Lumpy said:
waywardOne said:
'tis, but the first two episodes have to be incredible for many people to keep going.
It's very easy even for incompetent writers to create a nice, interesting mystery, intriguing the audience to go on, even if the resolution is fucking stupid. See Lost for an example.
So this could easily be the plan here - make it look like it's a nice story in the first eps, with no reviewers knowing the whole story to call the scam, and then lead people on to buy all seven eps due to OCD.
Actually I'd hold up Lost as an example of how difficult it is. You've got a professional team, with the assistance of some of the better hollywood screenwriters for some of the beginning and ending parts of each series, and it's one of the most successful 'episodic serial over multiple series' ever sold on TV and....yet it's still pretty mediocre.
If they can't pull it off, and everyone else who has tried to keep that format going over multiple seasons has failed even worse (and usually much much worse), why would an indie game developer be expected to produce something 'easily'.
Ok, you might say it's the multiple seasons thing that makes it nigh-impossible. And that's definitely a big part of it - the whole concept of Lost is flawed in that serials have never ever worked well over multiple seasons. I'm excluding here show where each season is essentially it's own standalone serial, such as Dexter and Breaking Bad, where each season is largely self-contained.
And once you look instead at one-season serials and new-serial-each-season shows (Dexter, Dr Who, The Prisoner etc) things pick up massively. But that format is still considered 'risky' by tv standards - very few writing teams can do it well, and the flops vastly outweigh the benefits. To list some recent failures: Flashforward, Wolf Creek, Persons Unknown...none of those made it past their first season. And then there was the utter shite that hit our screens when Heroes tried to do serial past its first season.
Yes, the British have a much better track record. They've been doing serials for decades and have honed the method pretty well. Traditionally, British shows are written for 1-2 seasons ( I think its to balance out Dr Who, which I'm fairly certain is going to keep running, with the odd 10 year break, as long as Britain does), and knowing that in advance lets them give a serial a clear beginning, middle and end. But it's certainly not an 'easy' style to write - the British success is mainly down to their BBC-centered working model, where instead of having one set of writers (and actors for that matter) doing one show for 10 years, you have a handful of writing teams doing multiple shows which then end and the same team (same writers, production team, often the same actors) move on to a new project.
Serials are a trap for inexperienced writers, who tend to use the serial format in lieu of actually having a well-developed beginning and end of each episode and each arc, thinking 'I can wrap that end up, or address that issue later in the series'. Getting the pacing right for a serial format, where you've got to balance the internal pacing of each episode with the cross-series pacing, is fucking hard.
And audiences are VERY quick to turn off. Just take a count of all the serials that were greenlighted after the early success of Lost, Heroes and Battlestar Galactica - and see how few of them actually made it through to finishing the serial. Many of them didn't even get through the 1st season.
