As a person making a nominally episodic game series (and who at one point attempted to make a weekly episodic game series), one of my frustrations is that Telltale kind of poisoned the well in regards to what “episodic games” means (although this is also part of a larger trend with TV series as well). Most of the Telltale games, in addition to most prestige TV, is less Episodic and more Serialized. It’s a single continuous story broken into parts. I think this partially contributes to the “I’ll wait until it’s done” mentality that was mentioned on the podcast. This leads to the situation where, when I’m talking about my own episodic game series, I have to explain that it’s “Less like The Walking Dead, and more like Star Trek, where each episode is mostly a self-contained story with the same set of characters and maybe some continuing story in the background.”
Like they alluded to on the Podcast, a lot of classic JRPGs, particularly the Dragon Quest games, actually have a very Episodic structure even if they’re not released episodically.
