The replayability problem is a hard task ...
But personally, i think it mainly depends on the genre of the game your are making .

For some civilisation-like, sim's-like, stree-fighter-like ect ... the replaybility is reached by giving the player the sensation taht each new game is really different, and that he can totaly play a different way than the game he did before .

For rpg's and so, i would rather focus my gameplay on the one-time experience.
For exemple, you are talking about to unlock some events, path ect .. i think its nearlly the same to offer those path in the game ( especially true in the late game where player can do many side-quests ... )
OR - if you really wants the player to play your game again, you have to manage to create a world that react on its own, i mean :
First, you give the world a big event ( ex : some alien civilisation are landing on earth ), and then, you let the wolrd and the player, react as they like ... so they may fear and try to destroy them, they may want to learn more about them ect ...

A list of things which make a game more replayable is useful, but what I'm really trying to do is move beyond the "replay" paradigm altogether. Do we think of Chess as having good or bad replayability? I don't really think so. If we had to pick, of course, most of us would say it had very good replayability. But the more pertinent issue, I think, is that we consider all of our chess games as an overarching meta-experience; in the case of chess, the experience is one of improving one's understanding of the game. This is something that's easy to do in an RTS or FPS or tetris or whatever, because the sole point of the game is to win the game. There is no story, no emotional involvement beyond the desire for victory.

But in a story-based game, where winning is only one of the things you do, it gets more difficult. You can still get better at the game as you go (assuming it's somewhat skill-based, as opposed to LucasArts-style adventure games), but that's only piece of the meta-experience puzzle. The story itself needs to be integrated into the meta-experience. Again, this isn't a concern for RTSes or FPSes.

Unlocking extra content is a good idea, but it seems like there are good and bad ways to do it. Players are not going to do a "victory lap" through the game; the unlocked content needs to be entertaining, not just rewarding. But if the player is simply playing the same game, with occasionaland strictly defined excursions into unlocked content, he's going to get somewhat annoyed with the experience. He would much rather that the new content be woven through the story.

Now here's an example. Suppose on your first runthrough of a game, you do pretty well, but your actions lead to the death of a sympathetic character. Chances are, next time through the game, you're going to be trying to avoid that. Why not incorporate that into the storyline, both during and before the sequence of choices which led to the character's death?

Resident Evil 4 was incredibly effective at this. You finish the game on normal difficulty, and you can start over again with all the guns and money and items you had at the end. It makes the game way easier, and by the third or fourth time through, you've maxxed out all your weapons and are storming the game without difficulty. Various unlocks an dmini-games help this stay fun.

When it gets old, you fire up "Professional" difficulty, which puts you back at square one, gear-wise, and lets you go through the game with tougher enemies and less health and fewer bullets. It's wicked hard, especially once you're used to having infinite ammo and a rocket launcher. SO you go through that, and then do it again, and again, until you've got all the great stuff you had before, but it's still fun just to roll through the game with ridiculous weaponry and fight the toughest baddies around.

I put in a lot of hours on that game, and loved every minute of it. With the new features in the PS2 version, I might play through it again!

With Tales of Symphonia for the gamecube, you collected points throughout the game that you use to BUY what you get to keep the next time 'round. Like you can choose to keep all the money you've made, have the monsters harder to kill, increase the amount of xp needed to level up, keep all the combos you've learned, keep the world map, etc. Probably the most crazy of the choices is to make it such that all monsters give only 1 xp throughout the game!!

Since the combat system was action based, it really took some skill to master. The whole 1xp per battle deal was just nutty if you ask me. Really challenges you to beat the game at the lowest level possible.

Based on the responses of this thread, and the responses over the years, I'm going to conclude the same thing I mentioned in my much earlier posts:

Storyline and plot based games are not replayable.

Just as books are not re-readable.

There are many wonderful books out there. You likely read them as part of your HS English and college literature classes. How many times have you re-read them?

If you read them once, that's probably it. You're done. You're not going to re-read The Good Earth, Lord of the Flies, or Catcher in the Rye more than once. You probably aren't going to re-read The Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter series more than once or twice, except for people on this forum who are addicted to this stuff.

Similarly, you play your story based RPG on normal difficulty, then maybe on Gold level looking for every possible sidequest, then possibly on Hardcore mode trying to get a final bit of value, then you're done.

We can use the devices mentioned in this thread, but they've all been gone over so many times and they don't work.

Goal-based games are extremely replayable.

If you have a set of rules to follow, you can replay it.

Non-casual board games like monopoly, Risk (tm) (R) (c) (Hasbro Inc., don't sue for mentioning the game), and Settlers of Catan have simple rules, you get some social interaction for an hour or two, and you know when you're done.

Casual online games, like those found on hundreds of web sites, are also replayable because you follow a few simple rules and replay until it's time to go home from work. ... er, until you finish the level, or all the levels.

Casual board games, like chess, checkers, go, mancala, backgammon, and a few others have survived the test of time. Any idiot can play them. With the exception of chess, they can all be played with a few stones and a board. The board can be a drawing in the dirt, or on paper, or whatever. Chess requires specialized pieces, backgammon requires a few randomization devices, but both objects are easily obtainable and portable.

Card games (generally) have simple rules. You can play them alone or with friends. They can be casual games played with one or more standard decks of cards, more specialized involving chips or tokens, or even non-casual devices like stacks of Magic: the gathering or Pokemon cards.

Sandbox-based games are somewhat replayable.

You can play games like The Sims, SimCity, Rollercoaster Tycoon, or Animal Crossing. There is no plot. There is no story. You do whatever you feel like, within the boundaries of the game.

But sooner or later, you will get bored. You'll get the expansion packs, download new objects for the sims, new building types for SimCity, new tracks for Rollercoast Tycoon, etc., and eventually you'll get bored of those.

The ultimate in casual sandbox games is something kids around the globe have enjoyed for centuries. Give them a writing stick and something to write on and they'll be entertained for hours. Eventually that, too, becomes boring -- except for you artists out there.


I suppose that's why the games I make and sell online (kid-targeted drawing games on PDAs) sell.

frob.
Family Friendly Games

it seems to me that the replayability of a plot-based game is dependant on the nature of the plot. I'm a big fan of procedurally generated events that seem like plot, but really aren't, So I want to have a rpg character slaying dragons, and several Civilization AI duking it out in the background. This causes the flow of the game to be different each game, which gives you, IMHO, quite a bit more replayability. Nethack, for example, has excellant replayability. every game appears to have a different plot, but the plot is an illusion of the particular produral generation of the whole dungeon. The actual plot is quite minimal.

In this same way, I hope to have a space RPG/combat game that involves a single plot element: there was a civil war, and you got the hort end of the stick. Now, your single objective is to come back and practice advanced badassery on the revolutionaries(or whoever won the revolution). As the game starts, a procedurally generated battle is created(stacked horribly against whatever side you are on), with the ships computer advising you as though you were a n00b, but as soon as you deviate from it's instructions, it goes back to being a standard ships computer. if you follow the instructions, you escape. if not, you might die. or you might winn the battle. whatever. after that, there's a procedurally generated political structure to interact with, which hopefully is completely new each game.

What do you think of that kind of rplayability?

Hi.

I would rather have all the game content the first time I play the game. Why keep content out of the first run? Setup your game as a long linear/paralell timeline, and make the player "think" that he finished the game, when there realy is more to come: secret levels / new stuff / replay with harder difficulty.

Now, consider the "whole" game (including the replays), and see if the last part is worth playing, if not... redesign. :-)

Quote:

Original post by NIm In this same way, I hope to have a space RPG/combat game that involves a single plot element: there was a civil war, and you got the hort end of the stick. Now, your single objective is to come back and practice advanced badassery on the revolutionaries(or whoever won the revolution). As the game starts, a procedurally generated battle is created(stacked horribly against whatever side you are on), with the ships computer advising you as though you were a n00b, but as soon as you deviate from it's instructions, it goes back to being a standard ships computer. if you follow the instructions, you escape. if not, you might die. or you might winn the battle. whatever. after that, there's a procedurally generated political structure to interact with, which hopefully is completely new each game. What do you think of that kind of rplayability?

Sounds like a sandbox game where you can win or lose forever.

Eventually you'll get bored.

Well my idea is groundhog day. It may only suit a certain type of gameplay but the workings of it may be applied to other games.

The player is given a certain amount of time to live (or another reason why they restart) and they have to accomplish something. Progress is in the form of items they may discover (that are with them when they restart), information and experience of what worked last time. If they fail at something important, die or reach the timelimit the game starts over. I'm thinking something around 2 - 5 minutes.

The items they find should only really serve to make things easier, they whole game should completeable from the start within the time period. Someone who knows the finish wouldn't have a need to do complete the game, because they already have, they would head out to the part of the game which they enjoyed or wanted to play. The first play through this part of the level / game would be to get the information and story needed to proceed, any plays after this would be just for fun.

Other re-playability would be searching for all the 'extra' items (weapons and other cool things), finding secrets within the level, completing the game with different player enforced 'rules' (pacifist, single weapon, melee etc.) The player enforced rules would be identified my the computer (it would know if you didn't use weapons etc) and award these when detected.

The game I want to make is a zombie survival where as soon as you exit your apartment you are bitten, I was planning on having that part a sort of mini game where you can postpone with a sequence of very well timed moves, but in then end you always get bitten. Anyway, you are bitten and in 2 - 5 minutes you are going to turn into a zombie. You have to go to various locations, and there might me multiple endings.

This is cool because casual gamers and core gamers should enjoy it. You don't have to put in 2 hours of work to progress, and you don't need to quicksave or save normally, because death doesn't matter, you just start again.

Quote:

Original post by umbrae The player is given a certain amount of time to live (or another reason why they restart) and they have to accomplish something. Progress is in the form of items they may discover (that are with them when they restart), information and experience of what worked last time. If they fail at something important, die or reach the timelimit the game starts over. I'm thinking something around 2 - 5 minutes.

Have you played the game Shadow of Destiny, aka Shadow of Memory?