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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)."
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.