what makes a rpg have more replay?

I'm not going to bother with a poll since this is also peoples opinions. here are your choices. you can pick all that apply.

-Saving feature
-No saving
-Never ending gameplay
-many items
-challenging but short
-moderate but long
-other (explain)


*my opinion* if you have a saving feature you will most likely only play until you beat the game with that character, and with no saving feature you will probly constantly play over and over with new characters until you beat it. Also i would have moderate but long.

Umm, more replayability = more characters. More items. Random quests but following a main quest. Suprises. Good storyline, lots of dialog.

This is different from rpg to rpg.

Some main rules to make it more replayable:

- Make lots of secrets and quests, that are special or hard to find
- make as much random things (items, random quests, etc.) as you can.
- Don't make too much heroes! If you make too much it will be too hard to balance them. Some players will join ur map, see that the hero sucks and will leave and never play the map again!
- Make ur map something special! (Every rpg should have something that makes it special. F.e.: Legacies has the third-person-view and the class-items; my map has a 3rd person view either, but rotatable and zoomable like in NWN or DS and it has 'cute pets', such as upgradable weapons; Kaggz rpg has a dark atmosphere and cool thunder and lightning triggers; and so on ...)
- Don't punish the players! If something is really annoying at your map - f.e.: the gem-using revive in Legacies, which lets you load over and over again because the bad AI lets ur hero be killed - they will stop playing it after a while.
- Make a really big map! (I can't say it often enough: Use the resources you have!)

Other - Randomness. Randomize quests as well, and randomize the way to complete them (like if you need to find an item, and a certain monster drops the item, pick like 4 locations, and randomly put it in one of those locations.) And of course having multiple diff heroes to choose from is great too.

I like the random itme place idea.
Just to let you know all you suggestions are being considered in my RPG im making. Editing the quests to be random will really confuse the heck out of people who play it twice, lol.

Well, if you think about Diablo the original, the single player version of it had random quests. True, there weren't really that many quests in it, but it gave some insentive to play through it more than once. Expanding on that idea would be really cool.

is was planning on making 10-15 quests. Naby i could set aside 8 quests and make 4 come up at random.

randomness,

randomize anything you can, and it will have more replay
or different difficulties which enable different things

The answer:

Math - Random number betwen 1 and 1000

Yes, it must be random.

I can add difficulties. Does anyone bother with them in RPG's? Oh well i can put them in easily with a unlimited ranged aura.

Its hard to get an rpg played alot, most of the time, you play it once, or beat it once, and its the same old thing over and over. What you should do, is generate the game as players play, so it will have random quests, and other quests depending on how previous quests were handled. Maybe a saving feature, but only to a small extent past beginning. maybe saveing code that loads a level 5 hero, so you dont have to mess around with low levels. Use tons of items, NO TOMES, NO GODLIKE ITEMS, just items that get a little better then previous ones. NO +Uber armor items, and keep agility heros armor bonuses per agility low(change constats) Try to keep +str +agil and +intel not as good, so they need those extra items you give them. Sorta so that they need a little of everything, because if they mass on just one good +damage item, they might die fast, or have no mana, or armor.

Well, if that helps.

i hate people who put in uber items and expect people to like it. I got the plan for quests being random done. and im also wondering how you guys like saving characters?

Different variations of EVERYTHING.

Heroes, Items, EVERYTHING (ex. Warrior has 100 levels, but has 4 skills, each with 75 levels. That means he has to know which one to contribute, therefore every game is different).

Also, having it more open than linear is fun too. I mean, it's more variety :D

heh, use my map design, you can randomly make maps with it... my map even comes with its own.. uh... map editor o_O

nevermind...


if you could have a buncha characters, and have the plot change depending on what characters are in the party, that would be great... cause you'd get a different perspective every time u played -- but that would take a lot of working out before you even start making the map so that the stories make sense and intertwine between the characters

a very daunting task, i'd only advise it if you were squaresoft