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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)."
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.
I'm for episodic games. It benefits indie game developers because they only have to create most of the assets once, and then just create multiple stories using the same assets instead of having to recreate the wheel every time at great cost. Another benefit is that the episodic games are more story driven, since there's no reason to release another "episode" of the same multi-player frag-fest, so episodic games are making way for the resurrection of the adventure game genre. Yet another benefit is that I don't really have time to go through a 40 or 50 hour game anymore. I'd much rather sit down for an hour or 2 of gaming, complete the game and wait for another episode instead of playing for 4 hours, not getting far because the developers felt they needed to beef up the game length with an impossibly hard section, and then give up. I've played just the beginning of so many games that I've lost count. It might make more money for the developer in the long run, but it will save me money because I sometimes spend 50 or 60 bucks on a game that I only play for 3 or 4 hours anyway. Now I can spend 20 bucks on a game and at least get the satisfaction of finishing it. 90 percent of games are crap anyway. With episodic games, if I don't like the first episode, I could give up on the series without losing too much money, so developers will have to work harder on the subsequent episodes to keep gamer interest. Come to think of it, I can't really think of anything negative about episodic games. If the games are good, I'd gladly give the developers more money to continue playing it. If not, then I'm losing less money than I would had I bought a full-length crappy game.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
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.