Duck and Cover

Some of you may have played SiN, the sci-fi FPS released around 1997-8. I didn't. Anyway, there's a sequel in development on the Source engine. What's got people stirring, however, is the rather unique plan for episodic content release the developers are implementing. In essence, the consumer purchases 3-6 hour chunks of the game at a time over Steam. Presumably the individual episodes will be priced far lower than your typical full game. It seems to be quite the controversy.

The game itself looks promising, despite shameless T&A marketing.

...the consumer purchases 3-6 hour chunks of the game at a time over Steam...

Over my dead body.

Indeed.

The game looks alright, a bit too HL2'ish for my tastes, though. Not to mention that FPS's aren't famous for complex storylines and smart dialog, even less if the game is purchased in short episodes which can be bought in any order or not be bought at all. I remember reading about this project a few years back, didn't think they'd actually manage to get it this far (a website and renders, ya-wooe!)

I remember SiN. It was rather amusing. The sheer variety of plentiful, gormless, consequence free dialogue fluff throughout missions was hilarious.

'HEY, I FOUND A PENNY. OLOL.' - Whateverhisnamewas.

Frankly, I'd be lying to say I'm at all pleased with the prospect of episodic releases. 'Tis simply another unpleasant step towards exclusively online rental of software. Not good.

WHY?

It'll flop. Hard. Just like the first Sin (ignore the fanboys, it sucked), but this time worse because you can't own a physical copy of a finished game. They limited their consumer base to those who still play Half Life 2 at the time of the first episode's release. And that number is not as high as Valve will let you believe.

Why would anyone want to install Steam for 1 or 2 hours of play time?

It's been done before, and it has failed ( as far as I know ), and now that it's steam-based, I'm sure it'll somehow make it. Darn the luck, darn!

I dont mind episode releases, as long as they are on a strict schedule. My biggest worry is that they will release one then promise more to come every month but it ends up being 3-4 months. Same thing kinda happened with NWN, they said they would be constantly releasing premium proffesional mods but they put out chess and swarms mods. Not until like a year later was when they first released a real mod.

If you have to buy each episode then you can test it out and if you don't like the first one or anyone one after that then you can simply not buy anymore. So its not like buying a full priced game and finding out it sucks.

I'll wait for the reviews and get the bloodiest episodes only. Storyline in a FPS, who are they kidding?

Lunchmeat wrote: In essence, the consumer purchases 3-6 hour chunks of the game at a time over Steam. P

Omfg Rotfl. It appears the developers don't want to get too much profit from it

I think its a cool idea and I also like the look of the game. The colours make stars in my eyes.

Haven't I seen this marketing somewhere? Hmm... oh yeah, everywhere. Nice thong though.

It would be out of character for them to abandon such ploys. The 'villain' of the first game, for example.

Franz Schubert wrote: Haven't I seen this marketing somewhere? Hmm... oh yeah, everywhere. Nice thong though.

Here, mebbe?

God I hate game developpers.

I'm not touching anything that's delivered by Steam, no matter how low priced it is.

Steam gets way too much of a bad rap. I've rarely had problems with it. I don't see why people are so eager to piss all over something that with time and patience, could become the best thing damn since sliced bread. With a delivery service such as Steam, the product heads right from the developer to you, the consumer. This means no more shitty publishers breathing down developers neck's and forcing them to release unfinished games.

Also, as mentioned before, episodic content has several advantages over realesing the game all at once, such as reduced download times, and the fact that you don't have to pay for the whole game if you decide you are dissapointed with the product. I'm not saying that episodic content is perfect, as there is still the possibility the developers could not meet deadlines. In fact, I'm almost sure they won't, but then again almost no games today are finished on time as it is.

Because the whole basic concept of Steam is shit. You pay for a game but you never get a physical copy of it. You're 100% dependent on these assholes running a server in Calif, forcefeeding you patches, copy protections and shit.

Episodic release has absolutely no advantage on good ol' "Full Install from the CD".

S4ur0n27 wrote:Because the whole basic concept of Steam is shit. You pay for a game but you never get a physical copy of it. You're 100% dependent on these assholes running a server in Calif, forcefeeding you patches, copy protections and shit.

Episodic release has absolutely no advantage on good ol' "Full Install from the CD".

+ if you need to re download the software that you bought ,and the steam server is down/overloaded, you're fucked up

I think they allow you to burn the data to disks from what I heard about Half life2. You still need to probably log into steam to play though or do an activation for each episode.