Quote Originally Posted by Loony BoB View Post
FFVII is definitely more than 50% longer than an ME game. I'm not sure what you're using as a measure of content, but going by "main story +" on this site which seems pretty decent...

ME - 29 hours
ME2 - 35 hours
ME3 - 35 hours

FFVII - 58 hours

If you're going for completionist...

ME - 43 hours
ME2 - 50 hours
ME3 - 48 hours

FFVII - 92 hours
Ok, but my estimate of 50% more is much closer than your estimate of all three combined. I will give you diversity of content but the story and characters are all very self-contained in the ME trilogy which doesn't really argue that they are one big game. I cannot see a split of FFVII that would create such heterogeneous games.

I can see the development cost issue which is one argument for needing a higher price overall to compensate. RPGs have done this for years by often being $10-$20 more than other games at retail. The episodes would be another way to do this that could generate maybe 2 times the cost of a normal game but I can't see justification for much more than that for a single gaming experience.

Quote Originally Posted by Mirage View Post
In what way would you say MGS5 is episodic?
Yeah, MGS5 was more like a paid demo followed by the actual full game.

I'm not trying to argue that the episodes is a bad idea, just that it's not intuitively a good or understandable idea. It does require giving SE some rope to accept and I totally understand people who won't give them that rope.