Quote Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne View Post
This final point IMHO often gets overlooked. People often ties replayability to rewards but that’s ignoring the actual process to get said reward. It is to no wonder that players nowadays are so reward-centric that they very often are obsessed to ‘shorten’ their gameplay so much just to quickly get their reward & get out, never touching the content anymore. Because why wouldn’t they? Rewards are one-time. Gameplay is garbage, focusing at one very narrow, specific subtype of player while leaving the rest dead in the ditch.
In game design, there's what is called intrinsic reward and extrinsic reward. Intrinsic reward is internal; the feeling of satisfaction of fighting the boss well, learning and mastering a fight just because that fight is fun, replaying it because goshdarnit I want to try out a different strategy or I feel I could do something better this time around. Extrinsic reward of course is the external factor; you're doing this fight for the gear, the glamour, the minion, etc.

You ultimately need both, the extrinsic rewards motivates you to do the fight in the first place, but the intrinsic rewards is what ultimately makes the game engaging, those are the dopamine hits from playing well. But to achieve it, you need depth, plenty of choices that can affect how you perform future plays, failure states (otherwise "correct" plays have no meaning), risk vs reward, etc.

The reason I think people only care about the extrinsic rewards you mentioned is because there's no intrinsic reward to care about. We do the content just enough to get all the rewards and stop bothering after that. The moment things like player expression and interesting choices get made, it's easier to shoot that down and say "that'll be hard to balance; you'll get a meta where everyone goes for the best choice anyway; people will just use the safe strategy and ignore the hard one (or vice versa)." But in my opinion, the content that ages best are things like Eureka and Bozja where there is some level of player agency in say, what Lost Actions you can bring, Logos actions, stat potions that can potentially change your role in combat, sub-jobs, etc. Despite my issues with Occult Crescent, I still had fun taking Time Mage as my sub-job just because I liked how well it synergized with Red Mage, using Oracle and ignoring the damage penalty of that one spell it has using Hallowed Ground on Paladin, etc. Those are fun, that's the player expression part of intrinsic reward done right.