Tom Mustaine Q&A

"...we would have been better off selling it at $35 than $19. At 19 bucks it went straight to the shit bin in many places."

Hrrm that's strange, I still see it in the new releases at the stores around here. I liked it a lot but I don't think I would have paid more for it...

In the article he also makes a comment about people wanting a gravity gun. Is that for real? I didn't miss it at all :|

From my post on BluesNews:

"Throw player into new world and slowly uncover the changes since the last game" simply doesn't work in an episodic sequel to a several-years old game without some people losing interest and others not being interested to begin with.

IMO they tried to mimic Valve's approach and failed because there was no "HL2" version of Sin. And to be honest, would we actually be as psyched about HL2 if after 6 years there was nothing but a 4hr episode with a story that seems to make no sense, explains nothing and offers little new? Say, if instead of HL2 we would had gotten the part from waking up in the train till reaching Dr Vance, with only the crowbar, pistol and SMG for weapons and nothing but the initial combine troopers and headcrabs as enemies, plowing through some backyards and then an extended sewer sequence - what would we have thought of the game (also ignoring that the fanbase of HL is a lot larger to begin with)? Sin needed a whole game to introduce the player to the new Freeport and the returned Elexis, uncover parts of the story development and THEN it could have jumped to episodes, explaining what was going on in detail.

Besides, although partially fun Emergence suffered from several bad design decisions. The limited variety overall (few badguys to fight, only three guns, scenery) and the overall look and feel more often than not made me think I'm playing a watered down version of HL2, cut to sell in several parts, instead of a unique game. Add to that after Sin vs. HL, they should have known that launching Emergence only shortly before the much more hyped/coveted HL2-Ep1 was going to be a bad idea. It all came down to Emergence being directly compared to "Aftermath" (which to me felt more like a short expansion than a real "Episode" with the features of the original FULL game + some) and falling short of the latter in almost every aspect.

IMO it's sad he can't acknowledge these issues at least partially - while a fun game, there were fundamental flaws with Emergence which you can't just dismiss and blame it on retailers putting your "shit" game into the "shit bin" (something which didn't even happen from as far as I know...)

Did HL2:E1 go straight to the shit-bin? If not then maybe, juuuust maybe price wasn't the factor.

Personally, I still haven't played either although I bought them both on Steam. After I already owned them I saw both of them in the small Virgin store near work which only has a handful of different games at any time so it wasn't shit-binned there, at least. (If it was it wouldn't have even been on sale.) I would've bought them retail instead of via Steam had I realised they weren't Steam-only releases. (Since buying something from Steam requires me to get involved with them in an email chain for each game because their credit card checking functionality is fucking fucked beyond fuckedness for international customers yet they don't seem to give a fuck. Fuck. Anyway...)

Maybe there wasn't enough education/advertising about the idea of episodic games and people assumed it was a shitty budget title and didn't buy it. Then again, consensus is that Sin:E1 *was* a shitty budget title and the only thing it had to do with episodic gaming was length rather than concentrated quality. So people did the right thing either way, I guess.

The fact that he doesn't mention how well HL2:E1 did and also that HL2:E2 is hotly anticipated is odd given that it's the only other big episodic game and came out in the same climate via the same release mechanisms

Also, what's all that stuff about being tied to the source engine? Correct me if I'm wrong -- I'm no expert on game development -- but nobody is *forcing* every licensee to keep up with the latest version of the engine, right? They can fork off their own version, if that's more appropriate, and still incorporate or port bug fixes made by Valve unless the fixes are so huge that they change the code architecture. Or does Steam have a single copy of the engine shared by all games? I doubt that, else Valve have tied themselves into forever updating old games when new ones come out and would be preventing people from significantly customizing the engine.

"So, the lack of a gravity gun, for instance, stood out as something "missing" from SiN to some gamers."

Errr, what!? Not having a gravity gun didn't prevent several hundred games being made recently. How on earth is that a reason not to make E2?