Sin Episodes is out

Mad Mike

I haven't downloaded it yet - I'm still coming down from WOW and using healthy doses of Far Cry and Oblivion as methadone. However I do have some thoughts on the economics of episodic gaming:

1. If as suggested previously it encourages game producers to produce better quality games in order to hold their audience them I am all for it. If this becomes commonplace I expect it will become a bit like pilots for new TV shows. If sales don't materialise the series will be cancelled after a couple of episodes.

2. I do feel the price point of nearly €20 for a 6 hour episode is too high. My gut feeling is that €10 would be a more sustainable level. People happily pay €5 to rent a 1.5 hour movie and I think twice that for a 6 hour game would be attractive but 4 times that puts it beyond the level of an impulse entertainment purchase (for me anyway).

3. I too am an avid consumer of discount games and I will be dissapointed if this innovation kills them off. However I doubt it will. Once an episode becomes old there will be pressure on the distributors to lower the price. In fact the episodic nature of the games guarantees obsolescence. When later episodes come out there will be a lot of presure on the distribs to lower the price of earlier episodes in order to attract new followers to the series.

Sgt. Politeness

MasterOfSolos wrote:

It's totally outdated technology. Looks crap, performance is crap, bugs upon bugs upon bugs, and level loading is so damn slow.

woah woah woah woah woah....woah. woah?? WTF? Source engine looks crap? I suspect the problem here is that youre actually playing the original SIN game and going 'bloody hell this source engine is sh!te'. Fire up HL2, take alook at Alyxs facial expressions, take a walk around city 17, play some day of defeat source, goo 'ooh' and 'aah' over the HDR on maps like argentan or donner, and THEN tell me the source engine sucks. Its one of the best, if not THE best, engines out there atm.

Zombrex

Not sure about this whole dynamic difficulty system

Initially I thought it sounded good, and it played well I was finding the game a good challange when most FPS these days you play through once without ever dying.

But now it is taking me like 30 minutes and 10 quick saves to move through each fecking room. As Retro says those chain gunning SinTek soldiers are so fecking annoying, because you can unload your entire set of ammo on them and they still stand.

SirLemonhead

Sgt. Politeness wrote:

woah woah woah woah woah....woah. woah?? WTF? Source engine looks crap? I suspect the problem here is that youre actually playing the original SIN game and going 'bloody hell this source engine is sh!te'. Fire up HL2, take alook at Alyxs facial expressions, take a walk around city 17, play some day of defeat source, goo 'ooh' and 'aah' over the HDR on maps like argentan or donner, and THEN tell me the source engine sucks. Its one of the best, if not THE best, engines out there atm.

I've played pretty much ever FPS game out there. I'm not going to get confused

Besides, they're practically the same game anyway, with Source being based on the Quake/Quake2 code

SirLemonhead

Ciaran500 wrote:

I'm getting a steady 65-75fps through out, loding is about on par with any other game out there and do you not think bugs are a developer problem rather than source engine?


Anyway looks good to me

It stutters all the damn time for me, going into new areas and the like. It's a problem a whole lot of people have had with the engine over the various source titles.

Half life 2 has tons of things wrong with it, as did CS Source ( that game gave me a huge amount of grief...moreso than BF2 does )
It looks too cartoony for my liking. I dont think it looks realistic at all. Which is fine, but I wish people would stop saying it was realistic.

tba

MasterOfSolos wrote:

Source being based on the Quake/Quake2 code

Really?

I guess that why it runs so good on my ancient wind up PC

SirLemonhead

tba wrote:

Really?

I guess that why it runs so good on my ancient wind up PC

Ok well, very loosely. Don't listen to Valve when they say its a complete re-write. The whole engine is very similar to Quake, right down to the smallest details (same texture used to represent a missing texture, the purple and black one)

To me, it's like Quake2 but with higher resolution textures. It has the exact same lighting (except for stuff like HDR which is tacked on) and even has the same clipping problems as the Quake engines.

Notice how the tie on the old guy at the docks kept half disappearing inside his chest?

Half life 2 had tons of it too, shadow rendering problems, and Strider legs poking through concrete walls.

Ciaran500

Yeah, why listen to the people who actually wrote the engine :rolleyes: The engine is a complete re write, anything like the purple and black texture could of just been carried over from HL1 and isn't proof that its in any way based off it.

Every game has clipping problems, make no difference to gameplay and weren't that common in HL2.

SirLemonhead

Ciaran500 wrote:

Yeah, why listen to the people who actually wrote the engine :rolleyes:

Because all the evidence points otherwise?

Even John Carmack said it in an interview a few months ago...

Ciaran500

You really have to start putting more into your posts, all what evidence?

SirLemonhead

Ciaran500 wrote:

You really have to start putting more into your posts, all what evidence?

You'd really need to look yourself. Otherwise, dont concern yourself with it.

Still no sign of that patch, Ritual said this weekend though so I guess it'll be out later...

Ciaran500

I did look and couldn't find any, hence why I asked for the evidence you apparently had.

SirLemonhead

Ciaran500 wrote:

I did look and couldn't find any, hence why I asked for the evidence you apparently had.

I'm lazy and don't care enough to do all the work myself, besides, it's sorta dragging the post off topic.

Gateway

This is a better link
http://www.latexlair.com/

Sgt. Politeness

UNF!!!!!

madrab

good ole slydice creeping into every forum

L31mr0d

Ok well that ended abruptly. I was just getting into it and then it just ended. I don't like this whole episodic gaming crap. It seems more geared to benefit the companies making the games rather than the gamers. Sometimes I like to be able to just play a game and play it all the way through in one or two sittings. Like Quake 4, I did 2 stints over a weekend and had it done. Whereas SiN? Had it finished before breakfast... now what?

The game is very repetitive, the graphics are dated in that they look like too much like HL2. Funnily enough, my girlfriend seen me playing HL2, then FEAR, then GRAW.. she looked over my shoulder playing SiN and said "that game looks a bit old doesn't it?"

Things like the textures on the cardboard boxes being the same as HL2 bothered me, and the whole phone boxes all over the place with numbers to call where pointless. Its funny because there really isn't many things I disliked about this game, I liked the melee attacks that where missing from HL2, the ability to hold guns up to aim like CoD2, the ability to slow things down with the gas like FEAR, the fighting of bosses at certain points like Quake4... but there was just something missing? It wasn't original, there was nothing new, the gameplay wasn't better and besides the blatant/excellent/uneeded teenage boy aimed CG Bikini scene nothing of interest about the game. It felt like playing a mod of HL2 that somebody threw together in their spare time.