Anyone Wish Adventure Games Were NOT Episodic?
I kind of miss the old, huge, more open ended adventure games of the past.
I love this game, don't get me wrong, and I love Telltale, and I understand the episodic format is more successful in today's market, but surely I can't be the only one who misses the ability to explore the environment more.
Episodic adventure games just feel a bit to confined when u compare them to classics like the Monkey Islands or Kings Quests.
I mean, wouldn't it be cool to be able to go between time zones and accomplish different things a la Day of the Tentacle.
I love this game, don't get me wrong, and I love Telltale, and I understand the episodic format is more successful in today's market, but surely I can't be the only one who misses the ability to explore the environment more.
Episodic adventure games just feel a bit to confined when u compare them to classics like the Monkey Islands or Kings Quests.
I mean, wouldn't it be cool to be able to go between time zones and accomplish different things a la Day of the Tentacle.
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Telltale does episodic gaming correct and I would not want them to change it any other way.
Unless the puzzles were more difficult to figure out.
If you enjoy waiting this much, maybe you want to do the shopping for me?
The perfect adventure is a epic one and non episodic.
Episodic adventures can be fun as well but so far in real they've always had their issues, limited puzzle design, living in a corridor world, all the waiting, ...
But maybe that is because I tend to wait until their price drops to around the amount telltale charges :P
(With an exception for Simon the Sorcerer 5 as I just like that series.. Let's hope there will be a part 6)
But with episodic games you get to play earlier..and you have the nice month long discussions of the chapters
If you talk about this thread being in Telltale forums, why not?
I feel like episodic gaming and full releases have just a little difference between them and it's present only during the release time. Episodes tick people off since it's hard to wait for the next episode and they're mostly shorter than expected, but when the final episode gets released it's the same with any other game.
There is one more difference though, which applies to episodic ADVENTURE games. Every episode is set in different scenes from the previous one, so some scenes seen in the previous episode are not present and new ones are added. When new puzzles and new items corresponding to those are added, there is no way for you to try the item in a scene seen in an earlier episode (or an episode that's going to come later), which always limits your playground and the game is easier to be solved. I mean, remember the time playing Hit the Road for the first time. SO MANY PLACES TO GO and puzzles are generally so absurd, half of the time you just go walk around EVERYWHERE and try to make logic from everything you see.
Well I do agree with you that it's cool we can't finish it all at once.
That said, I think it takes a relatively shorter amount of time to finish when in episodic format. Since there are less options, its quicker to find the right one, and this reduces the time.
So 10 episodic hours, may translate to about a 6-8 hour non-episodic.
Oh, and this is definitely the right place to talk about it.
This is a topic about Back to the Future the video game, why wouldn't it be.
You don't have to see this as an insult to Telltale, but just a comment on the positives of non-episodic releases, we can't forget all those positives we are missing out on you know.
I'd just like to seem them do a full release, that's all.
Charge 30 instead of 25 if it is a money issue.
It also gives us all a chance to discuss theories of what might happen later
The thing is, streamlining in adventure games is not a bad thing. When adventure games have a linear story and a pretty linear course of actions (not to mention most adventure games don't have ANY alternate solutions to puzzles), the open-ended world stuff is kind of a bad and frustrating thing.
Let's take Sam & Max: Hit the Road. I like the humor in it, I like the graphics, but I don't like it as an adventure game. Basically what it's doing is giving you all these places to go, all these abstract goals which you have to reach by some abstract and bizarre logic, and... it kinda sucks. And for all it's open-worldiness, it's a very linear game with linear puzzles, which makes it even harder. It becomes better near the end when you have a more straight set of goals (those four totems which you can complete in any order) and a bigger understanding of what you should do, instead of trying everything with everything.
Now, Secret of Monkey Island, for example. I must say, my favorite chapter in the Secret of Monkey Island is the second one. But, I would like to say that, unlike S&M, SoMI's Melee Island is a very well designed open world stuff. Not only it gives you straight goals to the beginning, you can complete them in any order you want, meaning if you get stuck in one line of actions then you can complete the other one while thinking about what to do with the first, and so on. It has the same beginning and the same end to the chapter, so the story itself is effectively linear, and the puzzle solutions themselves are too, but since the player has more things to do and to explore and to talk about, it never really gets dull or boring or frustrating - everything feels natural and the player is almost always allowed to progress, instead of just getting stuck for so long that in the end he is forced to use everything with everything (and there's A LOT of stuff to use and stuff to use with), and has more control of things - he can get to the ending of the chapter any way he wants instead of a certain way. Which is the exact reason I don't like Monkey Island in SoMI, because it's essentially the opposite of the Melee Island's design.
So, if it's not designed well, the open world stuff, places to explore and stuff are more of a chore than a good thing. On the other hand, if not designed well, a more streamlined experience is bad too. So, there's really no 'better' or 'worse' in the more open-worlded retail adventure games or more streamlined episodic - it's the matter of how they implement it in their respective fields.
This. Probably the best argument _for_ episodic adventures.
BUt yeah, Telltale isnt big enough yet to invest 1-2 years in a game sadly
A future of episodic games from other companies would make me very sad.
And i sure pray that Valve will stick with full lenght games again, its not fun getting a short halflife adventure, i rather wait 5 years and get a full Halflife 3, where i can game for 20-30hours.
Torin's Passage (Al Lowe's more family friendly game) was basically multiple episodes in one game as well. If Torin's Passage was released today as a five episode game and released the prologue as a free demo, I would gladly pay $49.95 for the 'season'.
To be honest Torin's Passage was my favorite Sierra game and I wish GoG had Al Lowe's Sierra games in their store. (I can get the King's Quest, Space Quest, and Gabriel Knight games, but not Quest for Glory or Leisure Suit Larry & Freddy Pharkas.)
I prefer them that way... but sadly there are not many adventure games worth playing out there now a days.. there are some but not many.
I think both formats, big box retail style and episodic, provide their own set of advantages and drawbacks. Someone who prefers one or the other strongly may exist, but I don't think either is inherently inferior and I'd be upset to see either completely disappear.
The open-endedness of Monkey Island 2 relative to the new ones, or Sam and Max relative to the new ones is hard to deny.
If you don't like all the waiting between the episodes, then just don't play any of them until the finale comes out
I did that with most of sam and max season 3... :rolleyes:
I like linear games as much as the next guy... but i would like to see an episode where more than just 2 or 3 of the episodes puzzle chains are playable at the same time
Their last one was reality 2.0, which was a really well done open ended story
I do love the TTG games... but I can not help but think they would be a lot better if they were not so limited.
Okay on the typical release date downloads probably slow down, so it might come down to an extra hour.
But who cares?
If they double or triple the size, I just know that I will get a better end product and won't mind the longer download time a bit.
Sure a few years ago that would have been a big deal, but today we have hundreds of gigs of free disk space and our download speed is only limited by the speed telltale can deliver. (Which isn't too slow, even on release days)
Or they could make something like a season base package.
A download giving you all the standard models and phrases that will be used in every episode...so the actual episodes can contain more stuff that is made especially for this episode, and so give us slightly bigger episodes.
(Or at least episodes that seem to be bigger as the actual game content probably won#t change much)
Just as a note, they are fully capable for making the games longer. It's just when you're budgeting a game, you have to make note of how long it will be as well because longer time = more content = more expensive for them to produce.
And if they can actually increase play time, I would be willing to pay more.
(As a rule of thumb I expect an hour of play time per Euro spent)
But for the option with a base package, they wouldn't really create more, just release stuff in a different order, so the game world already looks big in the first episode..even if the script for some of these locations might be minimalistic as there isn't any real action going on at those locations right now.
The main point is to make the game world look bigger right from the start.
The overall work will remain the same, the only thing changing is when you get certain models
Take a look at their previous games, and the improvement one can see in between episodes. SBCG4AP is probably a fantastic example, with the sharp change in enjoyable gameplay from Homestar Ruiner to Strong Badia The Free.
So, while it does frustrate me a little, it's a good sort of frustration, building up anticipation so we enjoy it that much more when it comes out, because as it comes out, it will get better and better.
While I like both, the non-episodic full adventure games I played recently (Runaway 2, A Vampyre Tale, Jack Keane) just don't have the level of quality a TTG-game has, which is sad
Looking forward to the next episode of BTTF, and for Tales of Monkey Island to get real cheap so I can buy it *again - long story (stupid PS3 account). Never did get to play the last ep for it =/
But back on topic, yes.. this is a cool idea.. or even double long episodes. The episodes for me are a tad bit short, especially this first BTTF one. It was great tho!
Telltale have found a business model that works for them. The old adventure games were great but they died because not enough people played them. We can say the old games were superior but it's not really fair on the developers to say we wish for those rather than episodic games. If there was a market for them they'd still exist.
http://www.adventuregamers.com/
Telltale are not the only kids on the block.
I have a simple solution for this. We hunt down and shoot every human being who doesn't play full length adventure games. The more we shoot, the more the market for them will grow, and then full length adventure games will return and the rest of us can be happy.
But the market share would grow!
Otherwise, Sam & Max Season 3 was my first brush with episodic gaming and it sounded strange at first but I thought the way it was presented was absolutely superb. The wild twists and mc narration left me excited at the end of every ep for the next month and coming episode. As far as the other seasons I've played since, I find myself more relieved that the game is in portions rather than a big chunk because it is a little less overwhelming. I kno that isn't too old school but honestly I was too young to have the nerve to figure out a lot of the bigger adventure games at the time they were being released.
As for Telltale doing episodic - when I got my first game from them (ToMI) I was suprised at how well the episodic format worked. Instead of waiting in excitement for the release date of a game, I (and many others) had been waiting 10 years for, I spent about half a year waiting in excitement for each new chapter. I think it really boosted my experience of the game. I didn't quite get that same experience from Sam and Max season 1 & 2 because they were already released and I was able to follow one episode after the other. The games were brilliant (of course), but the excitement of waiting to play it was a little short lived as I didn't need to wait the month, but instead a few minutes as it downloaded. Not enough time to build up the same anticipation I had for Tales.
So, yeah. I think Telltale should continue episodic. Episodic is good.
Take Secret of Monkey Island. In every chapter you are required to pick up every item you need at that moment, and are mostly required to use all items you need from that point. Only in rare instances you take along items from a previous chapter. You are never left with the confusion of items you actually don't need at that moment.
You can even compare it to Tales of Monkey Island. At several points in the game for convenient reasons Guybrush loses part of the inventory at the beginning of the chapter you actually don't need. Take for example the Pyrite Parrot.
So, even though the episodic games don't look all too big, they actually help the flow in games. You see, the problem with adventure games is that they often are too hard. Sometimes the puzzles don't even make sense. At all. It doesn't occur that often, but still. With an inventory as large as the screen can be filled with, you are bound to get people confused. At this point, the game won't be so much as a puzzle as it is a trial-and-error game, not unlike the old Sierra games, only without the death game over stuff.
And Telltale is trying to get more people into adventure games, not just the ones who grew up and loved these sort of games. I mean, with Back to the Future, they don't just cater to us gamers. They have to please a whole fanbase.
And there's a difference between the fanbase of HomestarRunner.com and Back to the Future. The H*R fans are generally gamers. They even played thy Dungeonman series or Peasant Quest, so you can adjust the difficulty to the mindset of the fans here. Telltale didn't need to necessarily make the puzzles easier. With Back to the Future, this is different. Fans here play the game to get immersed in the world of Hill Valley.
Each episode allows Telltale to crank up the difficulty, so adding a tonload of inventory items you actually don't need from a certain point onwards would be confusing to a lot of non-gamers. Making it episodic helps in removing the confusion here.
However, there are certainly problems associated with the episodic format, yes, even in Telltale's episodes. Often, they don't have that same quality in all areas that the classic full adventure games had. And (I've said this thrice, or perhaps four times, and I'll say it again) almost all of the problems associated with Telltale's episodes could be fixed if only they we're released on a bi-monthly basis.
However I'd like to see branching story paths or even episodes where choices you make can lead to whole different puzzles/outcomes/episodes. It would be nice to have a adventure game where your choices effect the game in different ways.
This is what I originally expected when I got my first DVD from them. It would be nice, but I'm happy with it the way it is too.