Thorgrey wrote:spreadsheets wrote:
As a sidenote, I firmly believe that games who lose their value after one playthrough are flawed and should fix exactly that. If one pirated first time playthrough eliminates most of the motivation a player could have for playing your game, you did something wrong as a developer.
I agree with all your points save for this, some games are really good, but only for one playthrough. Not worth the price of admission if it's a full priced game but sometimes very worth it on cheaper games, Terraria comes to mind, although I agree, re-playability is a very VERY important aspect of what makes a good game.
Isn't Terraria a kind of sandboxy game?
I didn't think it had a straight storyline you could beat and be done with it.
And really like the most straightforward good game I can think of is probably Serious Sam (First or Second Encounter). Even that has variety. Secrets, different difficulty modes, multiplayer.
Ways to mix it up for the next playthrough.
I mean even Terraria offers at least multiplayer and as far as i am aware secrets, too. It's a fairly good game, so the motivation is there to play it again. Therefore it does not fall into the category of games I was talking about.
An example of what I meant would maybe be Mass Effect 3 or X-Blade. Note how those two are both bad games.
Mass Effect 3 is of the kind that at most after one playthrough you realize the game fails to satisfy at pretty much every level possible and as such there is no reason to keep playing it.
X-Blade can actually be played through completely in one go and on top of that it's not very fun.
I might have accidently implied that but I was not exclusively talking about replayability in the sense of varied storylines on different playthroughs or the like.
I was talking about giving people who played the pirated version some kind of motivation to still play the game.
Beyond Good & Evil is a good example in my opinion. That game does not have branches (at all I think). Still it is exactly what I mean when I talk about a game that motivates you to play. It's just incredibly good and an all around fun experience that you just want to play again because it's good. And that "I want to play this again!" is all a game needs to fulfill my criterion.