Slashdot Mirror
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)."
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.
...
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
There's a ton of stuff that Blizzard implemented in Vanilla WoW without requiring people to buy an expansion pack. You can see them here, but what follows is a small summary of patch content:
:)
- Maraudon (Dungeon)
- Dire Maul (Dungeon)
- Outdoor Raid Encounters
- PvP Honor System/Battlegrounds
- Blackwing Lair (40 man raid)
- Zul'Gurub (20 man raid)
- Ahn'Qiraj (20 and 40 man raids)
- Naxxramas (40 man raid)
Each of these new boosts added new armor sets, trinkets, items, etc.
Note that this isn't an exhaustive list, but only highlights the main points. Plus, the fact that Blizzard was providing this content for over two years without an expansion is pretty nice, imo. Everquest pushed out expansions every 6 months, if I recall correctly.
As for the Burning Crusade, originally I wasn't planning on purchasing it. However, I handed over the $40, and so far I haven't regretted any cent of it. The new world is absolutely stunning, with a wide variety of quests, plenty of eyecandy, wonderful new skills and armor sets, and some really nice dungeons that I enjoy playing through with my friends.
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.