143 The Foreseeable RPG

I’ve been playing a recently released iOS RPG (Knights of Pen & Paper 2), and it’s becoming clear an issue plagues many of these types of games. On the surface, they can be a lot of fun. They’ve got interesting settings, some fun stats to manage, a bit of difficult battling to do, and things like that. The problem comes when you dive deeper into the game.

A game needs to surprise players, but it also needs to let them know what to expect as they spend more time with it. Playing an iOS RPG, you’ll typically know what’s going to happen for the rest of the game, mechanically speaking, after playing it for an hour or less. And being able to foresee the entire RPG that early on is a good way to make your players disinterested.

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