What's the best way to keep the players interested in a game indefinitely?

good input, thanks

I agree. That's why i played through all the Baldurs Gate fames
>Even Siege of the Sjw
It was fun watching my character develop relations with party member and npc's that carried over from one game to the other and watching my mc ascend to God hood over the course if an epic journey

yea that sounds like a nice experience. but you did reach the end of it right? how would you keep it going?
you'll be op at some point, so more, harder games to use your existing characters in?

The true answer, that nobody around here wants to admit to because it's cancer: gacha/lootboxes. Look at everything long-running, particularly the profitable ones, and you'll see they almost all abuse random microtransactions or sunk cost fallacy.

In short, there is no way to make a "good" game that people play indefinitely. It's better to make a tight, well-curated experience that doesn't overstay its welcome long enough to become boring.

so you're saying it's impossible because it hasn't been done yet?

Well i did take him over to IceWind Dale and solo'd that on a hard difficulty to compensate for his high level.
Infinite engine was neat that you could take characters between different games.
I guess it'd be easier to keep adding to IWD than BG because you could keep adding new maps quest periodically without worrying that much about the story it self

BL2 is definitely an indefinitely playable game. Each character is unique and deeper to that, each character has multiple different play styles. Even the idea of farming doesn't get repetitive if you shoot the shit with a friend while you casually farm a boss. It is, in many ways, the perfect game. And of course you'll get bored of it eventually, but you can just go play something else and come right back to it.

One more

If you're doing sci do stop greebling everything just for the sake of making it more complex. It makes everything harder to render at the expense of processing more action and it doesn't make things look "futuristic" it just looks overdesigned. Every call of duty game after black ops 2 is guilty of this, and after bungie gave halo to 343 everything became fucking ugly because fractal designs were put on everything for no reason.
If you're doing fantasy have some creativity but don't make everyone's clothing look like it's all made out of molded foam with lots of SHAAAAAAPES and spikes. Don't guild everything. Simplicity and easy to recognize silhouettes are often underappreciated.
Also giving someone an unfortunate background doesn't make them deep or cool or developed, that's just edgy nonsense. Character development and changes NEED to be seen on the screen. Don't expect anyone to notice or care about a character changing when it happened over radio dialogue. Make the villain matter and actually present for the story. Don't make them show up last minute for us to care. If you're going to make a woman in the game stop Makijg her a no nonsense sniper who talks like she's in the matrix. Showing a female character kill lots of baddies does nothing for our interest in her.
Don't make every character the same personality. It's a problem with solo developers because they always inject a little bit if themselves into everyone they write and often a lot of character couldn't be distinguished if you just took away everything but the text.

Make it fun. I still play games like the thps series and ssx because they have really fun and satisfying mechanics. These games keep me coming back because the gameplay is fun.

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thanks for the input everyone.
will come back for more opinions or present ideas eventually.

probably whatever PUBG/fornite did early on

You just described Warframe

Having ways to change up the experience on top of a base fun game, I think games like Minecraft/Terraria are good examples of this where you can vastly change up your base and experience the world in a multitude of ways even if the base content isn't much. This could be improved on with more connected worlds, if Minecraft had it built in where you could zoom out into space and visit other players worlds I think a lot more people would be longterm players.

Other big games that do constant content like Fortnite/WoW tend to kill their own games by making people burn out. Forcing too many challenges or having to rely on other people to progress and being limited by time make people quit despite there being unexperienced content. I think this style would be improved on if they took a more adventuring approach where solo play is completely viable but having friends is just more efficient. I feel like if fromsoft tried to make an indefinitely engaging game they could do so as their games capture this really well.

Autistic high level optimization where optimal solution is hard to find.
Then shake it up just a tiny bit with each update. But make that tiny bit just big enough that the meta has to shift in non-obvious way.

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For online multiplayer/esport type games:
Give the illusion that a game takes "skill" and is worth playing at a top level. Make it 5v5 so that players' egos aren't bruised when losing (omg my team sucks!!!). Have slight, subtle RNG present but not too much to occasionally let bad players have a taste of being "pro".

All you can think, everything