A request from Telltale...
I will never play a game in episodes. In my opinion, to experience a game and enjoy it fully, one must play it consistently so that in the end it will have that epic feeling of accomplishment and appreciation towards the game.
Film director Quentin Tarantino once said that movies should be watched from start to finish with no pauses or interruptions. He said that the viewer and the movie are connected together with an umbilical cord, and that once interrupted, that cord snaps and the experience is degraded.
I see games in the same way. We all remember how amazing we felt playing through Sam and Max Hit the Road, the Monkey Island series, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle and so many more amazing adveture games. The story was consistent and we didn't have to wait a month to play the next segment.
I understand this is the business model Telltale games have chosen, and I respect that. Some people prefer a dose of entertainment every now and then, and don't view a game as a piece of art, but more like a TV show, which is fine (no one can argue that 24 or The Sopranos are not pieces of art, could they?).
What I do not understand is why when the season is over, Telltale won't distribute the game as one piece - connected together to create a full complete game. Not only would it attract the ones who dislike episodic content like myself, but it will also do the following:
1. Not clutter your Steam list with 6 additional icons per season.
2. You won't have to install, configure and play 6 times to complete a season.
3. The story will make more sense and the game will feel complete.
I hope someone at Telltale reads this and responds. I've talked to many people about that and they all agreed with me. A few fellas with OCD even mentioned they will buy the games twice - once when they come out as episodes to play immediately, a second time just to have all their eggs in one basket.
Film director Quentin Tarantino once said that movies should be watched from start to finish with no pauses or interruptions. He said that the viewer and the movie are connected together with an umbilical cord, and that once interrupted, that cord snaps and the experience is degraded.
I see games in the same way. We all remember how amazing we felt playing through Sam and Max Hit the Road, the Monkey Island series, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle and so many more amazing adveture games. The story was consistent and we didn't have to wait a month to play the next segment.
I understand this is the business model Telltale games have chosen, and I respect that. Some people prefer a dose of entertainment every now and then, and don't view a game as a piece of art, but more like a TV show, which is fine (no one can argue that 24 or The Sopranos are not pieces of art, could they?).
What I do not understand is why when the season is over, Telltale won't distribute the game as one piece - connected together to create a full complete game. Not only would it attract the ones who dislike episodic content like myself, but it will also do the following:
1. Not clutter your Steam list with 6 additional icons per season.
2. You won't have to install, configure and play 6 times to complete a season.
3. The story will make more sense and the game will feel complete.
I hope someone at Telltale reads this and responds. I've talked to many people about that and they all agreed with me. A few fellas with OCD even mentioned they will buy the games twice - once when they come out as episodes to play immediately, a second time just to have all their eggs in one basket.
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
I agree with what Quentin Tarantino says about watching a film, but would he say the same thing about a TV show, or a story deliberately built as a miniseries? He'd probably just tell you to not watch TV or miniseries because he's that guy.
As far as your OCD friends, as is always said, you and they are always welcome to wait until the episodes are all out, and play them back to back off the DVD or through the launcher, the same way some people choose to wait until a TV season is done before buying the DVD, or a season pass off of iTunes or Amazon.
If you buy the series from Telltale, as always, you get the collected DVD for free at the end of the run, and since BTTF also has a unified launcher in the TTG direct purchase version, that option is also available immediately upon the completion of the season.
I think it would be cool to be able to play some of the Telltale games back to back to back (notably Tales of Monkey Island), while others I think benefit strongly from remaining deliberately serialized (Sam & Max The Devil's Playhouse is clearly modeling old serialized adventure reels and 70s science fiction TV dramas as much as, or more than, it is looking at film and comics).
I don't know if the games would hold up structurally if we merely snipped the credit sequences off the beginning and end of each episode and stitched them together. I think in many cases the pacing would be weird, or we would have to remove a bunch of content (In the case of The Devil's Playhouse, every episode is bookended by a narrator/host character, like the Twilight Zone or Plan 9 from Outer Space, and if the games were run linearly without a deliberate break, those segments would all collide in an unappealing way). Also from a technical standpoint the games arent built so that we can literally toss all the files into one archive and have it work seamlessly. It wouldn't be anywhere near the work and time and cost of a full episode to stitch the games together at a quality level we were comfortable with, but it wouldn't be free either. "Re-editing" a game is a bigger and scarier undertaking than reediting a TV miniseries. I'm not saying that it's not doable, just that, I imagine, it's a hard cost and project to justify when we already have the gaming equivalent of the TV on DVD boxed set at the end of the season, with an episode browser/launcher, etc.
i mean, its not that you play EVERY game you buy completely from beginning to the end in one session, right? you make pauses, you play 2 hours on saturday, you quit the game, the next day you start the game again and play on.
and as already said, playing a game in episodes, and playing these episodes right after their release (and thats really what you should do!!) is just like watching a good tv-show. you cant watch a whole season when just the first episode aired. you have to wait. period. and if you WOULD play all episodes in one session you would miss all these cool speculations "what happens next?", "is he really going to do this?", "what happens to.." and stuff. as said, see it the same way you see a weekly tv-show.
i agree with you, that a launcher that adds all episodes to one full game would be nice, buts its not essentially. as i said, you dont play every game you buy in one session.
and think about the cliffhangers, even if you just have to start the next episode, the cliffhangers will impress you much more with a little pause between, than as a whole game, where the story continous right after the cliffhanger.. which isnt a cliffhanger anymore if the continous without any pause....
its just like reading comics if you want, recently i read about 70 issues of the walking dead. and i really enjoyed the cliffhangers, even if there where just a few seconds, minutes, a day till i read the nex issue.
enough said, writing english is so hard.....
Wanted that since ToMI. Sad it didn't appear in S&M3. If it appears here, that would be great...
Yes. But then he pulled out Kill Bill Pt.1 and then Kill Bill Pt.2...
Isn't that like TT games? Divided in parts, each part having its own integrity?:rolleyes:
In fact, when playing through them again off the DVD, I'll have to watch the IWWH shorts between each episode just for the sheer fun of it
I would like to know the answer to this, too!
(We already asked for during ToMI and S&M Season 3's cycles)