Deep Silver: Episodic Games Hamper Hardcore Game Quality

The publisher of Risen 2 has declared that it did not want to compromise its touted 60-hour gameplay experience by making the game episodic, and has pointed to Valve's Half-Life 2 series as a case in point.

In an interview with SPOnG to be published later today, Deep Silver's Senior Brand Manager Daniel Oberlerchner said that to create any kind of core experience "in chunks" would have a dramatic impact on quality if mishandled.

"What you’re seeing right now is people are focusing on micro-entertainment," Oberlerchner said. "Risen 2 is really a hardcore game, which means that it’s not designed to be consumed in chunks. When you’re deciding to make a game in chunks, you have to make sure that the quests and dialogue are designed that way.

"That’s what we didn’t want to do, because when you do that it will just hamper and hurt the gameplay. You can’t do complex stories because people will be annoyed when they switch off the console for two weeks and then switch it on again, forgetting where they left off."

Oberlerchner added that the episodic approach has worked for smaller games such as Telltale Games' Monkey Island and Back to the Future series, where gameplay time totals at around 15-20 hours. But, "it was also planned for Half-Life 2 wasn’t it? However in that case, we all know what happened.

"When you have a complex game like Half-Life 2, you’re suddenly running into problems that the development time increases, and I can fully understand that Valve is not able to throw one episode quickly after each other. It will hamper the game’s quality, and they clearly don’t want to water down that quality.

They want to deliver cool stuff, and there is a fight between being quick enough for episodic content and having the quality you need for a AAA game."

Deep Silver is not ruling out the supposed future of PC gaming. He hinted that the company may look to create unique apps and games for Facebook and iOS, focusing on specific elements of the Risen universe rather than an alternative method of playing the main game.

"We could come up with an app which revolves around the Gnome creatures specifically, perhaps. That could hook into the Risen universe, but make it a dedicated experience for the iPad. But you don’t necessarily need to break up the 60 hours worth of gameplay of Risen 2 and share it on an iPad or any other mobile device, because then you’re going to fail. You really have to focus on what the device can do."