Less Episodes, Meatier games.
In general, I think Telltale should decrease the amount of episodes in a series, but beef up the content within them.
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Now, because of the smaller game sizes and more confined location choice, it gets harder to have that many characters or items or locations. The latter especially I feel falters sometime in Telltale games in order to serve the game.
But, when playing Hector, it felt much bigger and meatier, even with the less amount of episodes.
The content is at about 70% of what I'd like it to be, so yeah, I'd beef it up. The scripts, and the actual content we do get? Great. I wouldn't change that, I just want more. Shortening the amount of episodes to beef them up is a great way to do it. TV shows (especially from the UK) do that often to help reign in the spiral and have tighter, more expansive stories.
No.
Half-yes.
I wouldn't mind 3 really long episodes, (sort of like a 3 parter special). Change the pace up a bit, might get some more meat on the bone in terms of gameplay/puzzle design.
Remember that Tales of Monkey Island had to be compressed a lot in order for it to fit within 40 MB on WiiWare. More content means less space for actual dialog and crap. Even with high compression, you can only compress so much.
With the walking dead games, I get the impression that you'll be building up to having the entire game, due to the choices in one game affecting another. So again, file sizes make no difference there.
What's also true is that you used to be able to buy separate episodes of telltale games, but now you buy a season pass. So again, not much point in spreading it over longer.
The only reason I can see to spread games out so long, with releases once a month, is to keep Telltale in the public eye. The more episodes you have, the more reviews, the more coverage. It's the only reason I can see.
2) To enable them to make connected stories that differ in tone.
3) To give them enough time to actually make 20+ episodes.
This is where episodic games lie. It gives the developer the ability to stop and start the story while letting time pass, essentially skipping the boring parts in between. To get the same feeling from a movie, imagine every 15-20min a screen popping up "10 days later", "30min later", "1 month later", throughout the entire film. It removes any investment you currently have in the characters and story while you're playing catch up. While the more recent TTG releases have been more fluid, if you pop in an older episodic title and run through it, you feel removed from the story in between each episode. They were really counting on you putting down the game back then.
I guess I have to admit BttF and JP were more successful in that regard. To contrast the recent releases, pop in S&M season 1. Every episode started "okay this is what happened, this is what's going on now, this is what's changed...GO". In terms of television, each episode of the games felt like a new season of a modern TV show. Oddly enough, this was actually quite common in the older days of television and the days of radio serials.
What I mean is, TTG makes their games the way they want to by their own choice (especially since they distribute their own games), so it's not the same as why TV shows are the length that they are.
They are usually 40min-1hour shows though.
(Some have been even longer then that! Especially murder mystery series! XD)
Hah. We even have 3 90 minute length shows as well like Sherlock.
(3 90min episodes per season)
I guess we are more flexible when it comes to scheduling.
What would be neat is to somehow combine all the episodes into one full game for the dvd release. Having to finish an episode, watch a trailer, close it down, open the next episode and get a re-cap isn't really the best way to go about it at that stage.