The most controversial or divisive talk at DICE 2012 was held by EA senior CG supervisor TJ Gaida. His session was called “Nonlinear Story Telling: Crafting a New Genre” and it had one of the most heated post-panel Q&A sessions. Gaida was pushing episodic gaming as the future, making comparisons to the episodic nature of television. He got off to a rough start by using Fight Night Champion as an example. I love the Fight Night series and talk to a lot of hardcore boxing fans that love it, but we couldn’t care less about the game’s story. It was just a poor choice to illustrate a point about story.
Gaida went on to tell the crowd how simple and easy it was to make games episodic. This didn’t go over too well with the audience. I distinctly recall a gentleman from one of the major console companies blurting out, “This guy has no idea what he’s talking about.” The Q&A session at the end was an all-star interrogation of people claiming that episodic gaming is anything but easy and looking for examples of successes. Insomniac Games CEO Ted Price, Schell Games CEO Jesse Schell, and SMU Guildhall executive director Peter Raad provided some interesting counterpoints to Gaida’s presentation. It was certainly one of the most heated and interesting discussions at DICE 2012.
Check out the video above and let me know if you’re on Team Gaida or…uh…Team Everyone Else. *joke* Seriously though, I do believe that episodic games have a future, but I also believe that it’s extremely difficult and there are a lot of unknown factors. Aside from Telltale Games, I don’t know anyone else that’s doing well with episodic games and it’s not like Telltale is a huge company. What kind of future do you see for episodic gaming?
First off, upon reading the phrase " non-linear story telling", I immeadiately thought of David Lynch, Pulp Fiction, and Memento. These films are great in doses, but they are easy to screw up and if all movies were like that, I probably wouldn't like movies.
As for episodic gaming, I would raise that any franchise with at least 3 titles is episodic. But giving you dose by dose of a game like Fight Night just seems tedious and uninteresting. More so than that, it seems like a way to milk even more money out of the consumer. In which case, it doesn't surprise me that EA would come up with it.
My first guess would have been Activision, but EA is definitely second.
TJ was talking about episodic in the sense of a 13/26-episode television season being analogous to a 5/7-episode game.
I think he's right. Games will be sold in chapters to prevent used sales and because of the pitiful broadband infrastructure and usage limits.
Do you think games have to be designed and written differently? Ted Price asked for an example of someone doing this well and TJ didn't have one.
Wasn't Fable 2 designed that way? It was episodic and later sold that way I believe.Any game that comprises of Acts or Chapters can be done this way.A multiplayer game like CoD loses lots of value in this system though. They'd maybe sell the single player to 5% of the ppl who buy the multiplayer.Sent from my iPhone 4
I don't recall Fable being sold that way. The main game always cost more than the DLC afaik.
Of course games divided into acts or chapters could be sold this way, but acts or chapters don't have the ham-fisted hooks found in TV shows. Will gamers buy this way? What happens if a gamer gets stuck? Jesse brought up the example of, "Viewers don't get stuck on an episode of House and stop watching."
The general feeling is that it isn't a matter of simply selling games by acts of chapters. The design and writing have to be different. The marketing has to be very different. The vibe I got from several developers in attendance is that this is a big challenge.
MMOs are sold this way if you think about it. The sub pays for servers, mods, and content.I thought Fable was sold that way excluding the DLC. I'll have to look it up.What do you mean stuck? I dont think design and story have to be modified drastically honestly. Cliffhangers aren't hard and abilities or whatever are increased or augmented later in the new chapters.Sent from my iPhone 4
MMOs are an entirely different beast.
Stuck as in gamers can get stuck during a "chapter" of a game and lose interest.
Watch the end of the panel when you have a chance to see where developers are coming from. None of the people I spoke with after the panel felt that this is an easy undertaking.
Fable 2 was offered up episodically on XBOX Live after it's initial release.
Five words for Team Gaida:
Half Life 2: Episode 3
-M
Alan Wake's an example of a game that SHOULD have had this model. it was already built that way, they could have just cut it up into little doses like a weekly TV series. Might have kept my interest longer that way, as I got bored with it just blowing directly through it.