HAVE WE SEEN THE FINAL CHAPTER FOR EPISODIC GAMES, OR WILL THEIR STORY CONTINUE?
Hitman’s move away from a chapter-by-chapter release could mark the end of an era
When the new Hitman game was revealed at E3, developer Io Interactive made a big point of confirming that the previous game’s episodic format had been dropped. On a personal level, it was hard not to be disappointed – I’d loved the slow monthly drip-feed of new exotic locales to murder people in – but looking at games as a whole, it seems inevitable.
Once upon a time, borrowing TV’s season structure seemed like being the next big thing for games. Depending on your exact definition, episodic games have been around since the 1970s. However, the format really took the spotlight in the past decade, first with Valve’s episodic mini-sequels for Half-Life 2, and then Telltale games like The Walking Dead, which really leaned into the boxset-storytelling mentality.
But the second of three promised Half-Life episodes came out in 2007, leaving players still dangling off its cliffhanger ending over a decade later. Telltale applied its formula to an ever-growing list of properties, from Batman to Minecraft to Game Of Thrones, like the Funko Pops of narrative gaming – but this came with diminishing returns, and last November the studio laid off a quarter of its staff. With Agent 47 now throwing in the episodic towel, it looks like the TV-style season model might be reaching its finale.
HAVING AN EPISODE
There’s nothing wrong with episodic games, in theory, but the actual practice has always lagged behind. A regular delivery of bite-sized chunks of game sounds ideal, a way of squeezing experiences that can otherwise stretch to hundreds of hours into a busy life, but, inevitably, the game falls off schedule, or you miss an episode, and by the time the season is wrapped, you’ve lost track. This is true even of the format’s shining beacons, like Life Is Strange, due a second season later this year.
Streaming TV’s rise to prominence happened almost in parallel to episodic games, and at first glance the two look similar – but as TV increasingly tends towards big binge-able blocks, having to wait a month or two for the next instalment of a game feels positively quaint.