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In a quest to prevent players from reselling their used games, increasing replayability is often suggested as a possible solution.
But replayability is experienced by each player differently. In order to understand the different replayability approaches we must look at the different type of players and how they play games:
1. Challenge Players: these players consider the game as a challenge they need to overcome. So any form of reward that measures their success forms an incentive to replay the game in order to improve their score. Achievements and Trophies which can't be obtained through the first playthrough are a good method to encourage replaying the game.
Any form of high score (laptimes, points etc) also encourage replay, especially with online leaderboards. The great advantage of these methods is that the incentive for replaying comes from the player himself, who will always try to beat his latest score.
2. Collection players: these are the kind of players who go after each possible achievement/trophy, who will try to unlock extra costumes, game art etc when these are available in the game. Off course these achievements should not be obtainable in a single playthrough. Unlike challenge players, the incentive for replay must be included in the design from the beginning.
3. Story players: These players enjoy a game because of its story and are the hardest to convince of a second playthrough, since they already have seen the story and are likely not interested in replaying the game.
There is a solution to extend gameplay for these group by including second characters whose storyline is not entirly visible during the first playthrough with the main character (like the two brothers in Call Of Juarez).
In general, including achievements/trophies is an easy form to entice challenge players and collection players for a replay, yet story players are harder to convince and unless the stories are specially designed for replay, they won't likely bother to replay a game.
(This is a repost from my blog)
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Firstly, that DLC is an excellent way to get storyline players to hold on to their games.
Second, as someone who qualifies himself as a challenge player, I can honestly say it takes more than scores and trophies to keep me interested. I've covered this subject at length, and have discovered that while these incentives may help, the only way to satisfy a challenge player is with rich game play. In other words, the game play has to be meaty -- something they can really sink their teeth into and especially something that they can improve on. If they're unable to get better at the game, they tend to lose interest. The scores and trophies are just the icing on the cake.
The Metroid games are great for Challenge/Collection players, not because they provide trophies for collecting things, but because the incentive to find all of the items is that it's difficult, and the reward is that you've found all of the items! This is far more incentive for me to try and find everything than something that says "congratulations. You did a good job. Here's a gold star for your efforts."
There was some study a while back showing that most people never completed their games in the first place. Can't find that study but lets just use the hl2:ep1 stats as an example instead (even though it is totally skewed by being included in the various boxes/deals)
Average completion time of 5-6 hours, yet less than 50% of players actually played the last map.
http://www.steampowered.com/status/ep1/
What about the notion that being able to create new worlds for each playthrough (allowing Perception to expose alternative strategies for play) serves the specific needs of replayability for some folks?
- Free mission choice: Metal Slug, Super Mario World, Donkey Kong, Devil May Cry, Burnout, Spawn, Bomberman, Gem Crafter...
- Short Playthrough: STG, Sonic Wings, Metal Slug, on rail shooters and fight games... (The free mission choice slices the game into mini short-playthroughs)
- Battle/Mercenaries/Score modes (adds same concepts above): any Biohazard/RE, CoD4...
- Multiplayer matches (somehow equals to Free Mission Choice + Battle Modes): any game with multiplayer...
- Ingame Open-Ended (the player can set his own Free Missions, Battle Modes or anything): any RPG or game with freeplay, also after finishing...
For games that take about or more 15hs to finish, it's harder to get the player to replay it, the playthroug can become such as work after some time, even if the player has an open-ended game, sometimes the player can feel that restarting means go through the whole game and finish again... so in this case we want the player to KEEP PLAYING, not exactly to REPLAY. Games with short missions and free choices are more like REPLAY, but you can put both in a single game, ex: Super Mario World, Donkey Kong, NFS Underground, Gem Crafter...
@ Tim Carter
Yes, I think every gamer is a different gamer depending on the day...