How does someone make a game that people would want to revisit at a later time?
Is it with innovative game design, fascinating characters, or formatting?
I asked this because there are some projects on this websites that display one or all of these and they make for some pretty good games; even without the affinity attached.
So, how?
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Replay value generally comes from the ‘30 seconds of fun’ gameplay loop. As long as that remains consistently exciting, people will wanna come back to your game for that. Other factors can go in to that, but the core of replay value is really the gameplay loop.
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The way I’ve tried to do it for my project is simply let the player see their past actions in gameplay - you beat the challenge, and you get to see how you did every bit of it with an exact time of how fast you went.
To help add to that though, you need level design that compliments the kind of fast-paced gameplay your game has, or it can make it too tough.
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filler absolutely kills replay value and should be avoidable if it is in the game. I stopped playing Vanquish after 2 or 3 playthroughs because of the unskippable walk and talk sections and the boring sniper mission. I bet if it wasn’t for those things I would still be playing it now
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It could be something simple like a goal to achieve to keep people replaying, I mean look at Panic Diet as you are working towards a goal (losing weight) yet the RNG of the game keeps things interesting and different each time. However when you fail at least you see the progress and your result due to your efforts.
Yeah - filler/padding can make or break a game. It’s literally half of Sonic Unleashed, with the werehog.
it also depends on the Type of game.
I know that a lot of games that reward you replaying them get me to replay them. This is outside of the context of weight gain games, but I like when games have new game plus rewards like the old god of war games, and even deadspace. Different endings help with adding replay value too.
Replayability’s a bit tricky in porn/kink games, since they tend to get repetitive pretty quick.
There’s only really so many ways you can jam a [REDACTED] down someone’s throat.
The best ways to get some replayability out of a porn game is to have some elements randomly generated, to have alternate paths, or to maybe do a new game+ mechanic.
The only other option to get people to replay the game over and over again is just to dump the game full of so much content there’s no way they’d ever do it all in one run.
Lilith’s Throne had a lot of promise in that field, but they screwed it up by tacking a very linear story on top of a very good, non-linear sandbox.
Corruption of Champions had replayability by allowing you to play as a corrupt person, a pure one, or something in between, as well as giving you a new game+ function after you beat the game, so you can run back through the game again and try other things you didn’t do the first time.
Nimin got players to make a bunch of different characters by having your level up perks be permanent, so unless you want your character to swap from female to male and NOT be able to shut off your lactation, you need to make a new character.
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Basically what the last post said, but I wouldn’t say dumping content into a game necessarily makes it worth replaying. If the game makes it hard to realize there is a lot of content you missed, then it will be unlikely you find it worth replaying until there is a community or guidebook around the game that reveals it to you.
Replayability through fun can be quite interesting. While you would think an amazingly enjoyable gameplay system would keep you replaying the game many times, it also relies on the compatibility of the content. For example, if you had a game with the combat of one of the best Devil May Cry games, but then you had lots of unskippable cutscenes, or parts of the game that are just talking to characters and puzzle solving and they take up more time than the action sequences, you might not want to bother as it felt more like a waste. You could also prefer a game with a pretty basic gameplay system because while it doesn’t stand out from others in gameplay, there were many scenes or enemies that were cool to experience or maybe the control scheme happened to make it feel better than it should.
The second route to replayability is development. As mentioned in the previous post, Nimin and Corruption of Champions gave your character permanent paths to go down that you would have to replay the game if you wanted to experience new things. But this is not the only way to do it. You can also have a lot of story choices that interact with each other. Or you could have a limited amount of money with very important things to spend it on and a big challenge at the end that would take multiple playthroughs to find the best build to defeat it. You could also have the player sacrifice other characters or have maps that they will not be able to access if they take a specific route through the story.
The third factor of replayability is to have lots of content. In my opinion, if you have a lot of content, most of it should always be accessible if you haven’t completed it (or maybe even repeatable infinitely) instead of forcing a player down paths so they have to do 20 playthroughs to see everything. Also, the content should cover a variety of bases instead of being a bunch of generic things or people to interact with that typically have a lot of the same traits.
Last is thought provoking and memorable writing. If your writing is powerful (or very effective at being erotic), it is worth replaying to experience from the beginning multiple times. I think in order to have writing that works this well, it needs to have a bit of everything. It should have some horror, comedy, history, fantasy, over-the-top events or fights, authentic romance, dreams to fight for, mysteries and stuff like spying on secretive people or going into places where you aren’t supposed to be. It could also be powered just by having rare content done well and placed effectively within the rest of the game…
if it’s a game of making your own choices that affect the story and may create different scenarios, then you could make a great WG Choices-related game that people may want to revisit over and over again only to see the outcomes.