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Why Hasn't Episodic Gaming Taken Off?
Thanks to GameSpot for its 'GameSpotting' editorial discussing the potential lure of the episodic videogame. The writer ruminates: "Imagine your favorite first-person shooter, role-playing game, or action adventure game. Now imagine that game broken up into one- to two-hour sequences. Now imagine that the first part was free and subsequent parts were delivered to you automatically for five bucks a pop, each month. Would you take the bait?" He suggests this approach could work particularly well for "...a lot of people out there who want to be gamers but don't want to make the commitment of living the 'gamer lifestyle' of having their entire existence revolve around their hobby." Could you see yourself buying into episodic gaming?
The online collectible cardgame + space civilization sim Star Chamber is a good similar idea. Free download, free trial play with sample decks. You pay money for booster packs at a low cost of $20 for 16 (240 cards total, more than enough for a good deck). It plays better and is more fun than games twice as costly. You go into a chatroom and play against other people and trade. There is an entire section of the system that even allows phantom sealed deck tournamnets.
Episodic gaming is hard to get off the ground, I my opinion, because the first episode has to deliever a lot of promise, and the next part(s) have to maintain that promise without disrupting the cost vs. content and length balance. Myst: Uru will hopefully open the way for more installment type games, with free downloadable extra content.
Murphy's Paradox... the more you plan for success, the more avenues there are for failure.
I don't want to spend eight weeks with a game. I would probably play more different games for a shorter time, while coming back to favourites when new episodes are released.
.hack has a note sitting in it that probably tells me something like "level up before going to area (whatever the name of it is) to finish this game", because I got sick of spending so much time on the last boss only to die. There's a similar note in my FF Origins case, except that I'm nowhere near the end of FF2 afaik.
Why do you need games to be episodic to do this? I usually have 3 or 4 games next to each of my systems and cycle through them, putting one back on the shelf every time I get a new game for that system (the new game going next to the system), or get sick of or finish that particular game. If I think I might have a problem coming back to a particular game, I write myself a note. If I have a guide for that particular game, I'll stick the note in the page that's roughly where I'm at in the game. If I don't have a guide, I'll just put the note in the game's case. I have a hand-drawn map of Metroid on my coffee table at the moment because I've been playing through the emulated version of the NES Metroid on my GameCube, and it helps me remember where I've been and where I'm going. What I'm trying to do is something I can usually figure out from there. The first "episode" of
What it comes down to is simple, games need better facilities for tracking your progress so that you can fire a game up after not playing it for a month or so, load your save game, maybe read a little info from the map or an in-game journal (ala Baldur's Gate and derivatives), and you have a pretty good idea of what's going on. The games are getting more complex, your goals get more complex, so the games need to help us handle that complexity. After all, any of us can pick up almost any Super Mario Bros. game today, no matter how long ago we last played it, and have it all figured out in a couple minutes.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
There are so many problems with episodic games... Where to begin?
First of all, there is linearity of design. Generally, your character will acquire experience, gold, weapons, abilities, etc throughout a game. If a person jumps into the fifth month of a game, he will be at a severe disadvantage to continue if it is even possible at all. So in any game that contains character development, like the Metroid series, you will need to keep customers buying the packs in a linear fashion.
Which brings us to a position where you don't have an episodic presentation at all, you have a pay-as-you-go model combined with a content-in-patches model. People will start 8 months after the game is released and it starts to get some buzz, will play though the first available 9 hours, and will wait every month for the next level. And that, my friends, is a crappy way to experience a game. Even if you can only spare an hour a week, you will be left with nothing to play for 1/5th of the time, and a tight story experience that is spread out over two years. It would be jilted and terrible. Whatever coherent emergent experience the game may be presenting would be lost amidst the sea of time. Could you imagine watching LotR one hour at a time, spread out over 9 months?
And let's be honest, no monthly episode would ship on time. It should be in QA for the a month before it is ready for prime time. You have to create textures, unique characters, a map, a new musical track, and fresh voice recordings. You have to balance the difficulty, ensure compatibility, and test. You would have to develop the entire game before hand, and simply release it monthly. It would simply be a matter of withholding from your potential audience.
After a year, what then? If it took you two or three years to develop the first game, and you've been futzing about during the intervening year listening to player criticisms, altering gameplay balance, and adding areas, you now will have had maybe a solid 6 months to design and develop the next game. That's really not enough time, even using an existing engine. The reviewer complains that Metroid Zero is too short, and would like to see more content released monthly, but the reviewer doesn't say where this development time would come from. It's nice to say that a game is too short, but Metroid Zero isn't too short because they were waiting for the expansion pack. Game designers not "worrying about having to pad these episodes out"? These episodes would be all padding.
As for the first hour free... Has Greg Kasavin even tried demos? I know he's the executive editor for GameSpot, so he probably knows to avoid the slimeware that GameSpot's demo area tries to install on your system, but there are other sources. If you want the first hour free, go to a real demo site, like 3DGamers, and enjoy yourself.
It is true that games need to become shorter, more intense experiences... More Metal Gear Solid than Xenogears. But chopping up an otherwise perfectly fine game and making it monthly is not the answer. It may be a reasonable-sounding solution, which is why it is repeated all too often, but in reality this no-brainer really is a no-brainer.
The ______ Agenda
www.arena.net is the site setup for the refugees from blzzard who are working on Guild Wars, which loosly follows this model. It's an Everquest-like mmorpg, but has no monthly fee, and instead relies on repeat expansion buys to pay the bills.
Sounds like this may get tested this year.
-chitlenz
Imagination is the silver lining of Intelligence.