Preferred release schedule?

StarEye

Inspired by Hayden, and his post in the "Telltale plays it safe" thread, where he talked about how the games was restricted by the intense release schedule Telltale is currently working with. I had this thought that I think the biggest problem with episodic gaming, especially with such a tight schedule, is the extra time it probably takes to make them standalone. Having one full-length game gives you much more freedom and it also opens up for much bigger worlds. For example, the puzzles has to be within the relatively few rooms/locations that one episode contains. For me, Monkey Island 2, Part II, has the perfect structure for an adventure game. You're completely free to solve several puzzles in any order, and you can travel between a lot of different and unique locations, plus new locations continues to open up as you solve puzzles. It's basically a huge playground for the gamer, the free roaming of GTA in a point'n'click environment.

This is obviously not possible with episodic gaming, since it requires a lot of space, plus the episodes have to be self-contained. I can understand this. I also recognize that having a game out every month is attractive to a lot of gamers. However, I think that they should perhaps just hold back on the episode (and thus lose the typical "episode structure" of the games), and just released one full game every sixth month or so. Imagine if ToMI was a full-length game, we would probably have a very different game.

Maybe one of Telltale's biggest problem is that their games aren't really suited for episodic gaming? Anyway, cast your vote on the release schedule, and maybe explain your reasons for you choice.

corruptbiggins

I think their current schedule works. Remember that there is also lead time of a few months before the release of the first episode of a season. Maybe bump it up to 6 weeks between releases but other than that I think they're doing it the right way.

taumel

Depending on the game/licence, both: Full games without episodic structure and monthly episodic games which a) are also released monthly (but please not this we release the first episode, then it takes two months until the second one arrives, then there come two almost on the last possible day with the last one taking more than a month again, that's not a convincing monthly working schedule, more if you consider the quality and bugs of the games, if you can't make it in the timeframe then enhance the workflow or enlarge it to, dunno, six weeks or eight weeks and b) are cut into reasonable not this limited feeling pieces (like when you enter an island with a bar in TOMI which you can't enter, that's just plain stupid design due to the episodic schedule).

Ribs

taumel wrote: »

Depending on the game/licence, both: Full games without episodic structure and monthly episodic games which a) are also released monthly (but please not this we release the first episode, then it takes two months until the second one arrives, then there come two almost on the last possible day with the last one taking more than a month again, that's not a convincing monthly working schedule, more if you consider the quality and bugs of the games, if you can't make it in the timeframe then enhance the workflow or enlarge it to, dunno, six weeks or eight weeks and b) are cut into reasonable not this limited feeling pieces (like when you enter an island with a bar in TOMI which you can't enter, that's just plain stupid design due to the episodic schedule).

You could enter it later. It was cut not because of the Episodic Format, but the Wii memory capping it to the point where they couldn't add any more.

Secret Fawful

On the subject of bi-monthly to add polish, Sean Howard made yet another post in his blog that I think fits here-

Sean Howard wrote:

I finished Dead Space and my ultimate assessment of the game is that it was a C game wrapped in an AAA layer of polish. I could actually describe a lot of things that way. In fact, for some game genres - especially MMORPGS - the more polished they are, the more benign and trite their gameplay is. Blizzard is the king of this. They basically steal their gameplay (and game worlds) from somewhere else, and slap such a heavy coat of polish on the whole thing that you can see your reflection in it. So the question becomes, is it the act of polishing that reduces games to such generic experiences? I think so, in a way.

I think a large part of the equation is that there is a finite amount of development time and money. Focus in one place means less focus in another. It is simply easier to polish something that is smaller and has less moving parts. You don't need as much testing, you don't create as many bugs, and it doesn't screw with the rest of the game in weird, unpredictable ways. By making something simple and small, half your polish work is done for you.

But I think that polishing also smooths over the rough edges. If you have a semi-broken system that can be fixed by removing a piece of it, then that's what polishing does. It takes the complex, jagged edges and it smooths them down like sandpaper. You have a paper doll system with five hundred pieces of armor you can equip. Only some of those pieces don't play well together. You can prevent the player from using those two pieces, redesign them so they are simpler, or you can flat out remove the offending pieces. Perhaps the most expensive option is to redo the work. The quickest and cheapest is to remove it.

Creating a new gameplay mechanic is going to be something that requires a lot of iteration and testing. Something which seems like a decent idea up front can have a lot of weird repercussions later on - especially in a game where multiple gameplay systems interact with each other. Like 99% of the ideas in my Three Hundred Mechanics challenge won't work out of the box. They are the beginnings of ideas. Only through constant prototyping and testing can they even remotely approach their potential - and even then, just to sort of work, a lot of them would have to be simplified greatly.

Or, you can let someone else do the work for you. Take BioShock, for example. A large part of that game is dependent on System Shock 2, which was based on System Shock before it. But the whole finding logs left behind to tell the plot, or people speaking into your ear - well, you can find those ideas going back to games like Crusader: No Remorse, Marathon, and Strife - possibly further. These are established storytelling devices that have been refined through years and years of reuse. At this point, you can adopt the ideas by simply leaning on the last guy who did it. It comes pre-polished.

I like messy games that don't quite work. There's something raw and beautiful about it. I do enjoy polished games and find myself lost in the spectacle plenty, but it's like the difference between a garage punk band and Miley Cyrus. That rawness comes precisely from not knowing how to play the musical instruments properly. By not having pitch perfect singing voice accentuated by autotune. The songs were written through trial and error, not by knowing scales or music theory. These guys do something different because nobody really told them the right way to do it. When you polish their music, you realize how simple and obvious it is. But you lose some of the emotion that made it interesting.

It's the same way with videogames. I think that a lot of the smaller developers take risks and do things that large publishers like Activision or EA won't do. They do this because they have to (they can't compete with Call of Duty, so they need to think outside the box) but also because they don't know any better. They have a great idea and they just can't iterate it into a polished one. And that's okay, because it is STILL a great idea. And part of what makes it a great idea is the emotion and excitement behind it.

These raw ideas will, if they are accessible enough, be picked up and polished by someone else. Many of our popular gameplay mechanics had their starts in weird little shareware experiences. I mean, adventure games are directly traced back to Colossal Caves, a text adventure by an amateur who wanted to share the joy of spelunking with his children. It's been polished to an art. Puzzle trees and narrative structures. We now know that mazes are not fun. And that having missable items needed for later puzzles is unfair. And that dying by typing in the wrong thing is frustrating. We've polished adventure games over a thousand iterations where even the worst adventure game released today is relatively mature compared to what came before. You almost have to try to screw it up.

I think the game industry is pretty homogenized because there is this great need to deliver these massive, polished spectacles. As little as ten years ago, most games didn't even have a multiplayer component. Or a sound engineering team. But as the game industry has grown, so have the profits. With games being so expensive, there can be only a few real winners every year - but the rewards for being one of them are HUGE. A single major game franchise can support a game company for years... even decades.

So the publishers have adopted a summer blockbuster approach. Games are released at specific intervals when people are most likely to pay attention to them and purchase them at full price. Marketing goes into overdrive, spending twice the budget of the game trying to get you to pay attention to it. Reviewers are bribed. Stores are manipulated. A huge amount of money is spent trying to convince you, the player, that you need to make this game one of the ten games you buy this year.

It's ironic because publishers are starting to look at downloadable titles and think, geez, we can make a cheaper game that makes less money, but still makes a profit. And in seeing that potential, more money is spent, budgets get bigger, advertising starts to come in, reviewers are bribed, and we've got our own mini-summer blockbuster wars happening on PSN and Xbox Live.

I think that these publishers can't afford to release an unpolished game. Part of the trick of convincing people to make this one of their ten purchases is convincing them that your game is better than everyone else's. And a heavy coat of visual polish can make that impression stick. It may be possible to polish these weird, unfinished ideas that I tend to enjoy (Nintendo does pretty well in it) but the goal of the publisher is not to deliver a polished gameplay experience. It is to deliver a beautiful game that look familiar enough to feel comfortable enough, but different enough that if you are tired of the last game maybe this one is what you are looking for.

Crap. I meant to write about polish versus the naked energy of a raw idea and ended up going into game industry trashing mode. Maybe they are related. Maybe I only like raw, broken ideas because I've come to associate highly polished experiences with the mindless, loveless crap the big publishers try to constantly shove down our throats. Maybe there isn't a correlation at all. Maybe the big publishers just have the money to polish games but simply don't have the financial obligations to innovate and explore possibilities and genres outside of what's popular right now. I don't know.

I think this applies to a lot of Telltale's philosophy. Having a hard time getting point and click to work with the cinematic engine? Get rid of it. Having a hard time with difficult gameplay and avoiding dead ends and keeping to the Lucasarts philosophy? Get rid of it.

Hayden

I'd like to see Telltale at least attempt a bi-monthly release schedule, perhaps give it a test run. If it's successful, then they could stick with that. If it doesn't fix the problems that have become so evident recently, then it would probably be time to take on a full-lengthed project. If the games improve, but are still flawed, then maybe they could do both bi-monthly episodes as well as full-length games. All in all, a single month's development for each episode is quite simply not appropriate anymore. Sure, the format was fine for their first few games, back when they were still sort of considered an 'indie' company. But with their projects becoming more ambitious and with expectations upon them rising, they have to switch to a different format/schedule if they hope to maintain success and continue on the upward spiral (which has reached a halt with 'BttF').

Edit: And for all of you who are voting 'keep it like it is', I would be interested in hearing your reasoning behind this.

Blind Sniper

If possible, I would like to see the length between episodes be raised somewhere from 6 weeks to 2 months.

taumel

Ribs wrote: »

You could enter it later. It was cut not because of the Episodic Format, but the Wii memory capping it to the point where they couldn't add any more.

Monthly is monthly, you also don't want to receive your checks by entering later, don't you?

The corridor worlds more than once have been an issue and i wouldn't tie this to the Wii only (btw, if distributed in another way you don't have to life with these limits as well) and even if this would be the case then i find this a rather strange decision, watering the gaming experience for everyone else who doesn't use a Wii. Actually i would diss the Wii in favour of offering a better gaming experience for all the other platforms if needed.

adventureaddict

Okay, I voted keep it like it is, but that's not exactly what I meant.
Changing it to bi-monthly or even non-episodic won't change anything. There is always going to be some sort of schedule, and either way, the games will pay for it. If they changed to bi-monthly, the most likely thing to happen is we get two games happening at the same time, so no real change at all.
I like Telltale, I do, but they are a business, and decreasing their output by 50% is not going to be fruitful for them at all.
They don't need more time to make their games better. They just need to look at them differently.

Jennifer

I don't think a lot of these concerns have to do a lot with the episodic release schedule, but that Telltale's design philosophy is different than a lot of adventure gamers (myself included) expected it to be.

An episode with multiple locations and items traveling between locations could be done in an episode (we got a little bit of that in Night of the Raving Dead with WARP TV Studios, Straight Street, and Stuttgart all as visitable locations), but Telltale has always wanted their games to appeal not only to adventure gamers and casual gamers, but also to people who never played a game in their life (as evidenced by Dave Grossman's interview about having his mother in law test the game). So the learning curve has been skewed way down so as to get as many people playing the game, but the catch-22 is that it alienated a few long-time adventure gamers as well.

I think there's a balance to be found between the two that Telltale hasn't struck yet, but I don't think it will ever reach the difficulty and complexity of Monkey Island 2, King's Quest VI, or Grim Fandango because that's never going to be Telltale's goal since they want the games to be able to be played to the end by everybody without the non-gamers giving up in frustration.

I also think Telltale will get to the point where they are able to handle this many games without having as many bugs and scripting issues, but this workload is new to them and they are still having growing pains.

I'd like to see a monthly episodic adventure game more like the adventures from the 1990's, and I do think it's possible in the episodic format, but I don't think we're ever going to get it from Telltale. But that's OK to me since I'm sure they'll listen to fan complaints about Back to the Future and find a nice balance between non-gamer and adventure gamer. Hopefully another adventure company will make a larger and harder monthly episodic adventure game so we can have the Sierra to Telltale's LucasArts.

JedExodus

I would like Telltale to keep schtum about what they're developing untill they know they hjave something excellent ready. Announcing stuff when you've only laid down the foundation's gotta put the pressure on

Bunnyman

I wouldn't mind waiting longer for a stronger game that wasn't rushed by a release date. I would like for them to have the whole series built before any episode release, and make changes based on reactions as needed. From what I can gather, Telltale was still building 305 a bit after 304's release.

Ribs

JedExodus wrote: »

I would like Telltale to keep schtum about what they're developing untill they know they hjave something excellent ready. Announcing stuff when you've only laid down the foundation's gotta put the pressure on

However, it also means they get feedback on whether or not people want Cedric to be the main character in the next KQ game.

zmally

every 4 weeks or so (roughly) like now, but releasing two games at once, with a 2 week gap between them would suit me!

To explain this to my peers who can't understand my inane babbling:

Week 1: Game 1 Ep 1

Week 3: Game 2 Ep 1

Week 5: Game 1 Ep 2

Week 7: Game 2 Ep 2

... and so on!

Make it so!

Ribs

zmally wrote: »

every 4 weeks or so (roughly) like now, but releasing two games at once, with a 2 week gap between them would suit me!

To explain this to my peers who can't understand my inane babbling:

Week 1: Game 1 Ep 1

Week 3: Game 2 Ep 1

Week 5: Game 1 Ep 2

Week 7: Game 2 Ep 2

... and so on!

Make it so!

I think you missed the point of the thread just a bit.

Rather Dashing

Secret Fawful wrote: »

On the subject of bi-monthly to add polish, Sean Howard made yet another post in his blog that I think fits here-

...I need to read this guy's blog more often. Less because he has interesting things to say, but because he thinks everything I think and then says it in ways that sound far more nicely put-together. Essentially, I need to read his blog to steal his prose word-for-word.