Its mostly a recipe for disaster. But i wouldnt be able to help myself so i will contribute to this crap.
See, that's what I was thinking. Could I resist and wait on a full game of Metroid Prime 4? No, I'd more likely overpay to play five hours on one planet.
travo said:See, that's what I was thinking. Could I resist and wait on a full game of Metroid Prime 4? No, I'd more likely overpay to play five hours on one planet.
Yup and it would ruin the flow of almost every game. This MGS thing is different as this is literally just the intro so the full game will still be a full game but the price is ridiculous.
GZ is more like an appetizer. What was Kojima's reasoning for not including it as a whole package?
travo said:GZ is more like an appetizer. What was Kojima's reasoning for not including it as a whole package?
MGSV is going to be a long way away so to give us something to play in the mean time.
It depends on the game, or I should better say with the developer. I guess it works well enough for games like Sam and Max, or the new Monkey Island or the Walking Dead who make a point of releasing new episodes in a timely manner. I guess it could also work for something like Ace Attorney. Or for puzzle games like Picross, Sudoku etc.
But look what happened with the half-life. They took longer to produce an episode than other teams do to make a whole game, and they pretty well gave up on that altogether after the second episode.
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I want to say it works well for for adventure games because their structure is more affected by the narrative than most other genres...but let's be honest. The reason it's failed in other genres is that Telltale games filled a certain niche. It took them like 10 years to make something that wasn't structurally complete shit, and due to their financial success actually great game designers hopped on the bandwagon and were instantly able to deliver exceptional episodic content on their first try. And Half-Life episodes were way better than any Half-Life game proper. If Half-Life 3 had come out, then we might be seeing mainstream episodic games left right and centre. Or maybe not? At the beginning one of the supposed advantages was that, with the rise of production budgets, it would allow developers to work on a small title and release it for less. But if the title doesn't take off, then they can't release more episodes. Sure, then they might make a small profit, or lose less money, but it's not a very attractive prospect when you're trying to make a profit in the hundreds of millions, is it? And what about brand damage? If you're not fucking Gabe Newell then shitting all over the fans that did buy the game isn't going to look good. Not everyone gets a free pass. And DLC simply fits this purpose much better: you have the higher risk, higher chance of a huge profit main release, and then you can do some low risk money raising on subsequent DLC. It's the best of both worlds, with the only potential brand damage being that the DLC is shit. And if the main game is good, then no one is really going to care.
I don't see any reason developers with bigger budgest would do it. The ship sailed with Episode 3 and the eventual embracing of DLC.
Mass Effect anyone? Destiny? or even Rift?
I don't think episodic releases will be where the future is headed. The 3 examples I listed all offer distinct alternatives. A trilogy, a fiction that will last for over 10 years and span multiple games, or an online world where content is added within the same game.
I don't see episodic content becoming the main way to distribute digital content because it's scizofrenic in nature. It's both a unity that exists on its own and part of a bigger whole. You can't deliver a compelling package on both levels, unless you're talking something very linear story driven with little in the way of exploration.
I cannot really add to the insights above, other than to say I see more of episodic content coming that we've had for years but probably not thought of it i that manner -- map packs (think Titanfall).
All the talk about Ground Zeroes and it's length got me thinking could this be our future with games? Game development can take up to three years. In the case of the MGS series, it's been nearly six years since we've seen a new Metal Gear. Could developers start focusing on creating "episodes" to satisfy consumer demands? What if the first third of Zelda was released in early 2015', the middle third in the summer and the last part released during the holiday? What if the choice was to have it that way or wait for the whole package the following year? Obviously, it's not a business model that would be a good fit for most companies, but with development times taking longer, would you be on board for this? Or is it a recipe for disaster that could milk customers for more money?