|
|
Valve may reconsider episodic games
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 26th September 2007
After Half-Life: Episode 3, gamers will have a say in the future format of the series.
My opinion on episodic games has been well known for a while now, but one thing nobody has ever really clarified is just what the honchos at Valve think of how episodic gaming is working out.
Do the advantages of staying closer to evolving tech and to the consumer’s desires win out over the disadvantages of a constant pressure on developers and more strict release schedules?
In a recent comment to CVG, Gabe Newell has cleared that up just a little and has said that, if the market wishes, Valve may reconsider continuing with episodic games after Half-Life: Episode 3.
"I think what we really want to do is have a couple of examples out there - Episode One, and how long it was to play and how long it took to develop, Episode Two, Portal and TF2 and then the third part of the trilogy; and then sit down with the community and say, 'OK, so what do you want?"
With any luck then, those who hate episodes won't have long to wait until the idea gets canned. The Orange Box is out in a few weeks and, judging by our recent hands-on preview of Portal, the package is shaping up nicely.
Personally, I think episodic gaming is a great thing but it just isn't well suited to the FPS genre due to the traditionally long development cycles. What do you think? Let us know in the forums.
Related articles on bit-tech.net
Comments (35)Stats: 0.045 seconds
The problem I've got is that there's still a long wait between episodes. 1½ years to develop a 6 hour(ish) game seems a bit too long imo...especially since most of the work had already been done (engine, character models etc).
What's the estimated play time of Episode 2 then? I'm assuming it'll be similar to Ep1?
Fully in agreement. For time taken on each episode, and the TCO greater than that of a single game, I don't really like episodic content - I can see why people might, but I don't. And that isn't even taking into account the possibility that if one episode is unpopular, that the whole thing gets canned.
Loving the episodes so far, HL2 was an utter anticlimax being a whole 4 hours of gameplay, with episodes each are this sort length along with all the other goodies like engine upgrades (multithreaded source) that will hopefully allow ep2 and/or ep3 todo some crazy stuff with physics and/or graphics.
After all SP games tend to have their place on my steam list, back to the 'normal' section once they're done, whereas the MP version that I would see as an extra (and excellent value - orange box) lives on to fulfill 'everyday' gameplay (TF2 is awesome, espcially in competative games)
When I first heard about episodic games, I thought 'Great! That means we can carry on with the story pretty soon!'. I envisaged that with the source engine done (lest we forget how long THAT took!), they could now bang out a couple of new hours of gameplay every couple of months, with maybe 6~10-ish in total. Very short, but frequent, like a TV show.
But rather than re-using the engine to extend the story, they're re-using the story to extend the engine! HDR lighting and fancy cinematic physics (or whatever it is coming up) are all very nice, but its the story and the freaking GAMEPLAY that I am bothered about!
Lets have HL3 as a proper game, please!
I hope after eps 3 they do go back to full games as even waiting 3-4 years is better than dripfeed delayed short pap
I really think I'd prefer them to just work on a full game. That way you'll have everything in one big awesome package, instead of having a 'fix' with episodes.
dragged out episode2 way too long I think they should have put all this time into hl3. I think their
intentions were good but just could not pull it off complete games are the way to go
Ok, you have to work on the storyline, but they must have worked out the whole universe in storytime by now since the HalfLife universe started a decade ago. Damn i'm getting way to old for this sh!t What i miss from the original HalfLife is the puzzle solving involved, or am i the only one who loved that? I say bring back the puzzles and do less shooting. This way it will take me more time to play the game to!
so the time between each episodic release is justified, and for $45ish, getting 3 games (2 are single player, ep2 is prolly 5-6 hours of play, and portal could be up to 10 hours of play! i rly dont know :-/. and tf2 is multiplayer, so it will last as long as you feel like playing it, and from playing the beta, its pretty awsome.)
the downside, the engine is still cruddy and flawed, and their just milking it really, the games are far too overpriced (we payed almost as much for E1 (and/or E2) as we did for HL2, and E1 didnt come with CSS, etc etc), and it still takes them forever to make them
The plot for the episodes was laid down as far back as Half-Life 2, it just had to be broken up in the natural places. Marc Laidlaw did it all.
Ep 2 is taking just as long to develop because the engine difficulties of making Source do open spaces and cinematic physics. Portal was finished a while back IIRC. It's TF2 and Ep2 which are slowing THAT down.
Ep 2 is going to be 5 hours maximum, the same as Episode 1 (which took me 3 1/2 hrs). Portal has been completed by FPS noobs (literally, mums who've never played a game took part in the testing) in under four hours.
That's $45 for maybe 8 hours of gameplay and TF2, which shouldn't have taken so damn long and was bundled in to make up value.
Bear in mind that in the time it took Ep2 to be made, a single guy called Garry made all of Garry's Mod and progressed it from a community mod in version 8 all the way to a retail product called GMod 10. Then amateur modders used that to make SWEPS and replicate all of Portal that they could in a mod, whilst also developing dozens of multiplayer game types. They did that in their spare time.
I'm not saying Valve are lazy or anything, but the don't fully understand what episodic means. It should be closer to 4 hours of gameplay every two or three months with just a single game that costs a proportionate amount. If 10-12 hours of HL2 cost £30 then Ep1 and 2 should cost about a tenner each and they should be regular, say 3 a year.
As it is, they cost closer to £15 at start and then drop in price very fast, are very short and take far too long to develop bearing in mind that most of the textures and engine work is already in place. A company the size of Valve should be able to do things faster, IMO.
They need to remember it was never the tech which pushed HL forwards (Hl1 was on the Quake 2 engine practically!), it was the story. Stop fiddling with the engine and give us more Freeman, more regularly.
You pay £50, and you get 1 episode everyone month/4weeks/whatever for a year, that would be quite fun :)
Unless I was getting a fixed amount of reliably good content, I'd never sign up to that. I doubt I'd do it even for Valve. They can't even deliver on current release dates, so I'm not risking cash.
ie, if it has been properly episodic as opposed to being expansions in all but name
They spent most of 10 years making HL1, at the end a lot of the staff decided they would retire/move to easier jobs instead of starting from scratch and grind away to make a sequel.
They then spent most of another 10 years making HL2, including building the team back up, making everything from scratch again.
After HL2 they decided they really didn't want to start from scratch, throw away the tools, engine they'd spent 10 years on and lose a part of the team again to start over and spend 10 years making HL3, so they went for the more relaxed option of making HL2 episodes where they would get to keep using the engine and tools they had, presumably they relaxed the staff hours and such at the same time - sort of a valve developer's semi-holiday if you will ;) (Where holiday means not having to work 16 hours a day to try and get something out anywhere near a release date)
For myself I'm susprised at the time numbers being thrown out, HL2 took me some 20 or so hours and Ep1 something like 6 (maybe 7/8) hours I think, though I am the sort of person that investigates every nook and cranny and sight-sees a bit along the way.
i agree with him
edit: just want to add, what about sin episodes? they were episodic and now they are gone.... can anyone make a game using that story and idea?
Unfortunately, since Ritual was bought out bu MumboJumbo it means the copyright is still owned but that the project will not be completed.
I'm sorry, but you're saying they stated work on HL1 in 1988? And they then started work on HL2 four years before HL1 was finished?
Looks like I've mis-remembered the dates, it's probably just that they reckoned that an all-new HL3 would take 10 years, after (having now looked it up) the first took them almost 3 years and the second 6 years. I'm fairly sure I remember the reasoning right though, including a lot of team members quitting after the first, including one of the co-founders/lead developers.
I agree with this.
Personally I really like the episodes. I don't want to see "hl3" on the same engine as hl2, that's not right. I want hl3 to come out in 2012, to be brand new, to be, once again, revolutionary in FPS, pushing the 3d world to its limits. I'm so fed up with manufacturers pretending to have produced a new game but it's just the old engine with a few extra features and slightly more progressed story line. (re: GTA which got more and more boring after GTAIII until it was unbearably bad).
If ep1 took you 3 hours you CLEARLY weren't playing it right.
They add bits to the engine, it's not like they're just pumping out maps with predefined AI and generic story lines. HDR? yeah... and new challenges models and textures.
If they gave you more freeman more regularly there would be nothing exciting and new and you would whine about it being bland and boring.. "too much of the same," etc. This is what I like about valve so much, they don't release crap, they have the stones to make us wait until they have finished something GOOD. Think about how much they scrapped from hl2 beta. Yeah, it wasn't good enough, so they made us wait. And guess what? It was amazing.
It is not possible to have a good game that comes out quickly and doesn't cost much. That's like asking for a new ferrari for £29,995 and you want to pick it up tomorrow.
As for the whole "releasing it regularly would make it less exciting" thing, well if that were true then it would be fairly indicative of a bad story and bad game. There are plenty of regular, timed and similar releases in all media (especially tv series and comics or books) that continue with the same limited budget and are still utterly enthralling. Have you watched Lost or Heroes?
For the record, I look in every nook and cranny too. I play my games to death, over and over again and with a great deal of attention. You don't want to know how long I spent on Deus Ex. As it is though, there's very little hidden extras in a game like HL and a lot of the story is actually told outside of the game and HL doesn't tell you a lot of the story at all (why are the combine here, what relation was Nihilanth to the combine, why is Gman not in Ep1, why are the vorts now free, etc). I know the answers to these questions, but a lot of it didn't come from the game.
In fact a lot of the extra stuff is hidden where everyone finds it easily anyway. The clipboards in Elis office and clicking again and again on the Vortigaunts and Barney.
The only thing I can think of that I had to go out of my way to find was the hidden vortigaunt in HL2 and even then he doesn't say anything new.
I spend ages admiring my games and I love HL to death - but I still did HL2 in 9-10 hours (2-3 hours short of the expected time, even on hard mode) and I still finished Ep1 in 3 hours, an hour shorter than most.
As for the textures and new models etc, a lot of that was just reused in Ep1. Ground textures, character anims etc are mostly the same. That's why there's only two new badguys (stalker and Zombine) and no new weapons to balance. With that in mind, the dev time should have been dramatically less.