Prestige, Succession, and New Game+
Recently while not feeling well, I picked up a new free incremental game on Steam. (It's nice, it doesn't try to micro-transaction you to death, like all the others these days.) And that reminded me of an interesting exchange I had on Discord, and that got me thinking... There's several different "start the game over" type of mechanics, and you'd think they'd all be pretty similar, but in practice, they feel completely different. So I asked myself one of my favorite questions: why?
Before getting into the why, the first step is of course always to pin down exactly what we're talking about.
Prestige is a term anyone who's ever played an incremental game is going to recognize immediately. In a sense, it's a form of starting the game over - but when you sit and think about it, it isn't really. When you prestige in an incremental, you reset your "progress" in order to get a bunch of some sort of additional resource that you can only obtain this way, and you get more of it if you had bigger numbers before resetting. That additional resource will then either give you a passive boost, or be spent on unlocking abilities which give you a passive boost or access to new content.
You know what that sounds like to me? That sounds like levelling up.
Do gameplay that gets you a bunch of some kind of resource (like, say, earning experience) and then you spend all of that resource (your experience) and you get higher stats or new abilities or unlock new content (I don't even need an analogy there, it's literally what happens).
In other words, Prestige is really just a weird level-up mechanic where you decide when your exp bar is full.
So now for the second one: Succession. I wasn't sure what word to use for it, but it's a pretty easily understood concept. You have a character. While playing the game with that character, you lose/die/are otherwise defeated. If you were successful enough and prepared well enough during your time as that character, you get to leave some sweet loot or something as an inheritance for your next character.
It... kind of sounds like Prestige, in some ways? How well you do determines your bonuses for the next life, that part. But there's one big difference, I think, which is what makes Prestige so different from the other things in this list: you can beat the game without doing it. If there's an end, and you're super good, and super careful, and super lucky, you can reach the end without ever losing. It's probably not as fun, but you can probably do it - so the whole thing is more that, when you do probably lose, you don't have to start over again at zero.
While Prestige is basically just levelling up, Succession is venturing into actual "meta progression". You do have to start the game over if you lose, but you get a kind of persistence between gameplays that lets you do better the next time. (Or worse, if you really super screw up.)
Sunless Sea takes this kind approach and I really like it - but as you can tell from their company name, that's kind of their whole thing, you know? "Failbetter Games".
Last but not least, New Game+. I saw this term for it used while watching a Bloodbourne LP years ago and loved it so much I use it for the entire supercategory of concepts, now. Fundamentally, the idea is this: after beating the game, you get a chance to play the game again, but differently and with something extra.
Like with Succession, there's always some kind of persistence across these gameplays. It might be achievements, or unlocked content, or whatever. But, unlike with Succession, a New Game Plus is a reward for beating the game. That's right. You beat the game, and as a reward, you get to play the game again. But differently.
This is the part I originally had this on my mind, because I was in the middle of tossing around that "use Evennia to make a browser game" idea and, while it's called something different, it shows up multiple times just in the examples I've played significant amounts of. In Kingdom of Loathing, you get NG+ as Ascension after you defeat the Naughty Sorceress. And in Improbable Island, you get it through a Drive Kill.
This one is my favorite, honestly, and I think it's because, even though it's basically the same "starting over" as the rest, it's a reward. And it's especially my favorite when it's an optional reward - a game where, when you beat the final boss, you can just continue to go around doing the game things if you like, or you can start again and, if you beat the game again, get some extra bonuses or shiny badges or maybe even just a chance to play the game as a different class/species/starting town/whatever.
In contrast, Succession is more like a consolation prize. And Prestige is just a normal progression mechanic with a twist.