On the Matter of Words Per Playthrough

As an author of 4 hosted games and 4 WIPs, I can confidently say that most readers don’t give a solitary shit about replay ability. In fact, more often than not, they seem to be annoyed by it because it drastically decreases the all-important playthrough length.

What most readers seem to want is to be fooled into thinking their choices matter with varied, interesting, and well written fake choices. Here’s why I say all of this:

  • My game, The Magician’s Burden, is 230k words with a playthrough length of 60k. That means the replay value is very high, and I considered this to be an asset. In the markets, this turned out to be the opposite. I’ve had a very significant amount of bad reviews saying that certain ROs are bland, lifeless, and not there, while others are well developed and engaging.

This is because of the replay value: depending on your choices, you could see all 4 ROs an equal amount, or you might see certain ones very little in one playthrough and then a lot in another. But instead of viewing this as a positive thing, lots of readers simply assumed that various characters had little screentime at all. So all of that extra work just amounted to a big drop in sales and ratings.

I will not be doing that design again, where entire mini scenes with characters are hidden behind choices that cannot all be seen in one playthrough, or even a few playthroughs. There’s a reason why CoG has recommended against this system. The only exception I will make is for romance routes, like date and sex scenes.

  • My infamous WIP, Mass Mother Murderer will be roughly 220k when finished. With a projected playthrough length of around 90k, it will be my most linear work yet, aside from Foundation of Nightmares (which happened to be skewered for its blatant linearity.)

Despite this, it has recieved no complaints that I can remember for being linear, and it’s my most popular story by huge margins. also consider that this MC is one who has a defined personality, defined motivations, and so much agency that they make countless important decisions of their own accord, with the reader either just deciding how these things are done, or not giving input at all. But, because of the engaging writing, plot, and characters, the reception for MMM has still been overwhelmingly positive. And this isn’t just me blowing smoke up my own ass, either. I’m going off of my beta testers’ feedback and comments.

All that said, I am certainly not condemning huge amounts of replay ability with various mini scenes. Whatever the author wants to do is fine, and several games have had huge success with this approach, like Zombie Exodus.

All I’m saying is that, in general, I think it pays more dividends to both the author and the readers if the story is much longer at the price of being a bit more linear.

Not TOO linear, of course. I still enjoy giving enough options so that playthroughs can have noticeable differences and the reader can play as several different kinds of MCs, but I just think that, at a certain point, replay ability starts to become less and less worth the very considerable effort it takes the author.

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