The episodic experiment began in mid-2006 with Half-Life 2: Episode One and SiN: Episodes - Emergence. Grand stories were told about how episodic gaming would mark a major shift in the way games are developed and delivered. All fine and dandy, but a year and a half since all the grand posing, where exactly do we stand?

WARNING (and Disclaimer): Personal opinions, long sentences and an abrupt ending to follow!

Sin Episodes had a luke-warm reception, and not much has been heard about it since. Half-Life 2: Episode One received rave reviews and was followed up by the stellar Episode Two. The series has served as a shining beacon for everything episodic, with both the Episodes marked by water-tight gameplay, innovations in some form or the other and dramatic scripted events that far surpassed the already excellent Half-Life 2 in depth and quality. Other than that, there’s the Sam & Max series. This one has not played a single episode from the series yet (apologise!) but reviews and word-of-mouth suggest it’s doing pretty well.

There are a few other relatively less-well-known (admittedly, to yours truly) episodic projects as one is informed by this Wikipedia article. But that’s that. All the hullaballoo seems to have died down, and for all commercial intents and purposes, Valve seems to be the only large developer who’s (was?) seriously interested in the episodic format. So what went wrong?

Episodic gaming, though its advantages are widely acknowledged and adequately proven by the Half-Life episodes, was beset with numerous handicaps at the very outset. Number one, is the most well known reason - distribution. Retail likes to have a single title that makes a major splash, hordes all the promotion, pays for its shelf space and then makes way for the next behemoth. Episodes on the other hand split the cake into much smaller bites. While that’s great for developers and gamers alike, it’s not so great for shelf-space. Imagine two value titles that span 6 hours each, competing with a 50/60$ blockbuster spanning 10-15 hours. No prizes for guessing the winner.

Which is where digital distribution comes in. Steam has been picking up st..er..momentum lately, with major publishers and developers releasing older hits, and even spanking new demos over Valve’s digital distribution platform. With Community features and the introduced-with-The-Orange-Box Achievements, Steam looks poised to take over (if it hasn’t already) as the digital platform of choice on the PC. The incredible success of smaller games that would have otherwise passed under the radar also makes Steam an attractive “Do’h obvious” choice for releasing niche experimental titles, including those that toy with the idea of going episodic.

This was, however, not the case about a year ago when the episodic hullaballoo began. Steam was great, yes, and had begun to grow out of the initial negative press and forum-talk. But third-party publishers still weren’t looking at Steam as seriously as they do now. At that point, therefore, there was no legitimate platform that could claim to take episodic games to the masses without causing too much trouble to too many people. All those smiles at Valve were not quite as infectious as they could have been, and here we are with a not-too-stellar bunch of games-gone-episodic.

Then - problem number one point five - there is the question of multi-platform games. These days almost any game made with the mass-market in mind is developed from the ground-up for all the three major platforms (Wii? Hm. Still sometime before we count that in), or ported across eventually. For a major publisher to be interested in episodic delivery, the logic would have to work on the 360 and the PS3 as well. While both have digital marketplaces, you are more likely to find a grammatical error in the OED than a full-length game for download. In the console space, retail ain’t huge. It’s EVERYTHING! And that’s a hell of a lot of inertia to get over.

One way to keep retail happy and keep digital distribution in its place (merely as another excuse for lazy gamers to stay put in those now-sagging couches), is packages like The Orange Box. This method is already in use and works quite well for ‘platinum boxes’ - basically, the second phase of sales. Indeed, The Orange Box itself justifies its 50$ price-tag by bundling in Half-Life 2 and Episode One - both games most sensitive, intelligent (some stupid, agreed) human beings already own. How well would this model work for launching brand new titles? There are all kinds of issues and questions here. What kind of games go into a package, to make it attractive enough for a customer to be willing to shell out 50$? How can one expect the development life-cycles of all the games in a package to follow a reasonably parallel schedule? If game X1 were bundled with Y1 in package 1, and after six months game X2 gets bundled with Z1 (if in the feedback, Y1 failed) in package 2, would people still buy it? It’s no doubt very early to be asking such questions, but that is how complicated the business could get.

Even if J.J. Abrams switches from gobbledygook to English and all delivery issues are overcome (we haven’t even LOOKED at connectivity and bandwidth issues with digital distribution!), there’s the HUGE problem - numero duo - of content. It’s almost - infact, practically - the difference between making a movie, versus a TV series. Some, in fact most, games are just not suited to the episodic format. Only so many games can boast of a genuine story arc that can be spread out like rich, creamy butter (yum!) over several teensy helpings. The Half-Life episodes worked, because Half-Life 2 worked! Without the epic scale set by the Half-Life and Half-Life 2 games, the episodes wouldn’t have had a large canvas to draw on, and would NEVER have been excused for the numerous delays. Besides, the nature of the Half-Life experience - with gradual revelation of story points filled in with engaging gameplay - perfectly suited the episodic format. Games that are planned to be episodic have to be gripping from the get-go, and have to be able to compress engaging gameplay and an epic scale right into the first episode. Every subsequent episode, while carrying the story arc forward, must also extend it to support future episodes, much like the beloved Heroes TV series - which, interestingly, Valve founder Gabe Newell referred to in an interview. That can be INCREDIBLY hard to accomplish, and you could go so far as to say that the episodic experiment has worked with Half-Life simply because of the quality of the creative teams at Valve.

The other kind of episodic games don’t really have an epic storyline, but feature memorable recurring characters that can make each episode stand up on its own, much like a sitcom. Case in point, Sam & Max. This model of episodic gaming is far more likely to find wide acceptance among developers and audiences alike, simply because of its sustainability. Such games would require an initial investment into character development and establishing the series formula. But then again, you can count the number of memorable characters in video-games on your fingers…and maybe your toes and nose. While this format holds the most promise in terms of the direction episodic gaming could take, it again, is a niche category that involves using innovative game design and/or characters to get audiences to keep coming back for more.

If you look around for other examples of the ‘establish formula and exploit’ model, there is The Sims (2, to be precise) which has had enough expansion packs and made enough money for Electronic Arts to run a small country for decades. Now we’re not really talking about episodic content here, but expansion packs which are more investor-pleasing after-thoughts than pre-planned delivery modes for all the gameplay options possible within a game. But in the absence of true episodic success stories other than Half-Life 2 (on the epic scene), that’s all we got. Then there’s Grand Theft Auto IV, that promises an additional two episodes, once the game releases. There’s always the hypothetical possibility of more, especially for a game like GTA where there are innumerable opportunities for creating newer and fresher challenges and things-to-do.

Both the examples - and indeed, Half-Life 2 - however, involve a monolithic blockbuster setting the pace and tone for the smaller servings to come later. For episodic games to grow out of this hand-holding phase, developers would have to take inspiration - if not entirely lift concepts - from commercially successful TV series like Heroes and LOST. Okay, maybe you could count LOST out. Not too many gamers would be interested in letting their kids find out what everything in that game-they-played-when-they-got-their-first-jobs was all about. But more on that later. Getting back to the point, in an ideal world, investing in episodic gaming is a lot less riskier than a monolith. But then, the immediate distribution headaches counterbalance the long-term gains so well, at this point the kicks in episodic gaming lie solely on the creative side. Given the industry is ruled by traditionally risk-phobic publicly owned companies, creative incentives are not even remotely likely to get people’s palms itching. And after all, why tinker with a model that works? (has…till now)

For people to sit up and take notice (they might be already, with the success of the Half-Life 2 Episodes, particularly Episode Two), a game designed entirely with episodic delivery on mind needs to make a humongoromous splash; which essentially is a chicken-and-egg scenario! One can only hope for someone pulling a Valve (as in, how they did in 1998) on our collective surprised souls. Till then, let’s just grab a blanket and wait for Episode Three, shall we?

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• Neelesh Says:
  November 6th, 2007 at 6:17 pm

  This whole bit on episodic gaming started way before Sin episodes and Half life 2, check out this now dysfunctional company called ARUSH entertainment they pioneered this entire concept long ago, another comapny wich PaUL Steed worked with was also involved with episodic content, and they had released a number of games between the years 2000 and 2002, If memory serves me right Duke Nukem Manhattan(ARUSH) project was also supposed to be eposodic in nature after completing the bunch of single player levels they had initially decided to add on more content and release an episode titled Endangered species, but it got cancelled midway, Betty Bad is another one of these games whgich was supposed to be episodic in nature but ended up being just one game, Feeding Chloe and Monkey Brains(A game similar to Abe oddyssey) was also a part of this “Episodic bunch”…episodic gaming is all set to gain momentum with the advent of consoles and high speed connections as you have already pointed out…and Vijay I actually enjoyed playing Halo 3 check out my review on why I did so….

• Reginald Miranda Says:
  November 7th, 2007 at 9:16 pm

  Interesting article, by everything thats unholy! you’ve made a very interesting point with expansion packs. I never really thought of it this way before, but dont expansion packs do pretty much what episodic gaming does anyway?

  There’s alot of great games out there that have massive stories which could fit the episodic content distribution model. StarCraft and Diablo would easily qualify. Silent Hill origins does this to some extent too, if im not mistaken.

  But yeah, I agree that while the concept is good, it needs to follow on the back of a strong story. So no new points here, basically, i’m just agreeing with you.

• Dev Kanchen Says:
  November 12th, 2007 at 8:13 pm

  Been offline for a week! Anyhoo.

  Hey Neelesh, thanks for adding all the necessary data that was missing…and basically completing the article! I am a complete lazy bum when it comes to research, hence the disclaimer at the top of the page.

  Massive..that’s something I was thinking about for a while. Does the storyline/setting JUST have to be massive or something more/less? Is being able to establish a major story checkpoint/cliff-hanger in every episode an added requirement/complication or would that happen by default when a story is adapted to the episodic format? I haven’t really been able to think too deep on this, which is why I suggested sit-coms are probably the best way to go and left it at that. Anyhow.

• Reginald Miranda Says:
  November 12th, 2007 at 8:49 pm

  hear hear!