Lunchtime Discussion: Episodes

I watch a lot of TV, although not in the intended format. Generally I watch a TV show in one big chunk once it’s out on DVD, I hate waiting between episodes to see how the story continues. That’s just how I am, I have absolutely no patience with these things; in fact I have so little patience that I’ll happily read spoilers just to see how a cliffhanger resolves.

The weird thing is I’m completely in favour of episodic content in games, providing a series of bite-size chunks of gaming goodness in monthly or bi-monthly succession seems to work pretty well in my opinion. A lot of this depends on the size of each episode in the game’s “season”; too long and they take too much time to develop and play ruining the whole episodic concept, too short and they don’t really seem worth the time and money you need to invest in the latest episode.

Telltale are clearly the kings of episodic gaming, they always seem to nail the price point and release schedule of their games spot on, and they make brilliantly funny games as well. All of these factors combine to make them the kings of episodic gaming, producing brilliant games that are just the right size to leave you begging for more.

Sadly there are those that misappropriate the term ‘episodic’, notably Valve. The time between Episode 1 and 2 was about a year and a quarter, which is hardly episodic. You wouldn’t say that FIFA is an episodic series, and it’s only on a yearly release schedule. However compared to the long wait for the third episode of Valve’s trilogy, the gap between the first two episodes was positively tiny.

Hopefully we’ll actually see the final episode one day, but even if we do Valve are hardly producing an episodic series. Maybe they just need to use a different description for the series, because episodic is just plain wrong.

What are your thoughts on episodic gaming? Does it make a nice change to more traditional releases? Or is the phrase misappropriated so often as to make it worthless?