An interesting note: I have a lot of people that replay my game, BUT a significant number of them replay essentially the same path. They want to relive and refine the experience, not discover other routes. And, essentially, I am the same. There are a few games I have replayed, but I haven’t done any major different routes in them, because the route I did fit my particular interest.
For me, writing wideish games is less about enabling varying replay, but enabling a good playing experience for a wider array of people. The more choices, the more the chance that the player will find a route/story/tactics they like and that resonates with them.
As long as you are good at writing choices such that they are clearly linked to outcomes, then following through on that. Not everyone’s super good at it. I’m not!
Yeah, it’s rare that I’ll change every single option on a replay, because even if I’m playing a different character, I’m still the same person and some things will always resonate most with me. If I do, it’s a deliberate choice, like “I wonder how different the story is if I do literally everything differently.”
Although I’m not totally clear on all your definitions;when it comes to long, wide and deep; I think it’s a close call between wide and long when it comes to which of them I feel are more important under your definitions.
If wide under your definition also includes customization of your character, then wide is the one that is most important to me. Like many others in this thread, having COGs and HGs with high replay value is really important to me and high replay value includes both making playthroughs which feel significantly different from another and also me being able to create several different MCs so that they won’t be the excact same character each playthrough.
But long under your definition is also something that I really appreciate. One of the many things that I really appreciate about my (so far) favorite COG/HG Life of a Wizard is that it spans such a long period and that you follow your character through a long period of time and watch them grow, both in power and other ways and can see how they affect their “world”. And I really enjoy series for the fact that you can really “grow” and “build” your character over a long period of time and over several COGs or HGs and also see how their decisions affect themself and their “world”.
Neither of these three aspects are unimportant and it’s normally important for me that COGs and HGs are sufficiently deep that the characters don’t feel too flat. But I don’t get as enthusiastic about COGs and HGs with great depth as I get about COGs and HGs that are really wide or long(under your definition). And if the COG or HG is good enough at capturing my imagination in other ways, my imagination can easily fill in the blanks, so to speak, for me when it comes to several aspects of the HG or COG that aren’t so deep. To use Life of a Wizard as an example yet again, most of the NPCs in that HG has a very low level of detail. But because that HG has captured my imagination so well, it’s often easy to fill in the blanks and when it’s not, it doesn’t matter so much, because I use my imagination to create other stories and imagine my characters and their lives in other ways.
good lord I thought this was talking about something else at first
imo deep, then long, then wide. I find COG is just terrible for wide games due to the lack of save system, which makes it so you have to replay and slog through half of the same text before getting to see the other choice.
I like swimming pools as much as the next guy, but the metaphor might not map on. Long without wide means narrow lane which sounds a lot like “linear.”
The only thing I think I can add to the mix is that your FATP probably comes to bear. Form, Audience, Topic, Purpose. Deep would seem important for, say, a localized romance where wide might be more significant for a piece showcasing a fantasy world. Length tends to be a detriment to thrillers which rely on tension whereas it’s the whole reason for a serial which is looking for precisely same shit, different day.
I hope this doesn’t come off as a there-is-answer cop out. If anything, it aims to be a consider-what-your-answer-is tailoring. (Like that? Open with bashing metaphors; close with crafting one.)
