Episodes

This post was started as a review of Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars / Command & Conquer 3 Kane's Wrath but at some point I decided to turn it into an editorial as I realized there's one relatively new interesting tendency among the game developers. Look at the title.

Why did they actually start releasing games in episodes? The first explanation, which came supposedly directly from Valve, said that creating an entirely new game (Half-Life 3) would take far too much time, so instead they had decided to cut up the project into parts and release them one by one in shorter periods of time, introducing new designs and improving the technology in the process. Well, it sounded like a damn good reason at that time - I mean, who would prefer to wait another six years for the next ground-breaking Half-Life installment? Today, however, when even C&C switches to episodes (Kane's Wrath being the first in C&C3 series), things look a little bit different.

Firstly, what is the difference between the episodes system of today and the add-ons system of not-so-long-ago? In many cases there's usually one or two add-ons per game, rarely more (like, let's say Counterstrike and Aftermath for C&C: Red Alert), while the word "episodes" in a sub-title definetely suggests plural. Why would that be bad? There are several reasons:

1. Making episodes makes people lazy. Most of them feature just another set of familiar innovative maps (with one notable exception - the Antlion Hive in HL2: Episode Two - it looks awesome), maybe one or two new weapons and some new enemies, how difficult to make can that be? All that's left to do is to push the story a little more forward, like tell the player to run all the way from one end of the map to another "because it's very important for the story".

2. Speaking of the story, what did we actually learn from the two Episodes of Half-Life? Well, that the Combine Advisors have a tentacle and that they can fly. And that's it. In TWO EPISODES, while the original Half-Life 2 introduced us to a whole new nightmarish reality, dragged us through it, eventually gave us the chance to try and set things right, starting with the death (or so it seems) of the main bad-guy. All in one game. Now take a look at the episodes again and tell me how much did actually happen there, apart from Gordon Freeman running his ass off all the time. Pretty much the same in Kane's Wrath - there's a new Nod AI whose intentions remain unknown and now Kane finally has his Tacitus. Full stop. I don't think the deprivation of decent storyline will become a habit of every episode series to be released, but I am willing to bet my car that some assholes will release a couple of episodes with no story whatsoever just for some more money. Right, the money...

3. How much will we be required to pay for the series? The price for the episodes of the games mentioned so far isn't all that low (again with one notable exception of Valve's Orange Box, but the low price won't seem strange if you think about how much money they have earned so far selling HL2 and HL2:E1) and considering everything I've written so far, this may prove to be money spent for just killing time - running around on the familiar-looking maps, killing the same old monsters, shooting a single new weapon), while at the pretty much same price you could have been given a full game which you would probably enjoy about a thousand times better.

4. The last thing I don't like about episodes is that most of them end with cliffhangers, which is rarely the case with add-ons or expansion packs. See, most of them are like mini-games themselves - they have some sort of a beginning and some sort of an end which is supposed to leave you happy at the job well done (I like to call that the "Mission Accomplished" Feeling), while Episodes, often leave you just guessing what will happen next. Just look at Half-Life Episodes and compare them with Opposing Force and Blue Shift, or even at Kane's Wrath, for that matter, compared with the previous C&C expansion packs like Firestorm or Yuri's Revenge. It feels like a really like a cheap trick to make you want to run to the store and get the next episode as fast as you can, once it comes out.

Finally, there is always a fate which Sin Episodes suffered: cancellation. The grand predecessor, the game Sin, was at the time a fairly strong competitor for Half-Life (although Half-Life crearly won in the end, considering Sin a loser makes no sense, because the two games had almost nothing in common, apart from both being FPS'es - I mean, show me another FPS with that variety of nicely-done levels: the bank, the construction site, the sewers, the subway, the dam, the bed of the ocean, the oil rig, the jungle, the high-tech underground research facility, the high-tech underground research facility FROM HELL, the old manor... but yes, Sin had bugs. It crawled with bugs.) but the first attempt to revive the franchise in the shape of episodes produced just one: Emergence, which didn't earn enough money for many people to stay in its development team. Thus, the story suddenly ended just after it has begun. Now consider this: if Ritual Entertainment chose to make a full game right away, they would probably think twice before placing as much as four weapons and two or so enemy models. They wouldn't deprive Blade the protagonist of voice (in Sin he had a reeealy huge mouth, I loved his lines). They would maybe make a nice game. Instead Sin is dead again, and what a painful and disgraceful death it was.

Making episodes hasn't become a habit yet, so I mean this post to become a kind of warning or/and a piece of advice (for once I actually LIKED the episode examples mentioned above, except for Emergence, although they could have been better in many ways):
For all you game developers out there, if you really want to make episodes for your games, go ahead make them. But for heaven's sake, make them worth something more than just useless single player map-packs. Make them worth our damn time.