I'm a huge fan of The Walking Dead Season 1, by TellTale. Haven't gotten around to play Season 2 yet. Now, a great part of why I think that game was as successful as it was (becoming a critical darling, as well as very well liked by the general public) is the episodic model it took. This has a couple huge benefits: It allows the team to concentrate on one particular episode, and make it as good as possible. Allowing the production of the game to be spread out this way makes each episode be as strong as possible. More importantly, it also allows the team to listen to criticism and improve future episodes. The Walking Dead changed a lot towards the later episodes, removing many of the puzzle elements that people found didn't work in early episodes and focusing more on the story, which, in my opinion at least, made the three last episodes of that game a lot stronger than the first two.
However, I've also witnessed people expressing displeasure over this model. Initially, I chalked it down to impatient people not being able to wait for the next episode to come out. However, after playing The Wolf Among Us, I realized that these objections hold more value than I thought. Wolf Among Us felt like a game that was very much hampered by the episodic model. I played it when the whole thing came out, and you could see the writers struggling with the constraints of having to put out discrete episodes with several months of waiting. Practically every episode ends on a dramatic cliffhanger, obviously to bring up hype for the next one, but said cliffhanger is often revealed to be irrelevant to the overall plot before the next episode's prologue is over. They also seem to feel the need to build each episode to stand a lot more on its own than it needs to when you see the whole game as an overall experience. At least once an episode you're forced into a fight that feels like the token action moment of the episode, and it messes with the story's pacing. Not to mention the "next time on..." and "previously on..." sections lining the ends and starts of every episode in both Telltale's series that grind the story to an absolute halt.
This is not even mentioning the Half Life issue of an episode seemingly not ever coming out (after a cliffhanger ending, no less), or the benefits that more bite-sized experiences can be for people who might not have real time to game. I feel quite conflicted about the benefits and drawbacks of this particular model of gaming distribution, and so, I run to the internet. What do you, fine people of the Escapist think about this stuff? Is episodic gaming beneficial? Should the model be thrown away? And, most importantly, why?
However, I've also witnessed people expressing displeasure over this model. Initially, I chalked it down to impatient people not being able to wait for the next episode to come out. However, after playing The Wolf Among Us, I realized that these objections hold more value than I thought. Wolf Among Us felt like a game that was very much hampered by the episodic model. I played it when the whole thing came out, and you could see the writers struggling with the constraints of having to put out discrete episodes with several months of waiting. Practically every episode ends on a dramatic cliffhanger, obviously to bring up hype for the next one, but said cliffhanger is often revealed to be irrelevant to the overall plot before the next episode's prologue is over. They also seem to feel the need to build each episode to stand a lot more on its own than it needs to when you see the whole game as an overall experience. At least once an episode you're forced into a fight that feels like the token action moment of the episode, and it messes with the story's pacing. Not to mention the "next time on..." and "previously on..." sections lining the ends and starts of every episode in both Telltale's series that grind the story to an absolute halt.
This is not even mentioning the Half Life issue of an episode seemingly not ever coming out (after a cliffhanger ending, no less), or the benefits that more bite-sized experiences can be for people who might not have real time to game. I feel quite conflicted about the benefits and drawbacks of this particular model of gaming distribution, and so, I run to the internet. What do you, fine people of the Escapist think about this stuff? Is episodic gaming beneficial? Should the model be thrown away? And, most importantly, why?
