Replayability in games blog - Silverfisk

The reason I want to play Lugaru more is because I can still get better at it even after playing through it many times. If the story was deeper I might play it even more, If a game puts too much weight on the goal (save someone for example) instead of the gameplay (kicking people's ass being fun), it won't be as much fun saving that guy over and over.
Because when you've saved him once, the fun part of simply saving him is gone, so then it's only up to the game's gameplay to keep you entertained.

If a single player game can teach you how it's played but still after a year of playing the game you find it challenging when the game tries to challenge you, that's going to be a game that's fun to play for a long time. If you after learning the game can get pro after a week it's not going to live for long.

A story can be really useful getting players through hard parts, becasue the story gives them the motivation to do it.

There are games like the Half-Life series for example, those games are pretty easy to learn and pretty easy to master, those games rely on introducing new stuff in every upcomming game, kinda like mini games (Magnusson device, driving the vehicles, find the battery to power the gate, escort citizens, defend the position, and so on).

I don't like replaying those games actually, but I do like playing Lugaru over and over. I think that's because David focused on that one aspect, the fighting, and tried to make it as deep and good as possible.

That made the game really hard for beginners, but despite being so hard it's still pretty forgiving, you get to restart immediately and if you get totally owned by a wolf or something you might fly across the map and that makes it fun to die.
Or maybe your last seconds you where owning the shit out of those three rabbits before you got killed giving you that satisfaction even though you lost.

In Lugaru you're always learning and trying to develop new tactics. I never find myself doing that in Half-Life, there it's run and gun and if I don't have much HP left it's sneak and gun, the games are pretty much straight forward. The fun for me in the Half-Life games is discovering the mini games and the environments.

Originally posted as a comment by Silverfish on Wolfire Blog using Disqus.

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