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BioWare Goes Episodic With New Games
The word from the site Computer and Videogames is that BioWare will be offering episodic content for all of its upcoming games. This includes Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Jade Empire: Special Edition. CEO Ray Muzyka, in an interview with CVG, talks about this and many other elements of the coming year in PC gaming. From the article: "The videogame market is very cyclical and PC and console gaming have an uneasy alliance - as new console systems are released, early adopter fans move over to check those games out and as PC systems reach and surpass console systems at the end of a console life cycle, a good number of those early adopter fans move back over to PC gaming. Console gaming is huge of course, especially when you add in hardware sales, but it's hard to quantify the enormous impact of online gaming on the overall PC market - retail sales just don't capture the revenues from the increasingly successful PC MMOs as well as digital distribution and episodic gaming (which are both gaining strength year after year)."
I have no problem waiting a few extra months, even a year, and paying more upfront for a lengthier, complete game. Besides, I don't like games that intentionally leave you hanging so you'll buy the imminent next episode. Before this episodic content craze, games would at least offer some degree of conclusion because the next installment would be a few years away.
Maybe I'm being too cynical, but why else would publishers push for episodic gaming if not for more profit? Selling less content for more money is all this is about.
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Personally, I see that there are two possible ways companies can produce episodic content; a company can build a complete game and then add expansions for it at a miminal cost or a company can charge you multiple times for the same ammount of content you'd originally get in a game.
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Burning Crusade and The Sims expansions represent a "good form" of episodic content because the games came complete and the content that is added seems (mostly) worthwhile to the target audience. On the other hand charging for horse armor or a 5 minute quest is shameful
is when a company like Valve takes so long to relase each episode. I would have been perfecly happy with the Source engine as is if that meant I could be playing EP2 now instead of June.
Sounds good to me. Bioware makes excellent games, but they're often few and far between and very long when they do come. If ever there was a company who's games were ripe for an episodic model, I would say it's Bioware.
Episodic gaming has been around since the Doom days. Back then, though, they called it "shareware." Of course, in those days gaming wasn't quite as "established" as it is today, which is why you got four "episodes" of Doom at once instead of paying for each one at a time.
I was really hoping that the failure of Sin would've quietly killed this change, but it'll probably blow over in a few years. If I wanted thirty-minute bites of entertainment interspersed with twelve-minute bouts of advertisement (a different but related can of worms), I'd watch television.
Burning Crusade is a bad example of an expansion pack. You pay that monthy fee partially because you expect new content to be delivered without your having to fork over _even more_ money. The whole draw of MMOs, I always thought, was that your continuing investment paid for continuing support and improvement of the game.
If you're going try to 'sell' me 1/3 the game (or less), knowing fully that you're not providing a complete game, then I'm going to try to 'ignore' you.
Honestly, though, it would be nice if they'd go back to the distribution model used back in the days of disks, i.e. I can download (or buy for the cost of the media+distribution/shipping) episode 1 of the game, and later episodes are what will cost me.
In that respect, episode 1 should only cost me at most $5.00, be freely available online, and be fully playable with all features (i.e. not crippleware).
Episode 2-n I'd pay for, if I liked episode 1.
You want to lessen* the amount of piracy online? Adopt the above methods.
* You'll never get rid of piracy altogether, but many pirate just to try the game out in a fully-playable way then decide if we want to buy or not
These 'Tech Demos' and 30-second trailers, while nice and all, offer none of the 'playtesting' that Wolf3d, Doom, the Commander Keen games, etc provided freely in their shareware versions.
How many of us have time for 60 hour plus games anymore? I sure as hell don't. I'd be perfectly happy spending $30 for a 20 hour game that I'll actually at least somewhat finish than $60 for a 60 hour game, for which I'll never explore 50-70% of the content.
The newest zelda and final fantasy are awesome, but I had to put them down because I can't invest 60 hours into a game anymore. I much prefer a game like oblivion, where you can finish the main quest in 10 hours and then the rest is pretty much optional. Heh, I remember the good old days, where I finished final fantasy IV in a weekend. I respect those that want and have time for 60 hour games, but it gets to be annoying when the majority of games (other than FPS) seem to be moving in that direction.
Wait an extra month or two? Sure, but it'll usually be closer to your 'year' estimate. Waiting that long just won't be worth it if you can still blow through the whole game in a day. Valve screwed up, IMO, because it takes them too long to release the next episode. Sam and Max, on the other hand, managed to keep the time between the first and second episodes reasonably short, and the third one should be done even faster.
To answer your final question, the episodic format is good for the developer/publisher because it gives them some money now as oppsed to next year (or in 10 years, in the DNF case). It can make all the difference when they're running out of money to properly finish the whole game, or if they can't convince the investors to give them all the money they need for this new innovative project.
The way the industry works now, almost no developer can afford to self-fund a "full-size" game. For most of those who can, it's an all-or-nothing bet; if the game tanks (And many great games regrettably do), the developer goes out of business. So for the overwhelming majority of developers, to do a full game it means getting a publisher to fund development. Publishers are understandably cautious about funding more risky (but potentially great) games. As a result you tend to see lots of knock offs, sequels, and crappy movie licenses. Innovation is stifled. Add on that most developers exist only so long as they keep getting publishers to fund them.
One way to escape this is to simply develop smaller games. That's great if you like that sort of game, but not so good if you really want to develop a sprawling RPG, a large FPS, just about any adventure game, or something similar.
Episodic content is potentially a way forward. These days the overwhelming expense in a large game is the content, not the programming. A first episode that represents, say, 20% of a game may only need 40% of the content. (Even better, episode two probably only needs 15% more content to generate the next 20% of the game, assuming you're releasing episodes quickly enough that you don't need to update your engine or art.) It's a much lower risk. More developers can afford to self-fund in this model. More risky ideas can be tried. I'm quite confident that Bone and Sam & Max weren't going to be funded by a major publisher as full games. As the developer typically self-publishes, if the game is a success the developer can bank it to support future development, possibly even more traditional big-single-release games.
Episodic content is problematic. As a customer you're left hanging mid-story. (Did we say you'd be playing Episode Two within six months of episode one? Did you purchase Episode One on that basis? Hope you don't mind waiting six more.) If the developer goes bankrupt or cancels an unprofitable line you may never see the conclusion. (Sucks to be you, Sin Episodes fans. Of course, you can suffer that even in "full" game releases.) While episodic content is almost exclusively sold online, reducing overhead and costs, you pay what overhead there is once per episode, driving costs up. I'm not a fan of episodic content for these reasons. But I believe at least some developers are embracing episodic content as a way to escape extremely cautious publishers.
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With definite limits on my disposable income, I have to grab whatever sorting mechanisms I can find to help me avoid the temptation to buy brand new $60 games. "Episodic" games help me do exactly that. No matter how interesting the game, the episodic publishing model tells me to wait until I can buy at least a whole "season" (to extend the TV metaphor a bit more) at one time. I may not save a whole lot of money if episodic games never develop the equivalent of the $5-$10 software bargain bin, but my approach has other benefits.
This way I not only avoid the long wait between episodes, I can also avoid games that get canceled before they release their full slate of planned episodes, and I can avoid spending my money at all until after all the episodes have been reviewed by gamers who lack my patience or just have a burning need to get rid of large amounts of excess cash.
Of course, if publishers can come up with an episodic game that really grabs my attention, they might get me as a customer while the game is still new. So far I haven't seen anything nearly compelling enough to give up what I gain by waiting. Maybe Bioware could be the one to win me over.
I think episodic content could be a good thing, particularly in a story-based RPG.
Think of it as the difference between a great television show or an epic movie. In a movie everything has to be "big." You basically have half of the first act for exposition before the main plot unfolds. And the story itself must be of epic proportions, even world-shattering (certainly character changing.) Put simply a movie is almost always about the most important thing that ever happened to this set of characters and the world they inhabit.
An episodic show, on the other hand, can really dig into the little things. Characters build, the world develops. You get a level of detail you would never get in a feature film. It is a lot of little stories that lead to one big one. There is much more room for minor conflicts and even humor. Television gets a bad rap and much of it is crap (in part because many series are dragged out much longer than they should be) but when it's good (like The Sopranos) it's really good, and you get to know the characters and world much better than you possibly could if the story was told in a two hour feature.
I don't know if Bioware is thinking along these lines but if they are I would certainly be interested. In an RPG for example every episode could be self contained and appropriate for the character's level. The first few would be based around his or her area of origin, gradually expanding to other areas of the world as the series progresses and the character grows. You can concentrate on dealing with the issues and hand and won't have the carrot dangling in from of you of rapidly levelling up to get to the end boss because that part of the story isn't ready to be told yet. In short an epic story could be told in a larger story arc, as the sum of many smaller stories along the way.
A nice game -- typically $50. Same game serialized into three episodes of $20 each = $60. I guess it works for them from a business point of view. Seems like a fleecing of the customer to me, though.
I assume this is the natural extension of the NWN premium modules. With the exception of Infinite Dungeons (my god was that horrible), they were a good deal at about $5 for a quality adventure. But the problem I found was that most of them opened up a great story and never finished it. Hopefully they won't repeat that aspect.
For NWN, this was a great way to make money that funded more development on NWN (the game has gotten over 60 patches). Which was great for NWN, with it's active user-developer community that's created many good adventures and persistent worlds. But for other games that don't come with a toolset, I don't think it's as good of an investment.
What ever they do, I hope Bioware soon replicates the NWN model. At the moment, I'm not so sure that Obsidian will be able to stay on the ball with NWN2.
Now that NWN2 is under the Atari/Infogrames umbrella, you can kiss the future of NWN2 good bye. I love the NWN2 Alpha version I bought for $59, hopefully the beta wont be sold as an expansion, and oh boy will I be excited when I'm done "pay testing" and can buy the real version of the game!
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Jade Empire was a short game. Not too much of a stretch to say it's as long as HL:Episode 1. I remember reading that they intentionally avoid the 50 hours gameplay time of many in the same genre because they do not believe that modern gamers have the time to invest. With this in mind, I guess episodic contents, generally quicker to play through, are a natural direction for them.
The warcraft III expansion was supposed to have episodes for the orc campaign, but they where so slow. That's not what I want from a game.
as PC systems reach and surpass console systems at the end of a console life cycle
PC's had surpassed the current batch of consoles long before they were released. The tendancy of console fanboys to comapre the specs of years-off vaporware to currently shipping PC hardware is quite annoying. I'm like to plop these guys down with some engineers from ATI or Nvidia who feel free to talk about what they expect PC graphics cards to be like in two years.
And as for the warm reception that episode gaming seems to be getting in this thread: how often are episodic games going to be made by indi studios or released to save development time, vs greedy companies like EA just splitting a title up into parts so they can charge twice as much for the same game?
A lot of people probably can still spend 60 hours in a game. For example the people who are in the same situation now as you used to be when you had that time?
For me, sometimes these 60 hours are spread over three months, and sometimes I play 3 days in a row with hardly any sleep.
These days all Zelda games give you a helper character to talk to if you forgot where you had to go. Usually the important words are even highlighted.
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Honestly, I don't care how they do it, as long as they give me my long-promised Shattered Steel 2.
"Our shareholders are drooling over the money that Blizzard is raking in hand over fist and episodic gaming is our way of getting you to pay the equivelant of a monthly fee. We're going to scrape content from the initial release and string it out over successive "episodes" and charge you more than we would have initially. Enjoy paying a never ending fee for a game that used to just cost you $50."
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My life has accumulated enough crap that I just can't invest in a 60hr game anymore. I need a proven game that works out of the box (unlike NWN's 60 patches, unplayable until about patch 29).
Episodic content is simply a way to make more money, and put out less content at the same time. Buy it and be fools.