Another tidbit from CVG's upcoming interview with Valve's Doug Lombardi reveals how the whole episodic thing sort of bit them all in the ***.
CVG promises us that the full interview will be released this weekend. Stay tuned!
The notion of the word 'episode' conjures up this idea of television where you get something new every week. And people say 'we thought that episodic meant we were going to get something new every six months or every year'.
I think a lot of folks in the games industry saw the same problem that we did with Half Life 2 in that making a 20-hour game with rich graphics, story etc. is a really expensive proposition both in time and money.
And some have started making games about the same length as Episode II, but they haven't changed what they call it, and they haven't change the price.
In a way you're charging people $50 but they're only getting $18 worth out of it - that's not necessarily the best way to go. But if you look at something like Portal, it's a five hour game and although I haven't done a qualified study, the number of people I've spoken to that finished the game feels like a much higher percent.
So I think we tried to be a bit more honest about it, and maybe we chose the wrong word in 'episode' in that it conjured up this TV analogy.
I think a lot of folks in the games industry saw the same problem that we did with Half Life 2 in that making a 20-hour game with rich graphics, story etc. is a really expensive proposition both in time and money.
And some have started making games about the same length as Episode II, but they haven't changed what they call it, and they haven't change the price.
In a way you're charging people $50 but they're only getting $18 worth out of it - that's not necessarily the best way to go. But if you look at something like Portal, it's a five hour game and although I haven't done a qualified study, the number of people I've spoken to that finished the game feels like a much higher percent.
So I think we tried to be a bit more honest about it, and maybe we chose the wrong word in 'episode' in that it conjured up this TV analogy.
CVG promises us that the full interview will be released this weekend. Stay tuned!