Would this game have been better as one release?

fiddilydee

I wrote this on my blog on my IGN. I originally meant to post it on here but I lost it because I took too long to type it and the page timed out. I should have wrote it in Word first and copied and pasted. So yeah check it out.

http://www.ign.com/blogs/fiddilydee/2013/02/13/the-walking-dead-the-problem-with-my-favourite-game-of-2012/

Riadon

Episodes 1-5 used player feedback to continuously improve. I think that this was a large part of the game's success.

I would prefer episodic because the wait will be shorter, as well as the aforementioned reason.

Yertos

No. One of the main reasons I love this game is because of the time we had in between to think about it and talk about the characters and such. If I played straight through I would not have ended up loving every character in it including Larry, Kenny, and Ben. With the time it took to all release it gave much more time to understand them rather then straight up hate them for what they do.

It's the reason why some of the most favourite and memorable TV shows were the ones I'd spend years watching rather then when I pick up on it later and watch it one after the other.

DAISHI

Uh you could have just waited until they all released. Tis what I did.

Vainamoinen

You can't just just play TWD during release and then decide whether the episodic model is "good" or "bad". Do it three, four, five times with different games and franchises, then you will get a better idea.

Fact is, TWD was a REALLY unusual episodic release for Telltale. Two months between many episodes is a previously unseen schedule. Episodes are meant to release monthly, and I pray that this will be the case with Fables again. I don't see the episode model working any other way. Still it is exactly what Telltale sets apart from its competitors right now. They have the experience and the industry contacts, and they will continue to improve in that field.

You speak at length about being disappointed by the "choices", and I really get that. Especially, you name those first moments in a game when you're not really sure about its mechanics and potential as the most enjoyable. This is probably something every game tries to achieve: to trick the player into expecting far more than the game will deliver, to suggest an interactive choice where there has never been one. In my opinion, TWD game stretches this trickery excessively, and this has nothing to with the episodic model.

I love how Telltale has given the player the chance to look more into the game's mechanics with the "story notification" option or help the player to experience less of those mechanics by turning them off. However, the mechanics will be apparent to everyone who plays episodes twice, regardless whether she or he plays it in episodic form or as a complete game. The many paths you might have seen as choices before converge to just a single road, and you will see the trickery as a painfully obvious thing.

What I do not want is that this level of player self-deception is necessary to enjoy the actual game! But in that case still, the game itself is to blame, not the episodic model.

Also: You argue for a non episodic release, but describe in great detail the withdrawal syndrome you've experienced, which is exactly what makes the episodic model so attractive to Telltale. THIS is what you are MEANT to feel.