Digital Tome on episodic gaming
How do you turn an industry buzz-word into an enjoyable game?
While many publishers and developers have discussed the idea of episodic gaming, selling games one episode at a time over a period of weeks or months rather than producing a single large game, very few have put their money where their mouths are so far. One of the exceptions is Digital Tome, whose role-playing game "Siege of Avalon" was one of the first episodic games to be released entirely over the internet. This process wasn't without its worries though...
"When first designing our Episodic Game Novel idea, we worried about getting both reviewers and players to understand the basic concept", associate producer Allan Halstad admitted in a recent interview. "The release of Chapter 2 answers a lot of questions for people who were not sure how we'd divide a single full game into episodes that were individually fun to play but still connected to make a much bigger grand story. Siege of Avalon is intentionally a short novel of only six chapters, so that we can demonstrate how the story builds to a grand climax in the last episode."
"There are still lots of people we hope to reach with this idea, and our future games will cover a wide spectrum of genres to reach a mass audience. But we focused first on the core RPG audience because we believe they'll be more willing to experiment with our innovation in gaming, and help us establish a solid game studio that can be expected to provide a rich collection of hot new entertainment titles; including the next game already on the drawing board, Pillars of Avalon."
If you want to try Siege of Avalon for yourself, the first chapter is available to download for free from the game's official website, while additional chapters will set you back $9.95 each, or $40 for all five.