episodic release cycles have hit two genres so far: FPS (Half Life) and Point-click Adventures (Sam & Max, Blackwell). what about RPGs? are there any? do you think it would work? i wonder, because i used to love RPGs, but now i don't have the time to play any RPG seriously (they don't really follow midcore manifesto point #1 - respect our time). so perhaps an episodic format would fit my lifestyle better.
some random brainstorming on how you would do such a thing:
each episode should take an average of a few hours to complete. so one episode may just be a single quest. obviously, each quest/episode would have to be more than your average "go to town A and get me some coffee" episode. the developer would need a stable platform that will allow them to design very elaborate, content-full quests in about a month. not to mention some very creative ppl.
your character would persist through each episode, and once you "finish" an episode, you can still run around the world and level up and stuff if you wish. could each episode be stand-alone then? if you want, any episode should let you start afresh with a new character that's appropriately leveled. or maybe take your character and "auto-grind" it for you. so for example, say you played ep1 and would like to keep your character. but ep2 came, and you were way busy that month so you didn't play it. now ep3's out. you aren't too interested in playing ep2 (reading some reviews, you didn't find the story setup very appealing), so what do you do? you take your character from ep1 and tell ep3 to extrapolate and level him/her up to a level appropriate to ep3. ep3 will "auto-grind" it for you.
of course, how does the developer fairly (as in, not make the game too easy or too hard for you) auto-grind your character? this would take some play testing, or maybe collecting stats on ppl from the end of ep2 like Steam (ie. on average, what level were ppl at when they finished the last quest of ep2?). some careful design and play-testing would be necessary here.
this would solve the problem of ppl quitting RPGs cuz they didn't level up enough to beat some big boss, and they don't want to go back and level up more. for episodic content, this would be pretty crucial. TV shows would die if missing an episode meant you're totally lost (no pun ntended). of course, each episode should also provide a review of past episodes (like HL2 EP2) in the form of a brief movie or something.
there's also the issue of persistence. in most RPGs, your actions leave permanent effects on the game world. so each new episode needs to respect that. i don't think this is much of a problem, since RPGs need to deal with this anyway: each quest already needs to be independent of others. so as long as quests (and thus episodes) remain orthogonal to each other, persistence shouldn't be an issue.
what about cooperative RPG'ing? now that anyone can "jump in" to an episode at any point (thanks to auto-grind), and now that each episode is only a few hours max, it's more possible for people to play through an episode together with friends. with a TV show, you can enjoy an episode with a friend even if the friend missed the last 3 episodes, and because an episode is only an hour long. not so with most RPGs (though, i don't think most RPGs even have co-op ability). but if an episodic RPG exhibited this episode-independence, it seems more possible.
i'd love to hear everyone's thoughts or ideas on this. would you pay for such a series (let's say, $10 per episode, one episode per month)? what other challenges do you see with such a format for RPGs? what bad assumptions am i making in the above brainstorm?
