next »

[Evan McClane]

So I've been working on the story and design of InfraTerra and need some advice.  Game length is an interesting and highly discussed topic, so I'm not gonna specifically ask "how long should a game be?"  I'm here to ask "if a game is long, how can it be made easy to pick up again after a while?"

I want my game to be relatively long - at least five hours, plus a semi-open world with plenty of side-missions which could add on a bit of time - but also want it to be easy to pick up again after a break.  So how can I make it easy to be reimmersed in a game after putting it down for a while?  Should I make the character's you interact with recount what has happened?  Or should I keep the story minimal but memorable, losing dialogue and interactions that help make the game coherent and your actions justified?  If you guys have examples of games that are easy to get back into after some time has passed, or advice about this, I'd love to hear it!

[Paul Eres]

i don't understand the idea that 5 hours is relatively long. you can play through a 5 hour game in one sitting (barely). so i don't think a 5 hour long game would need to care about people leaving the game for months and then returning and finishing it, most likely those people would just start from the beginning again

[Evan McClane]

Well, five hours ignoring all the sidequests and cutscenes and whatnot, just running and jumping and shooting enemies.  Missions that aren't critical to completing the game could take a while longer, 30 minutes each perhaps.

But let's ignore how long the game is just for the sake of this question.  How can I keep people immersed in the game after they've been away from it for a week or two?

[Paul Eres]

i'm not sure you can, or why you would want to. can you keep people immersed in a novel if they take a break from it for a few weeks? probably not. if they were immersed in it they wouldn't have taken a break in the first place!

so i think you should not worry about 'how to make sure that when people return they stay immersed', that's a bogus question. what you need to worry about is how not to get people to take a break in the middle. if a game is good enough, they would not want to take a break

[Evan McClane]

I have been enlightened.

I guess you're right, now I've got a new question to ask myself.  Thanks for your response, time to get back to writing I guess.

[alastair]

I'm aiming to make my next game about 35 minutes. My last game was about 6 minutes, lol.

[PompiPompi]

I would say story oriented and RPG games are more likely to make you feel part of the game. Or immeressed.
If your game does make someone feel immeressed, and if he do enjoy the game, then he could probably feel reimmeressed after returning to the game. He is also more likely to have longer playing sessions, but that is beyond the point.
I don't agree with Paul that someone can't play in short sessions, just that if someone enjoys your game so much, he is more likely to play it longer anyway.
A good example of an immeressive game you can play in short sessions is Fable 2.

[spolvid]

Make the controls easily accessible from the pause menu. I can't count how many games I've come back to and gotten frustrated because I couldn't remember how to do a certain action.

As far as the story goes, don't cut it down any more than you would from normal editing. A simple "journal" like in an RPG could provide players with a quick recap pretty effectively.

[Evan McClane]

A journal's actually a pretty good idea, and would fit in well with my story.

[jeffrobot]

Just a small thing: every time a player starts the game, you should check how long it has been since they last played. If its been more than x days, prompt them to read the journal. Don't just make it an option in the menu - they may never be aware of it. Show it to them when they need it.

[PompiPompi]

Not every game needs a journal to read... it depends on the game. For instance... Fable 2.

[seigiac]

I think that you can be immersed in an experience, like a game, and not be necessarily playing the game, it might not be as strong but you can still be thinking or talking about it. Bottomline is, players will take a break from playing and sometimes they will not be able to play a game for days or even weeks, the tricky part is that once you are back at it, the player can feel at home easily.

I like games that do precisely that. I could grab a random session of cave story and without much thinking I could position myself in what part of the story I am, you could argue that this is because cave story is very lineal, but still, the fact that you have some specific weapons, that the worlds are very different and unique, that the music is so characteristic of each world, well, all of that adds up to remembering and reimmersing the player into the experience.

I would suggest, that you should have very distinct elements that give the player a sense of where he is as much as you can without explicit narrative. Text and that kind of stuff should be used carefully and as an aid, not as your main resource, I think. It's a game, and playing should be the main vehicle for anything.

[Graham.]

Re-immersion is a hard problem; it's one of my favorites. There's like a dozen things you've got to do to nail it, and they all require heavy design thinking.

Recaps are nice but I don't like them. I feel like they don't respect my time. Journals are also a "bonus" feature. I think journals should only exist to supplement. If they're needed to enjoy the core experience then something's wrong.

Err... think about Earthbound. If I'm gone for a while and I return, I can just talk to everybody in town. They all say stuff and I'll slowly remember what's going on. I'm in control of how much filler I need, and where I need to go to get it. It's a game after-all; control is good.

If you've played Flow, Jenova Chen talks about how the game was designed to give the players the freedom to naturally choose their own difficulty setting by deciding how long they went food hunting before progressing to the harder levels. The food is there if the player wants it, they don't have to eat it, and they don't have to open a menu or do something outside of the core mechanics to interact with it, the process is just natural.

You can give the player the same degree of natural control over how to re-immerse by doing similar things. If the player is always in a world where they can practice their skills without the threat of derailing the experience (losing critical resources, pushing the story forward, etc), or interact with assets that "contain" the narrative (without the same threat), then they'll feel very comfortable in returning to your game. It even encourages replay, and the idea of being able to leave without consequence provides a feeling of comfort when picking the game up because you don't feel like you have to make a commitment to get an optimal experience.

Think about Minecraft. The story of your previous experience exists in your constructions. You can explore your constructions when you return to the game at your leisure, refreshing the thoughts you had the last time you were playing. Minecraft is brilliant for a lot of reasons. Anyway, doing this in the general case is a little bit harder. Here are some examples:

1. Have a side-kick, over-seer, whatever, that the player can query for different kinds of exposition. Think Navi, except not annoying, and you can give them a list of several things to say. Periodically give them normal story stuff to say in normal gameplay, then "store it" in their queue. At any point the player can talk to the side-kick and ask questions about particular topics. If you only display topics that have any relevance, the system can be very elegant. Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment kind of do this, but they're issue is that they always provide all information, so navigating it "effortlessly" is not really a thing you can do. Doing this is only good if it fits into your game. You can use existing characters if you'd like.

2. Make returning to previously visited places easy. If there's something that got the player to do something make it so that the player can easily return to it if they want to. Cave Story uses a hub-world to accomplish this. Hub-worlds are common. If you can guide the player away from returning to places that aren't really relevant at that time, that's even better. Skyrim half-heartedly does this by letting you select quests then marking your map with where you need to go. Not the best design, but they're rich so whatever.

Re-immersion is kind of a rabbit hole. You can spend a lot of time down there, but it's definitely worth it if you're up for it. The more deep your game is the more interesting this problem gets.

[JWK5]

Dragon Quest 9 has a nice plot synopsis you can bring up with the Y button that gives you the details of where the plot is currently at in about 2 paragraphs. It's a nice easy way to make the player go "Oh yeah, that's what I was doing!"

Final Fantasy 13 shows you a similar screen whenever you first load up your game and keeps record of all the plot points, NPCs, monsters, terms, gameplay mechanics, etc. you've encountered in a nice encyclopedia you can view at your leisure any time from the status menu. It is really nice for when you've forgotten specific details on a specific thing in the game and saves you a trip to GameFAQs and the like.

A lot of classic RPGs made use of a "fortune teller" NPC the player player could go to who, for a small fee, would reveal clues about where the player was currently expected to go or what the player was currently expected to be doing. It was a neat way to tie a story refresher into the gameplay.

Another gameplay-based story refresher that a lot of classic RPGs did was have miscellaneous NPCs in a town talk about things regarding the quest you are supposed to be doing or the quest you last completed. If you ever forget your goal you just hit the local rumor mill (or the local tavern).

A game world map can also be a useful way to remind the player where they should go next. You can have a blinking icon over the location the are meant to be headed to, which is a nice way to suggest to the player a destination without holding their hand.