• SalCan

    In an ideal world episodes would be awesome- they could come along every month, offer a few news hours of gameplay, a few weapon/feature, and another part of the story. This is much better than the HL to HL2 wait which was what- six years?

    The problem is that it is almost impossible to do episodes correctly. It take more than a month to release even a short part of a game, the episode system is expensive (so far HL2 has cost players over $100 in total if you did Orange box), you can end up paying for older releases more than once (with orange box).

    I’ll stop ranting… I could go on for awhile about virtues and faults of Valve’s recent decisions.

  • samwise

    Ditto to above…

    AIT2 tape

  • OpenSauce

    As games & their engines get more complex, the concept of developing (monthly/quarterly) episodes on the fly is a non-starter.

    I would suggest a comparison to decent episodic TV, where the episodes are mainly made in advance.

    For example, BBC’s Blue Planet was 8 or so 40 minute episodes (from memory). How long did it take to put together? 5 years. That was mainly waiting for conditions for filming events, with substantial production/editing afterwards.

    Look how long it was between HL & HL2. Was it worth it? I think so. Especially if you consider all the me too copy cat below par games released in the interim.

    The other option would be parallel processing – get the main game done & then farm out episodes to multiple developers.

    One good episode a year would do me, for some of those dark winter nights.