system you have to play through the same content all over again but I guess the reason it works with YS/SF64 is because you get all new content when you play through the second/third/whatever time.
That and the fact that you can beat the game on the bare minimum and feel satisfied, but if you're left wanting more, or you want more of a challenge, that extra content is available if you want.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown has great replay value, especially on harder modes with stuff from the Second Wave installed. It gets really gritty when you're trying to save the world and all you've got active are a single squad of Rookies.
The thing that I love so much about RPG's is going through them again with a different party or a different play style. If I'm playing Pokemon, I may try and play using really obscure monsters that I haven't used before. If I'm playing Skyrim, I may go from being a mage to a thief, or a warrior that focuses on enchantments, or whatever. The play options are the chocolate sauce here. You are doing the same tasks as before, but by changing your play-style or party, you have to try and complete them in a different way.
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