[quote name='Licorice King']I enjoyed it. It was a pretty solid game, worth the price, I guess. The battle system is one of the better ones I've seen (attack animations are fantastic), the "useless" dialogue you can have throughout is amazing, and in general it was pretty good. The only complaints I have was the similar gameplay. Every part of it was "hey, kill all the hobos around for their livers. Kill all the mimes for their invisible equipment. Kill all the garbage so the garbageman will give you his kidney." Etc etc. The revisiting the four same areas really got tedious.
Which brings me to my main point. Tycho and gabe are god damn evil geniuses. The way they're releasing this is really, nothing short of evil. Lets start off with money. The game costs $20, for (assumption here) 1/4 of a retail length game. Which would make it $80, if it came out in one piece. You also can't rent this game, due to DD. There's also no used game market sales loss. There's no disc distribution or manufacturing. That's all saving them money. I won't be surprised at all when they release the next episodes, despite using the same engine and battle mechanics, for the same price. Despite obviously less work put into it.
Another main point is the way they're releasing this, in episodes. First, you're paying for an unfinished product. It's an excuse for the game to be sloppy at shit at first. It's an xbox live title. Which means reviewers and the public will generally go much easier on it, because it's not a retail game. If this game came out all at once, they'd not only make less money, but it would get absolutely
ing hammered review score wise. And why isn't it compared to retail games? Because it's episodic? You're paying more than you would for a retail game, and getting
considerably less quality. They can release it unpolished, glitchy, ho-hum environments, non-existant dungeons, etc.
Because it's an xbox live game. At the end of the day, when you have all four (probably more, I'm sure they'll keep the free money coming) episodes, you'll realize you spent more than you did on a game like GTA4 for something considerably shittier.
And that is my giant rant about how releasing XBL games at retail prices is
ing ridiculous. Yes, it's only ten dollars, but if it costs that extra ten dollars, treat it as such. It's a meh retail game broken into four parts so that you go easier on it.
I'm definitely going to be downloading the rest of it. Screw those greedy bastards.[/QUOTE]
So now I am confused, I played through the whole game, and did not run into any glitches or bugs. It never froze or kicked me back to the xbox interface, which is less then I can say for recent retail releases (example: Frontlines : Fuels of War) and even after the whole rant you said you are still going to download it, in an effort to "screw those greedy bastards". So as I said before, I am confused.
The other thing that gets me is the fact that you assume episodic means unfinished and that it means the developer somehow works less. Yes, they will have an engine in place now, but they will most likely iterate on it, much like Valve does with the Source Engine and Epic does with their Unreal engine. Yes, they will also have art assets that they can leverage, but many more will need to be developed, based on the ending scenes in Episode 1. Also remember, manufacturing is a one time cost. Make 100,000 boxes and bam, you are done until your forecasts require you to print more. On the other hand, having to pay for rack space and bandwidth, that is a constant cost for as long as content is on XBL.
Now I will admit, maybe it is just my perspective, based on getting older, but I am fine with shorter games that entertain me. I look at Eternal Sonata and Lost Odyssey and frankly, I don't have the time to put 60 to 80 hours into a game. But, I have played through both episodes of Half-life 2 and enjoyed them thoroughly, as well as watched them get rated very highly. (86% and 90% according to Metacritic) We have also seen attempts at episodic content that failed, due to their lack of polish. (SIN episodes) So the market will regulate itself.
So, in closing, I think both of us, need to take a step back and see what Gabe and Tycho have planned. If quality continues, then in my opinion, it is worth 20 bucks a pop, because each game is a contained experience. It is very much like reading a book series, such as Ender’s Game or Harry Potter. You can read the whole series and see the full story and the character progression or you can pick up book four and just read that. You are not required to buy all of the other books, and you will have an entertaining experience.
(, but I'll probably start up another save to try to get the other things I missed.
