The Emergence of Episodes

By Plagiarize

Consider this two things, one, an informal review of Sin Episodes: Emergence, and two, a look at the ideas behind episodic gaming as today we get Half Life 2: Episode 1.

Skeptics could say that what we’re seeing is way to charge gamers more for the same content. At around $15 to $20 an episode, which gets you three to five hours of gameplay, to play the ‘full adventure’ is going to cost you $45 to $60. It’s not a major increase really, but one of the apparent benefits of episodic gaming is that you don’t pay for the parts of the game you haven’t reached, unless you want to.

Every game has games that they didn’t finish, whether because they didn’t like them, got bored, something better came along, whatever the reason, we’ve all been there. For a small price, I can get a chunk of game that I know I’m going to finish, and if I hate it I’ve only invested a small cost instead of a big one, though more on that way of thinking later.

Sin Episodes: Emergence is looking to be an interesting prospect. Its gameplay is fairly basic of the run and gun, point and shoot school of design, and given that it’s an old franchise coming back, I think many people like the game for that. However there are plenty of areas where it could be better. The AI is pretty basic: It works, but it doesn’t really do anything particularly clever or interesting… but all in all it’s fun for a few hours.

The storyline is pretty interesting, not that it’s the best storyline, but that the episodic approach feels fresh. Throwing you into a bad situation from the off, as Elexis and ‘the guy with a beard’ inject you with something, makes for a great introduction to Jessica as she comes in kicking ass to save you, leaving you trying to work out what the hell you’ve been stuck with. This plot is the focus of the first episode, but you can tell there’s much more going on. You were up to something before you got caught and injected, and a later episode is apparently going to cover that period of time.

The game ends on a slight cliffhanger, and uses its ‘next time on Sin Episodes’ trailer at the end, to show the resolution of that cliffhanger, as well as setting up where the story goes from there. It’s a great mechanic, familiar and yet new… and I’m confident it’s one that people are going to get used to.

If Sin Episodes went on as it was for another 10 or so hours, I’d never bother to finish it. The sillyness of how late nineties the game design is would wear off, even as the game revels in it; posters saying such wonderful things as ‘Packing: When in doubt, use a crate’ and silly secrets that are marked by the Dopefish or the Ritual logo plastered on the wall.

So why is episodic different then?

Well, while logic might say ‘try it and if you think it’s not that great, give a pass on the next one’ that does the episodic model a big disservice. See, the game is out in people’s hands now. People are playing it, people are talking about it. The stats from the game are filtering back to Ritual. Which guns did they use… did they stop using lower guns when they got the better ones. Did they use the grenades? Did people all get stuck at the same parts?

If you finish a game you have a small group of play testers. Some studios don’t even really bother with outside play testers, and playing something work in progress over and over makes it hard to remember which bits are fun. One of the reasons Daikatana took so long is because at one point, they were just redesigning the levels because they were bored of them. Not that the old ones were broken, or anything, just that the people making it couldn’t stand to play through them again.

Ritual now have millions of play testers, and the real test of Sin Episodes is not in the first course at all. The first one was dumb fun, like a summer popcorn action movie, that got around its weaker parts with its tongue in cheek sense of humor. The real test is in the next episode. Not just in what they add, but what they change.

The episodic model, means that Ritual can partake in this venture with a lower initial cost, with a smaller development cycle, and then to get product into gamers hands to generate revenue for the next episode, but also to see how their design is working. If the next episode is just the same but with a couple more weapons and enemies, and some different levels, then they’ve wasted all that information, but if the next one addresses the complaints people have with this one, then Sin Episodes could really be something special.

Traditional game design, finish the entire game, and then see what your consumers think afterwards, doesn’t offer that. Nor does it let developers take the same kind of risks… again, less cost, less development time means that developers can afford to try something different. Sin Episodes may not seem to be ‘different’ but Ritual had been wanting to make a sequel to Sin for years. No publisher would touch it and they couldn’t afford to self finance the development.

The episodic model has allowed them to take a risk that they couldn’t otherwise have. I don’t want Sin to change its style. I don’t want it to come fully into this millennium, just for its AI to.

Will the complaints be addressed? Its hard to say, but another episodic series has already set a good example. Bone: Out of Boneville, was criticized for being too easy, too short, and too expensive. The design of Thorn, one of the main characters, and the voice actor voicing her was criticized. Most people didn’t like the action based minigame, but they loved the multi character branching dialogue system and wanted more of it.

Bone: The Great Cow Race addressed every single one of these complaints. It was cheaper, longer, had more complex puzzles, redesigned minigames, more branching multi character dialogues and a redesigned and revoiced Thorn.

Whether or not Bone is your type of game, it’s a strong advert for the strengths of the episodic design model. Adventure games are rare these days, but episodic let a small start up company get going. Now they have the Sam and Max license and a hopeful future. Gamers who invested (quite an accurate word to use) in the first Bone, were rewarded with a much improved follow up.

Episodic gaming improves the relationship between the developers and the gamers playing the game. It makes it much easier to find out what the people playing the game want and that is really the strongest benefit of all.

Valve debut their first episodic title today, and it looks set to be one of the best, and most widely sold, episodic franchises yet. Their opinions on episodic gaming go beyond just reactive game design and greater opportunity for risk taking. The Source engine that powered Half Life 2, was never meant to stand still. More like the Unreal engine than say, the Doom 3 engine, it was designed to be continually developed.

They weren’t happy with their rendition of HDR at the time Half Life 2 was drawing near release, so they scrapped it and started working on a new approach that they knew wouldn’t make it in time for Half Life 2’s launch. After perfecting HDR, they didn’t stop there, adding other features to the engine, and beginning to work on others.

Half Life 2’s episodes allow Valve to showcase these new technologies, bringing each engine advancement into each successive episode, and because they don’t have as much content to worry about, they can get the technology into gameplay faster. Source’s approach to HDR requires multiple versions of the same texture, and had it been discovered two thirds of the way through Half Life 2 they’d have had to go back and relight and retexture all the work they’d done to that point, something they likely wouldn’t have done. If they get motion blur working as episode 2 is nearing its end, it’ll likely show up in episode 3. It could also arguably reduce how long gamers have to wait for a hot new feature to show up playable.

Feature creep is another problem that lengthens game development cycles. Coming up with new stuff to add as you’re well into development, that then needs to be implemented back into the gameplay of everything you’ve come up with so far… The episodic model reduces the work required to add features, as well as limiting the impact of it. Chances are, you’ll already have product out there selling that people are already playing by the time you get that idea for an amazing new feature, and it doesn’t delay the start of revenue flow, or the time it takes for gamers to start enjoying your product, as both those will likely already be happening.

Episode 1 is trying something risky from a game design stand point too. AI team mates that are with you almost the entire time have never really been pulled off successfully before. Trying that for a shorter game is obviously easier… and if its successfully implemented and enjoyed by the people that play it, you can bet Valve will do it again.

So the strength of episodic gaming is multi facetted: You only have to buy what you want to. $15 to $20 for a short game three to five hours long and that’s triple A quality isn’t bad, when many full priced games come in at under 10 hours of gameplay. Shorter development cycles and cheaper development costs allow the developers to take greater risks, either in terms of innovative game design, or in terms of less popular genres or franchises that publishers would unlikely touch normally. The episodic approach allows developers to be reactive to what the people playing your series are saying they like and dislike, allowing them to shape the series to gamers tastes. Finally, it helps prevent games get stuck in development limbo by minimising the impact of feature creep.

The episodic idea isn’t really entirely new, nor that different to the shareware model of the late eighties and early nineties. However, the other titles that have taken the episodic approach, tended to be budget titles of much lower quality, and it’s only really now that we’re starting to see big name franchises, and big name studios, experimenting with the idea.

Of course, there are drawbacks to episodic gaming. Replaying the entire series could feel incongruous when faced with the first episode after having played the improved later episodes. Furthermore, the first episode has a much greater set up cost than later episodes, given that the engined needs to be licensed or built, the series planned out, and any other custom technologies that the series might need created. The first really needs to sell well for the developer to be able to continue, however great they might have been able to make the later episodes.

Then, the release is limited to either online broadband customers, or the developers are faced with paying over the odds for packaging and distribution since they make up a much higher percentage of a $20 than a $50 dollar one.

However, the success of these first major episodic franchises, will likely make or break the episodic model for the foreseeable future. If something with a major brand name like Half Life can’t sell by the episodic model, then it’s going to be a while before anything can. If Half Life 2 Episodes is a hit, it might convince gamers more skeptical of the approach to give another episodic series a shot.

I know the episodic approach is something that I’m really looking forward to following.