Greg Tito said:
Also, I'm not sure that peppering multiplayer games with incremental rewards is necessarily a good thing. Is a game that supports an addiction model, a la FarmVille, really a better designed game or just one that preys upon those drawn to addictive styles of play?
Read this: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_255/7594-The-Player-and-the-Pusher-Man
Collecting stuff isn't what makes FarmVille addictive, that stuff's been around for ages before it became a problem in the industry... where FarmVille hits you is the the back-and-forth social obligations that the game generates. You can't stop playing without having a crappy run-down farm and starving cows on your facebook profile, and dropping the ball for a whole bunch of real-life friends :\
The slot machine's fun and the random new weapon is a thrill, but nothing in there changes the fundamental gameplay, a character's default loadout is extremely reliable and effective. What's addictive about Lost Planet 2 is player performance; going for that elusive "perfect run" where you and your team are nonstop awesome for an entire mission, chapter, maybe even a whole episode, nobody suffers from some humiliating death, people rack up lots of Good Job awards, etc. There are so many possible strategies and approaches to try and you rarely play a mission back-to-back which prevents learning by rote repetition.
Is it so wrong when the
fundamentals of a game are addictive like that? It's not gimmicks, it's not collectible stuff, it's like wanding to have a great race in Wipeout where you've got to play your end really well and just hope that nobody manages to sic a missile on you while you're making a hard corner and ruin a lap time. This is where Demon's Souls lost me, there wasn't enough of a random element - besides invaders - to replays, once you knew your stuff you could play the same area like clockwork.