Reading the answers sent in from these developers, and others behind games including Minit, and Artisan: Going Home Again, my view of New Game+ changed substantially. In this way our NG+ becomes a meta-game of how far you can make it, with dynamically increasing difficulty and a trackable highscore." By something like NG+14, you have nothing left to fetch in the world so the whole adventure is a linear path to the final boss, but everything also kills in one hit by that point, and the fee to get resurrected is so high that touching anything probably means perma-death. Thierry Boulanger of platforming adventure The Messenger tells me how the team’s approach to New Game+ changed the dynamic of the entire game, "The player gets to pick an additional item to lock-in from the get go, making the second portion of the game shorter every time.
The dynamic knowledge and translation systems in Inkle’s narrative archaeology game Heaven’s Vault combine for the New Game+ versions of transcription puzzles to always be new, and get increasingly specific over time, ensuring players are constantly learning more about the world they’ve chosen to keep engaging with. Technical action game Lucah: Born of a Dream follows the mold of games like Nier: Automata and makes the player’s evolving prowess a critical part of the story that unfolds over two playthroughs. The developers of State of Decay 2 encountered problems that are almost the polar opposite, for not just New Game+, but linear content in general.
"Doing it again I’d have implemented things differently, but isn’t that true about every game?" Speaking to other developers experimenting with similar content, the complexity Lennon encountered is not unusual. "Because our game has you revisiting many of the same spaces, with different characters, in different contexts, with different events, it did become really complicated to layer all of the scripting and design elements on top of each other," Lennon says. This ultimately took the form of a supernatural action murder mystery. Wave timings, hit counts, heal rates, etc, all interact and all need to be tested." After the success of Spearhead Games’ debut game, Stories: The Path of Destinies, they built their second game Omensight entirely around the concept of exploring branches and loops. "It’s rarely as simple as tweaking some numbers for a harder NG+. "It’s important to understand that ‘the same but different’ is actually ‘different, but some things might be the same’," says Spearhead Games senior designer Graeme Lennon.
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