Dear Esther Mac port confirmed
Killing Floor hits a million sales, discounted on Steam
Jam Live Music Arcade announced for PS3, Xbox 360
Metal Gear Online to quietly die this summer
Mad Riders: Techland's ATV racer coming to PC, PSN, XBLA
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Shack Giveaway: Mighty Switch Force (3DS)
Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack preview
Alan Wake 2 would be 'much quicker' than first game, says Remedy
Darksiders 2 releases June 26, pre-order bonuses announced
SiN Sequel News
by Maarten Goldstein, Jul 04, 2005 6:00am PDTThe new PC Gamer is being delivered to subscribers in the UK, and in it there's an article on about the rumored SiN sequel that Ritual is working on. The surprise here is that the game is not a retail product, instead Ritual is working together with Valve to release the game in episodic form through Steam. It is also no surprise then that the new SiN is powered by a modified version of the Source engine. Ritual expects to release a new SiN episode every 3 to 4 months, offering about six hours of gameplay at a cost of around $20 per episode. For more info check out PC Gamer, the new US issue (subscribers will be getting it this week) will have a preview of the game as well. Thanks EuroGamer.
In a rare interview with PC Gamer, Ritual CEO Steve Nix said: "We've been talking to Valve about Steam for about four years now, and we've always wanted to get back to the SiN universe. "We talked to publishers about doing it, but we never felt able to make the product we wanted to make with the next SiN." That is, until the relative freedom offered by Steam came along; something several developers must be seriously looking into at this point.
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The FPS gaming scene has been declining over the years in terms of content offered. Games used to be long, 30-40 hours at least. Then they got smaller, 15-20 hours. Then even smaller, often under 10 hours. This is a BAD BAD TREND. Now this. 6 hours of gameplay, and you have to shell out 20 bucks for it.
The value of our games has been steadily declining. This is unacceptable. There should be a push to make games longer, not shorter. In fact, there should be a regulation or a law which would restrict developers to pull these kinds of stunts.
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The choice is up to developers and gamer desires. Do you want increasingly complex environements and gameplay (uhm, yes please) at the expense of game durations? Or would you rather have longer play and give up some of that graphical fidelity? Personally, I think as games become more mainstream (and because of it) games will increasingly get closer in duration to the traditional movie viewers attention-span of 2-3 hours.
- boycotting steam: Hahahahahaha
- with limited bandwidth: Get together and talk with your ISPs
- with disfunctional creditcards: Get together and talk with Valve
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Heh. How contemptuous devs and publishers are becoming of gamers. I hope this flops terribly.
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1) Gives the devs an excuse to slap segments together without a good ending or story arc- they'll call it a "cliffhanger" and the players will call it "wtfbbq?".
2) No box, no manual, no discounted price once the game's been out for months, not even much right to the product you've paid for.
3) As a consumer, I resent being overtly nickel & dimed, and this sort of thing takes the cake- especially because I bet they'll also charge extra for the multiplayer, and then for each additional map and on and on and on.
The funny thing is, SiN has probably made more money over all these years from being ported to the Mac platform. You can still buy it for OSX w/ Wages of SiN for $20. Why? Not just because it's a captive community- the port was rock solid from day one and you got the expansion packed in. Plus a good quality Mac game browser. It was a decent value- something this episodic Steam thing doesn't strike me as.
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Steam was supposed to provide gamers with a CHEAPER product. WHY are they charging TWENTY dollars per 6 hr EPISODE. That gets pricey. By comparison, Serious Sam (which could be beaten in 6 hours) is a on retail box and has a full blown publisher. I bet the game will be cool, but why did Valve say games will be cheaper through steam, when, quite frankly, they aren't?
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just was bad timing for an fps from the generation before halflife to compeete with the new fps standard halflife
compared to any shooter before haflife sin was very good, but halflife had that damn scripted sequences and stuff heh =)
luckily this time they are coming out after halflife 2, so they know the standard
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I didn't notice any.
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Believe it or not, Developers like to make awesome games. Most will put extra into their products if they make really good profits. If Developers can become freed of the evil corporate hand of publishers, games will soon become Art (instead of product) once again. As it once was.
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$20 = £11.38
£11.38 x 3 = roughly £35, the price of an average retail game in the UK.
For that £35, I will get 18 hours of gameplay.
Half-Life 2 was only about 14 hours, Max Payne 2 was about 6 hours, both for that same £35.
This seems like a good deal to me.
Let's hope the load times don't suck ass like in the original.
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They won't have to rush the episodes out. It's marvellous
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So why do I keep seeing the "Steam hate"?
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release their own distribution application.
now it's not the end of the world - but it's not fucking fun either.
Steam has (finally) been refined to be a fairly good app - I don't want to be ANOTHER beta tester for another company or 50 ... :(
It's bad enough with Windows applications - like download quicktime or adobe or directx and several other apps and they have their own web downloader software (ugh) instead of a full.exe file to download (ok sometimes they do have that thank god)
I never thought I'd hear myself say that...."when it's done".
How much does it cost to see a film at the cinema? $10? I don't know, but in the UK, it's about £6-7, which I think is very expensive for 2 hours of usually quite dull "entertainment" that I have to share with a load of other people. $20 for 6 hours of something that can be played several times over and puts me in control of the action onscreen seems like a fair deal.
However, like many people here, I do think that the Steam client is a bit crap, and needs a bit of work before I'd want to see it become a regular tool for buying and playing games. The idea of Steam is fine, but I don't understand why Valve doesn't spend a little more time improving it instead of just giving us great addons (which I appreciate) for the games that it runs all the time.
I think that the pricing of HL2 over Steam is fine, but it would have been nice to have seen more of a difference between Steam and store prices. Now I regret buying via Steam because although I had a T1 connection when I originally bought HL2, I now have dialup, and didn't make any backups, so am looking at a month of overnight downloading to get the required files... I tell you something, it had better be pre-patched! I could have got a dvd for almost no extra cost :(
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instead Ritual is working together with Valve to release the game in episodic form through Steam.
fuck! All my interest just went out the window. Sorry Ritual, no game is worth installing malware to run it.
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Without a brilliant multiplayer, Ritual can stick SIN2 where the sun doesn't shine. I will not shell $20 for 6 hours of single player. No single player experience in the world has ever been worth that much. Especially because i usually play through a game in half the time the devs say i will need. Or i skip to multi after a few levels just because it's the same ol' boring SP experience as other FPS's with a bit more detail.
Multi? NP (World of Warcraft resolved my issues with monthly payments). Single? Hell no.
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whats a FPS normally run for hours wise?
I know RPG's are bout 40hours give or take...
but how long does it take average person to run HL2?
This cheaper? after say 8 episodes?
Either way,
1) Those who dont like it, will only play 1 episode and thier only out $20
2) Pressures the Dev's, to make a more interesting storyline every episode to keep the community coming back for more....
as long as this game doesn't turn into a soap opera...
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