Tom Mustaine Talks SiN on
1UP talks with the recently departed Ritual tribesman about what he's up to,
and what's going on with the second installment in SiN Episodes:
But he
did express a feeling that the world hadn't been quite as ready for episodic
content and digital delivery as they had banked on it being. The problems of
being able to sell in stores also came up with him adding "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."
Along with marketing struggles, the team ran into new challenges once they got
the first episode out the door. Mustaine explained, "we could have done episode
2 in 6 months, but we'd have needed double the team size just to keep up with
the Half-Life 2 engine." As it turns out, hitching their wagon to Valve became
as much a curse as blessing. Besides having to merge the code every time the
engine was updated, it also drew inevitable comparisons to Half-Life 2. So, the
lack of a gravity gun, for instance, stood out as something "missing" from SiN
to some gamers. And then there were the distractions. With Original SiN -- the
remake of SiN using the Source engine -- up and running, and the pull of doing
multiplayer with the new episodic game Mustaine said that it was hard to keep
focused on just cranking out the next episode.