With regards to nether portals and others connecting to them:
For starters, one could fill up the entire area around the vault with bedrock, making the building of another portal impossible. However, there is another method, which is similar to Nazeradom's idea, though with a twist. It is placing a load of portal blocks (those purple things inside of the portal frame) along the bottom of the map, directly above the void. Thus, using a portal that's not part of the vault will get you into this portal layer, causing you to drop in the void. By having a bedrock layer above this, tampering with these blocks (read: removing them) is impossible. Similar system directly above the vault, though the portals are now inside of a bedrock sandwich, causing the griever to suffocate.
So what makes you stop building your own portal, is the fact that it will get you killed.
That is the method our current design uses. Last I knew, it was essentially unbeatable, but no-one ever got around to constructing it for testing.
So I was putting in the usual hidden popup turret when I realized that the sticky pistons can no long move the dispensers. I checked my wiring.... works without the dispenser on it... put the dispenser back, no go. WTF? REALLY? REALLY? Of all the stupid things to go screwing around with (I mean besides the doors and the food system and the exp system and the incompatibility between map incarnations... and the endermen...) Put it back, dammit.
Pistons have never been able to move blocks with data attached... such as dispensers.
Alright... slight modification necessary... make the wall farther than block reach. Use a repeater method with a cobblestone generator to push the blocks on a single line to make a one block rail for player to land on after it is complete.
Doing this will negate the place while falling option and allow the lock to be reset by simply stopping the repeater and removing the offending blocks as you exit.
not if you build it in the nether
place water over hole, swim down. Place blocks down from the ceiling, and place ladders on them, then grab onto the ladders, and you can freely make your way to where you need to go.
1. Crafting requires you to either A. Try thousands of combinations in the hope of randomly making something or B. Have the wiki open in the background at all times to be able to play the game.
There is definitely a problem with the learning curve. The acheivements are meant to help with that,but they need more expansion. However, the recipes are highly sensible and easy to remember. You may need a wiki to learn how to play, but to play the game.
6. 1.8.1 broke as much as it added. Biomes are awful now, especially swamps and the lack of beaches, plus huge oceans with no reason to cross or even swim in them meaning wasted map space. 'Survival' playstyle totally destroyed to make way for 'Adventure' which is arguably not in the spirit of MineCraft atall, by making caves sprawl for miles giving lots of easy materials, and all too common mineshafts providing a cheaty underground wood source. Combat is rewarded with xp yet Mining and Crafting (supposedly the foundations of the game) are not.
I love the new biomes. Oceans can create for some cool "deserted island" scenarios, and make for some great scenery. They offer a room to build elaborate undersea creations. They are also the only place to find mushroom biomes. The "Survival" playstyle is still perfectly, 100% there. I do it all the time, and if anything, the addition of hunger bolstered that playstyle. Combined with spawning on a deserted island, and you get a real survival experience. Adventure is 100% in the spirit of minecraft, both from its early plans to what a significant number of people have always been expecting from the game. There have always been caves sprawling for miles, and resources have never been particularly hard to get. I consider spelunking to be core to the game, and this just enhances the experience. having to mine through stone to randomly run into materials is not a great mechanic. It is good as an option, but spelunking is where the real gameplay is, and should be encouraged. They have drastically lowered the commonality of mineshafts. Harvesting the wood from them is a waste of time, actually. It is much faster and more efficent to harvest a stack of wood, and then craft it into lumber as needed. Combat needed more rewards. Mining and crafting were already fully fleshed out, and offered adequate incentive. You can't fault a game for improving its weaker points.
7. It would be easy to not even notice that Minecraft has been fully released. One tiny post on the forums that was quickly hidden by a load of less relevant Minecon stuff is the only evidence, nothing on minecraft.net, no new methods of distribution, no advertisement, nothing to make it stand out as anything other than just being 1.9 with added hype.
They have frequently said that there isn't really anything different. Its just a milestone, them declaring that they have finished what they considered to be essential to the core experience. Namely, the progression to the end and the final boss, as the final capstone to their work.
Dead time is very undesirable in a game. Dead time occurs whenever the player isn't really doing anything. Loading screens, long elevators, waiting for NPCs, waiting around in real-time for a specific time, etc. It is boring, uninteresting fluff that should be culled from the game as much as possible.
Travel time is a huge, common source of dead time, and it needs to be dealt with carefully. Ideally, it will be eliminated from your game. This is not always feasible, but it should be reduced as much as possible, an the impact of what is left should be minimized. Travel time can affect pretty much any genre. Adventure games, RPGs, platformers, anything where you have places, you have the potential for travel time. So, you have to know how to handle it.
Quick-travel is a great solution for cutting out vast swathes of travel time. It can come in many forms. The elder scroll has a map where you select a location, and you travel there. you can have checkpoints you can move between, or teleporter booths. The explanation for the quick travel can be in-game or out of game. In-game, you have a means of teleporting or moving quickly, and it gets you where you need to go. Out of game, you assume the character walks there, and you are doing a time-skip forward to when they arrive. Both works, it depends on your game which you should use. A common element is restricting you from traveling to places until you have been there. This is a solid game element, and works quite nicely.
Quick travel is not always appropriate, for a variety of reasons. Most commonly, the scale involved is simply not large enough to justify it. This could also arise where you have fixed points you can quick travel to, and you need to move to other places. For times like that, it is better to have the ability to "move faster". Be this a simple sprint, warping powers, jet-boards, horses, web-swinging, or what-have-you, some mechanism to travel between point A and B faster than just walking there. This cuts down on travel time, and when done right, can be fun in and of itself. I already mentioned the web-swinging in spiderman 2. It was a great method of getting around quickly. It slaughtered travel time, and was a blast to use. As a general rule, speed is fun, so incorporating speed into the game serves the dual purpose of adding fun and reducing dead-time. Its a win-win choice.
Such mechanisms are also a great opportunity to spice up the gameplay. Incorporate the extra speed into the normal gameplay. Use the sprint as a charge, let them swoop in on a web-line and kick/grab and enemy, let them nail the enemy across the head with the jetboard, etc. such additions are often fun.
I had a lot more to say, but it ate my post, and I don't feel like retyping everything.
What about Monster arena? you didn't get through it because you weren't challenged, at all, but it has skill trees you need to pay multiple times to complete all of them, three base monsters with their own abilities, two unlock-able monsters that need you to beat the game before using, they have their own skills too. From a replay standpoint the game is rather good! but it is completely unbalanced!
But do the replays offer more value than the first-playthrough? Its also operating in a fuzzy zone where I'm not sure how much of that is replay value and how much of it is more content.
A game needs to be worth playing in the first place for replay value to actually have any value.
You may think that, but it is not necessarily true. You definitely want the game to be playable the first time, but it is perfectly possible to have a game be so full of flaws that only matter on the first playthrough that later play-throughs are better.However, I think is a mostly theoretical situation, and I can't think of any games like that. It would also be difficult to get people to attempt a replay of a game that doesn't work the first time. In any case, such a game would be deeply flawed.
Replay value is a term you often see tossed around in views. The lack of replay value is a tick against the game. It is something that many people care about, and having it is universally considered a plus. So, what is it? A the surface, it is how much value you will get out of the game on a subsequent play-through. At a slightly deeper level, it also includes how well the game makes you want to play it again.
Some genre's pretty inherently have low replay value. Puzzle games, as a particularly strong example. The gameplay in a puzzle game is solving the puzzles. Once you know the solutions, the value in playing the level again plummets. This is why portal lacks replay value. Once you have solved a test chamber, you know how to handle it. Now, there is still some replay value, as you can try to figure out alternative solutions, or figure out how to minimize the number of portals, or time spent. The thing that is most likely to get someone to play it again is having more levels. Providing fresh levels, either from an official level pack, user-access to editors, or procedurally generated content, can greatly extend the playable time of the game. This is not the same thing as replay value, but it serves the same basic purpose, and serves as a good substitute.
So what does create replay value? Basically, the ability to get a different experience on a new play-through. A game like chess has a lot of replay value. Every game is unique. There are a huge variety of strategies you can try, your opponent will be doing different things, and each game stands on its own as a fresh experience. That fundamental replay value is what enables people to devote their lives to becoming grandmasters. Tic-tac-toe lacks this property, as you can quickly figure out every possible game, and become unbeatable. There are a very constrained number of ways a game of tic-tac-toe will unfold, to the poitn where you can make an unbeatable opponent out of Tinker Toys. It does possess some replay value, but it is fairly quickly exhausted.
RPGs often have a good replay value due to the character creation aspect. There tend to be several obvious archetypes, from mage to rouge to fighter, and various sub-archetype withing those, from the pyromancer mage to the necromancer mage, to the two-handed weapon fighter to the sword-and-board fighter, just to use some classic examples. These different builds play differently, so you can play through the game several times, and see how the different builds operate.
The variation in the actual gameplay is also a major source of replay value. The ability to utilize different tactics, the ability to make meaningful choices, can make each playthrough a fresh experience. The character-build source of replay value is really a gatekeeper to this source of replay value. Different builds enable access to different tactics. If the builds do not really result in a different experience, then they are not going to provide a good source of replay value. If the two-handed fighter does twice the damage, and the shield fighter takes half the damage, the two builds are not going to really play differently, the shield fighter is just going to take twice as long to make it through any given fight. If you have a team-based situation, such distinctions are more meaningful, as it effects how they fit into the overall tactics of the group.
You also need a more adaptable difficulty curve. As I mentioned earlier, you want to match the difficulty curve and learning curve to provide the player with a good challenge. If that matching is broken on subsequent play throughs, there is no challenge to it, and the player will get bored of it. Having difficulty settings can help address it; this is the "I'm going to play through on the insane difficulty now" effect. considering the relative flatness of long-term learning curves, this can keep the challenge going for a long time, if sufficiently hard. A competitive game has a distinct advantage in that regard- you are pitted against another person, and they have the same capacity to master the game that you do. This is a large part of why multiplayer aspects of games tend to see a lot more long-term play than single player campaigns. part of it that you will eventually beat the single player campaign, but the competitive framework is very conducive to long-term play. Chess is a competitive game. You are facing off against another human being, who has a skill level that can also scale. The point of playing the game is not to win. Otherwise, the chess grandmaster will just play against their 9 year old sister and win every match. They want to win, but more importantly, they want to earn the victory. They seek out skilled opponents, people who can push them.
I would say there are 3 main classes of replay value. This is really a continuum, there are nuances and degrees to all of this, but they can still be classified.
The first is no replay value. Puzzle games fall into this category. In order to extend the lifespan of the game, you have to offer fresh content.
the second is limited replay. There is a clear added value from playing through the game several times, but eventually the game will be exhausted. There is nothing new to learn from it, nothing more to explore, and it will be exhausted.
the third is unlimited replay. There is no real limit to how much value you can get out of it, at least not within a human timescale.
Typically, a video game only needs to get limited replay. people don't need to devote their life to it, your game does not need to be the ultimate game that they will experience for the rest of their life. Unlimited replay is a nice aspect to have, but typically not something you need to concern yourself with achieving. Even no replay value can be acceptable, if done right. What you need to acheive will depend on your game, and is something you need to consider for yourself.
Some games have a suprising amount of replay value. Sonic, for example. For a platformer, there is a lot of replay value. Part of it is the level design. There are many routes through the level, so playing through the level multiple times can give you a distinct experience. It also has a flexible challenge to it, which also extends the replay. There is the base level of "complete the levels" that requires one level of skill. Then there is finding secret passages and cool items which is another level, and then there are taking the best routes which is yet another level. Each level is designed in a such a way that it supports multiple skill levels, which is part of its genius. There is a distinct difference in watching someone stumble through the levels, just trying to complete it, and watching someone attempting speed-runs. Both are normal, intended play styles, operate on the same levels, but require entirely different levels of skill. And hence, replay value.
There are also things that people do to create the illusion of replay value. For example, a morality system. A morality system, by itself, does not create replay value. It bribes the player into replaying the game, which is an entirely different thing. If all the morality system does is add a few discrete differences, such as a different ending, or a few different choices, you are not truly adding replay value. Bioshock, for instance. The morality system makes a fairly minor difference in the game. Your choice comes down to pressing a different button when you find the little sisters, meaning you do need to replay the entire game to see the different content. However, the gameplay difference resulting from it are very minor. Same thing with mass effect. They have the paragon and renegade choices, and a few basic differences in plot between them, but it is not truly adding replay value. There is some replay value to the games from other sources, but it is not the morality system. KOTOR does a better job at it. Whether you are light side or dark side will give you a very different set of potential force powers, meaning playing through as a good guy or bad guy actually effects your gameplay. Or as a great example, Iji. the difference in your morale choices is a gameplay difference. Playing through the game killing everyone, or playing through as a pacifist run, provides a completely different experience. The story also strongly adapts to the change, meaning that the story is something you will continue to play attention to. Most times the story is static, so the player will ignore it on replays. adding in a few minor differences from the morality system is more bribing the player to paying attention to it than adding real value to paying attention a second time. That was part of the problem in mass effect; you play through with paragon or renegade, and people are saying the same things in a different way. With iji, the entire timbre of the story is different, the plot feels different. It is quite powerful. Morality systems are quite doable with replay value, but their addition alone does not create replay value. They work best on a game that already has replay value.
I'd love to play a game made by you. I just know it'd be perfect.
I have one in the works that I am applying these principles to, but most of my prior work was before I started this study, and the flaws in them are part of what has taught me so much.
There is one available that I think turned out pretty well
Temporal Insurgent X
This is a bullet-dodging arena shooter I made for a 24-hour game competition. The twist is that you have a suite of time-based abilities.
Basic controls:
WASD to move
mouse to aim
left-click and drag to create a time distortion field
right-click drag to create the opposite time distortion field
spacebar to rewind time.
mouse wheel to change weapon
"Instead, put it on the ultra-good path that is tricky to get to. This rewards the player for playing well, and trying to seek out the collectibles can drive them to learn the more optimal routes. Thus, you are encouraging proper flow."
do collectables on the hard to make jumps to a higher path that gives negligible benefit other than the collectable fall in this category? I am thinking of crash nitro carts.
It depends. If it is a immediate bonus, say a speed boost item, that makes it so the added bonus of the item creates it to be the most desirable path, then it works. If you are adding in a hard-to-reach path for the sole purpose of a one-time collectible item, that is just silly. You collect it once, and then just have a stub on the level.
0
That is the method our current design uses. Last I knew, it was essentially unbeatable, but no-one ever got around to constructing it for testing.
0
Pistons have never been able to move blocks with data attached... such as dispensers.
0
place water over hole, swim down. Place blocks down from the ceiling, and place ladders on them, then grab onto the ladders, and you can freely make your way to where you need to go.
0
I don't even think this is possible.
1
There is definitely a problem with the learning curve. The acheivements are meant to help with that,but they need more expansion. However, the recipes are highly sensible and easy to remember. You may need a wiki to learn how to play, but to play the game.
They have clear plans to address this
How? I though killing the enderdragon made a portal back.
It is not impossible, I use them for that purpose on a regular basis.
Thats more of a quibble than something making it not complete.
I love the new biomes. Oceans can create for some cool "deserted island" scenarios, and make for some great scenery. They offer a room to build elaborate undersea creations. They are also the only place to find mushroom biomes. The "Survival" playstyle is still perfectly, 100% there. I do it all the time, and if anything, the addition of hunger bolstered that playstyle. Combined with spawning on a deserted island, and you get a real survival experience. Adventure is 100% in the spirit of minecraft, both from its early plans to what a significant number of people have always been expecting from the game. There have always been caves sprawling for miles, and resources have never been particularly hard to get. I consider spelunking to be core to the game, and this just enhances the experience. having to mine through stone to randomly run into materials is not a great mechanic. It is good as an option, but spelunking is where the real gameplay is, and should be encouraged. They have drastically lowered the commonality of mineshafts. Harvesting the wood from them is a waste of time, actually. It is much faster and more efficent to harvest a stack of wood, and then craft it into lumber as needed. Combat needed more rewards. Mining and crafting were already fully fleshed out, and offered adequate incentive. You can't fault a game for improving its weaker points.
They have frequently said that there isn't really anything different. Its just a milestone, them declaring that they have finished what they considered to be essential to the core experience. Namely, the progression to the end and the final boss, as the final capstone to their work.
Jeb is working on that now.
You are right. The game is not finished. No one is claiming it is. It is still going to be developed.
1
This opens them up for later enchantments.
0
Game Design Theory 2 - Linearity
Game Design Theory 3 - Leveling and Grinding
Game Design Theory 4 - Complexity
Game Design Theory 5 - Fun
Game Design Theory 6 - Difficulty vs. Challenge
Game Design Theory 7 - Adventure games
Game Design Theory 8 - Level Design
Game Design Theory 9 - Crafting an Experience
Game Design Theory 10 - Interfaces
Game Design Theory 11 - Flow
Game Design Theory 12 - Replay Value
Dead time is very undesirable in a game. Dead time occurs whenever the player isn't really doing anything. Loading screens, long elevators, waiting for NPCs, waiting around in real-time for a specific time, etc. It is boring, uninteresting fluff that should be culled from the game as much as possible.
Travel time is a huge, common source of dead time, and it needs to be dealt with carefully. Ideally, it will be eliminated from your game. This is not always feasible, but it should be reduced as much as possible, an the impact of what is left should be minimized. Travel time can affect pretty much any genre. Adventure games, RPGs, platformers, anything where you have places, you have the potential for travel time. So, you have to know how to handle it.
Quick-travel is a great solution for cutting out vast swathes of travel time. It can come in many forms. The elder scroll has a map where you select a location, and you travel there. you can have checkpoints you can move between, or teleporter booths. The explanation for the quick travel can be in-game or out of game. In-game, you have a means of teleporting or moving quickly, and it gets you where you need to go. Out of game, you assume the character walks there, and you are doing a time-skip forward to when they arrive. Both works, it depends on your game which you should use. A common element is restricting you from traveling to places until you have been there. This is a solid game element, and works quite nicely.
Quick travel is not always appropriate, for a variety of reasons. Most commonly, the scale involved is simply not large enough to justify it. This could also arise where you have fixed points you can quick travel to, and you need to move to other places. For times like that, it is better to have the ability to "move faster". Be this a simple sprint, warping powers, jet-boards, horses, web-swinging, or what-have-you, some mechanism to travel between point A and B faster than just walking there. This cuts down on travel time, and when done right, can be fun in and of itself. I already mentioned the web-swinging in spiderman 2. It was a great method of getting around quickly. It slaughtered travel time, and was a blast to use. As a general rule, speed is fun, so incorporating speed into the game serves the dual purpose of adding fun and reducing dead-time. Its a win-win choice.
Such mechanisms are also a great opportunity to spice up the gameplay. Incorporate the extra speed into the normal gameplay. Use the sprint as a charge, let them swoop in on a web-line and kick/grab and enemy, let them nail the enemy across the head with the jetboard, etc. such additions are often fun.
I had a lot more to say, but it ate my post, and I don't feel like retyping everything.
0
But do the replays offer more value than the first-playthrough? Its also operating in a fuzzy zone where I'm not sure how much of that is replay value and how much of it is more content.
0
Try 64m above sea level, as that is the height limit.
0
You may think that, but it is not necessarily true. You definitely want the game to be playable the first time, but it is perfectly possible to have a game be so full of flaws that only matter on the first playthrough that later play-throughs are better.However, I think is a mostly theoretical situation, and I can't think of any games like that. It would also be difficult to get people to attempt a replay of a game that doesn't work the first time. In any case, such a game would be deeply flawed.
0
Game Design Theory 12 - Replay Value
2
Game Design Theory 2 - Linearity
Game Design Theory 3 - Leveling and Grinding
Game Design Theory 4 - Complexity
Game Design Theory 5 - Fun
Game Design Theory 6 - Difficulty vs. Challenge
Game Design Theory 7 - Adventure games
Game Design Theory 8 - Level Design
Game Design Theory 9 - Crafting an Experience
Game Design Theory 10 - Interfaces
Game Design Theory 11 - Flow
Replay value is a term you often see tossed around in views. The lack of replay value is a tick against the game. It is something that many people care about, and having it is universally considered a plus. So, what is it? A the surface, it is how much value you will get out of the game on a subsequent play-through. At a slightly deeper level, it also includes how well the game makes you want to play it again.
Some genre's pretty inherently have low replay value. Puzzle games, as a particularly strong example. The gameplay in a puzzle game is solving the puzzles. Once you know the solutions, the value in playing the level again plummets. This is why portal lacks replay value. Once you have solved a test chamber, you know how to handle it. Now, there is still some replay value, as you can try to figure out alternative solutions, or figure out how to minimize the number of portals, or time spent. The thing that is most likely to get someone to play it again is having more levels. Providing fresh levels, either from an official level pack, user-access to editors, or procedurally generated content, can greatly extend the playable time of the game. This is not the same thing as replay value, but it serves the same basic purpose, and serves as a good substitute.
So what does create replay value? Basically, the ability to get a different experience on a new play-through. A game like chess has a lot of replay value. Every game is unique. There are a huge variety of strategies you can try, your opponent will be doing different things, and each game stands on its own as a fresh experience. That fundamental replay value is what enables people to devote their lives to becoming grandmasters. Tic-tac-toe lacks this property, as you can quickly figure out every possible game, and become unbeatable. There are a very constrained number of ways a game of tic-tac-toe will unfold, to the poitn where you can make an unbeatable opponent out of Tinker Toys. It does possess some replay value, but it is fairly quickly exhausted.
RPGs often have a good replay value due to the character creation aspect. There tend to be several obvious archetypes, from mage to rouge to fighter, and various sub-archetype withing those, from the pyromancer mage to the necromancer mage, to the two-handed weapon fighter to the sword-and-board fighter, just to use some classic examples. These different builds play differently, so you can play through the game several times, and see how the different builds operate.
The variation in the actual gameplay is also a major source of replay value. The ability to utilize different tactics, the ability to make meaningful choices, can make each playthrough a fresh experience. The character-build source of replay value is really a gatekeeper to this source of replay value. Different builds enable access to different tactics. If the builds do not really result in a different experience, then they are not going to provide a good source of replay value. If the two-handed fighter does twice the damage, and the shield fighter takes half the damage, the two builds are not going to really play differently, the shield fighter is just going to take twice as long to make it through any given fight. If you have a team-based situation, such distinctions are more meaningful, as it effects how they fit into the overall tactics of the group.
You also need a more adaptable difficulty curve. As I mentioned earlier, you want to match the difficulty curve and learning curve to provide the player with a good challenge. If that matching is broken on subsequent play throughs, there is no challenge to it, and the player will get bored of it. Having difficulty settings can help address it; this is the "I'm going to play through on the insane difficulty now" effect. considering the relative flatness of long-term learning curves, this can keep the challenge going for a long time, if sufficiently hard. A competitive game has a distinct advantage in that regard- you are pitted against another person, and they have the same capacity to master the game that you do. This is a large part of why multiplayer aspects of games tend to see a lot more long-term play than single player campaigns. part of it that you will eventually beat the single player campaign, but the competitive framework is very conducive to long-term play. Chess is a competitive game. You are facing off against another human being, who has a skill level that can also scale. The point of playing the game is not to win. Otherwise, the chess grandmaster will just play against their 9 year old sister and win every match. They want to win, but more importantly, they want to earn the victory. They seek out skilled opponents, people who can push them.
I would say there are 3 main classes of replay value. This is really a continuum, there are nuances and degrees to all of this, but they can still be classified.
The first is no replay value. Puzzle games fall into this category. In order to extend the lifespan of the game, you have to offer fresh content.
the second is limited replay. There is a clear added value from playing through the game several times, but eventually the game will be exhausted. There is nothing new to learn from it, nothing more to explore, and it will be exhausted.
the third is unlimited replay. There is no real limit to how much value you can get out of it, at least not within a human timescale.
Typically, a video game only needs to get limited replay. people don't need to devote their life to it, your game does not need to be the ultimate game that they will experience for the rest of their life. Unlimited replay is a nice aspect to have, but typically not something you need to concern yourself with achieving. Even no replay value can be acceptable, if done right. What you need to acheive will depend on your game, and is something you need to consider for yourself.
Some games have a suprising amount of replay value. Sonic, for example. For a platformer, there is a lot of replay value. Part of it is the level design. There are many routes through the level, so playing through the level multiple times can give you a distinct experience. It also has a flexible challenge to it, which also extends the replay. There is the base level of "complete the levels" that requires one level of skill. Then there is finding secret passages and cool items which is another level, and then there are taking the best routes which is yet another level. Each level is designed in a such a way that it supports multiple skill levels, which is part of its genius. There is a distinct difference in watching someone stumble through the levels, just trying to complete it, and watching someone attempting speed-runs. Both are normal, intended play styles, operate on the same levels, but require entirely different levels of skill. And hence, replay value.
There are also things that people do to create the illusion of replay value. For example, a morality system. A morality system, by itself, does not create replay value. It bribes the player into replaying the game, which is an entirely different thing. If all the morality system does is add a few discrete differences, such as a different ending, or a few different choices, you are not truly adding replay value. Bioshock, for instance. The morality system makes a fairly minor difference in the game. Your choice comes down to pressing a different button when you find the little sisters, meaning you do need to replay the entire game to see the different content. However, the gameplay difference resulting from it are very minor. Same thing with mass effect. They have the paragon and renegade choices, and a few basic differences in plot between them, but it is not truly adding replay value. There is some replay value to the games from other sources, but it is not the morality system. KOTOR does a better job at it. Whether you are light side or dark side will give you a very different set of potential force powers, meaning playing through as a good guy or bad guy actually effects your gameplay. Or as a great example, Iji. the difference in your morale choices is a gameplay difference. Playing through the game killing everyone, or playing through as a pacifist run, provides a completely different experience. The story also strongly adapts to the change, meaning that the story is something you will continue to play attention to. Most times the story is static, so the player will ignore it on replays. adding in a few minor differences from the morality system is more bribing the player to paying attention to it than adding real value to paying attention a second time. That was part of the problem in mass effect; you play through with paragon or renegade, and people are saying the same things in a different way. With iji, the entire timbre of the story is different, the plot feels different. It is quite powerful. Morality systems are quite doable with replay value, but their addition alone does not create replay value. They work best on a game that already has replay value.
0
I have one in the works that I am applying these principles to, but most of my prior work was before I started this study, and the flaws in them are part of what has taught me so much.
There is one available that I think turned out pretty well
Temporal Insurgent X
This is a bullet-dodging arena shooter I made for a 24-hour game competition. The twist is that you have a suite of time-based abilities.
Basic controls:
WASD to move
mouse to aim
left-click and drag to create a time distortion field
right-click drag to create the opposite time distortion field
spacebar to rewind time.
mouse wheel to change weapon
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It depends. If it is a immediate bonus, say a speed boost item, that makes it so the added bonus of the item creates it to be the most desirable path, then it works. If you are adding in a hard-to-reach path for the sole purpose of a one-time collectible item, that is just silly. You collect it once, and then just have a stub on the level.
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There will be, I'm not sure when though.