Episodic gaming is a pretty big new thing here in the gaming world. Games like Telltale’s The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us have been heralded as some of the best cinematic gaming that we have seen… ever! Yet they are only released in 2 to 3 hour episodes, each one furthering the story a little bit more, eventually leading up to a big climax.
But cinematic games aren’t the only games that can be released episodically. For example, Killer Instinct , a fighting game, has just gone into “season 2.” These seasons differentiate between characters and what years they were released. In addition, they differentiate between which companies designed which characters, as the game started development at Double Helix, and is currently being developed by Iron Galaxy. Characters will come out every couple of months, allowing the gameplay to evolve as time goes on.
So what other games genres can be released episodically. Well, the upcoming Silent Hills may be an episodic release, if we can believe some of the teasers we have seen. We aren’t quite sure how the game is going to play, if there is going to be combat or action involved, but we can assume that the episodes would be broken up by parts of the story, and that items and equipment would carry over from one episode to the other. This probably would be a decent fit for most horror games, actually.
Look at The Evil Within . All of the action in this game is broken up into chapters. Each chapter takes a half hour to an hour to finish. Each chapter ends with a save point and most chapters begin with a chance for you to rest and upgrade your abilities. Imagine if, say, the game came out in packs of three chapters each. The chapter points break up the action anyway, which is kind of needed considering how difficult the game is. The gameplay experience would, essentially, be exactly the same, just spread out across several months.
There are plenty of games that have chapters like this that could probably be broken up into episodic releases. Action games like God of War use chapters a lot to break up the action. There’s no particular reason why the actions of Kratos can’t be broken up month by month.
Shooters like Call of Duty usually have chapters in their single player mode. Heck that would probably make shooter players happy. Imagine if you could purchase the multiplayer component of Call of Duty separate at a reduced price. Then, you can purchase the single-player separately. The single-player would come out in chapters, once with each map pack, giving you some more single-player to play every time you also get more multiplayer content. It also means that if you aren’t into the single-player you can ignore it all together and save some money.
Honestly, we should look into more the episodic format because it holds a lot of promise. Being able to develop games as they are released not only allows gamers to save money by abandoning the game early, but allows developers to respond to their fanbase as the game is created. It worked for Killer Instinct , it worked for Telltale, and it will probably work for a lot of other games as well.