An easy trick to increase the playing time of a game is to include unlockable stuff.
- Higher difficulty levels
- different music
- mirrored levels
- special items to be equipped and used in game
- new playable characters
- time attack mode
Also adding some insane and basically almost undoable task which unlocks something can help to make people play the game for hours.
Special quests like collect 100 gems, finish under 30 seconds, find the 3 purple ducks will increase the replay value.
Just some thoughts.
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Example: Onechanbara (Wii)
I'm picking this game because I recently played it totaling up a playtime well over 40h.
The game itself is a 3rd person bloody zombie hack'n slay game, but the genre does not matter too much here.
It starts out with 8 stages and 2 charactres.
In fact it's 4 big stages, 3 boss level (which is only a single room for each boss) and a big room where you're spammed with hordes of zombies.
The stages are in a different order for each character, some stages are walked the other way round for the second character. Meaning the end for character one is starting point for character 2 and vice versa.
There are three boss fights. One battle is the two characters against each other, so two more characters are needed.
By finishing the first two stories, you get the remaining two characters with their own stories.
Difficulty level starts out with "normal". After finishing this, you get "Hard", finishing this one you get "Violent" and finally you get "berserk". For each of the 4 characters!
After finishing all difficulties you get new costumes.
Additionally there are monsters hidden in the levels which drop rings. Those rings can be used to improve character skills.
Finally two more game modes are available:
- Survival: get spammed with hords of zombies until you die! Difficulty raises each cycle.
- Quest: For each character for each stage there are 5 special tasks you have to fulfill. By fulfilling tasks you gain new costumes.
Let's face it:
- 4 levels, 4 characters.
- The enemies remain the same for each character story.
- Some little story blablah for each character.
- Bosses are reused from the characters
=> playtime is increased remarkably by adding intended repetition. But if the game itself is fun, repetition is not too bad.
This strategy should be considered to blow up the game content.
To show what I mean, I added a FAQ from qamefaqs.com
http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/wii/file/943440/52297 It lists all the unlockables. Just skip the remaining information about the game in there. It is not of interest for this discussion I think.
Any comments?
