Ritual Entertainment have revealed that they
are working on a sequel to the 1998 first person shooter 'Sin'. This time around the developers will be pushing the
boundaries of the the fps genre by naming the sequel 'Sin Episodes'. It's called episodes because the game will be
distributed by Valve's 'Steam' system in a series of episodes with around six hours of gameplay. The developers have
been in talks with the Valve guys over the last four years trying to set this up. It looks like they've got a pretty
tight relationship as the game will also be using a tweaked version of the Half-Life 2 engine. Episodes will be priced
at $20 each and will be released every three-four months starting this Christmas.
This is one of the first commercial attempts at episodic gaming since the explosion of affordable broadband.
Freeloader, which had several popular games available for download by episode, was the most recent example. However,
they went under in 2001 after giving away one too many free episodes. Other notable attempts include Wing Commander :
Secret Ops which was released in 1998 as a 120MB download in the days of 56k. Needless to say they eventually released
a boxed version of the game. The guys at Ritual are gonna need to make the first episode a 'must have' if they want the
whole series to be commericially successful in light of previous attempts in the genre.
[Via Pro-G]
