Have great writing, story and characters and it more or less is.
I'll admit, those are some noble aspirations. One of the drawbacks of story-driven games is that if they are overly-linear with only one outcome, you need great gameplay alongside it so that people can't get the full experience from simply watching a YouTube Let's Play, which is how I experienced Infinite courtesy of Jesse Cox.
If you have variants in the plot and multiple endings, even a YouTube playthrough like Jesse's would not be the complete narrative experience, as evidenced by his recent playthrough David Cage's Beyond: Two Souls; say what you will about David Cage and his "games", but with the variance in the dialogue and the choices that can be made, a single playthrough doesn't net you everything so you could in theory still play through the game and have a different narrative experience.
Another way to add variance, albeit in an extreme and possibly expensive fashion, is to have "alternate levels", as in one playthrough you go to the Scrapyard at a certain point whilst in the other you end up in the Catacombs at that same point of divergence. With the setting of Infinite involving alternate realities, there was opportunity for that in abundance, though the opportunity was missed.
A variant of this form of variance would be going to different levels in the order of your choosing, and the narrative would change depending on what you did there and the order of which you did it. For example, if you went to fight Slate in one reality before heading into Yekaterina (Russian Columbia), you'd get what we saw in the lock-up, but if you went to Yekaterina before confronting Slate, you'd see Slate/Comrade Lesnitsky fighting for the Bolsheviks as opposed to the Vox, with the Bolsheviks being the Yekaterina analogue to the Vox Populi, whilst the "Imperial Guard" act as the Yekaterina equivalent of the Founders Militia.
Plenty of examples of how to do it, though it'll only work out for the best if it has enjoyable gameplay to back up the story.
The best kind of replayability comes from high quality. Large variety and branching paths can be nice, but they aren't absolutely necessary for someone to replay a game. Too much interactivity can even throw you out of the experience and ruin the atmosphere in some cases. If a game is good enough that can suffice to make a player play a game two, five and ten times over.
[editline]1st November 2013[/editline]
What I'm trying to say is that forcing variety, decisions and branches into a game can often detract from the experience instead of increase replayability. It's sometimes better to focus on other things.
This is the problem I had with Heavy Rain, and is why I'm hesitant to replay Beyond: Two Souls. I loved them, but half the fun I had was from not knowing the story. Same for RPGs in general.
Didn't Valve essentially do this with Left 4 Dead? Hand out bits of story each playthrough to make the game replayable?
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