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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
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.
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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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.
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.