Steam News Update - SiN & HL2 Episode 1

[CSN NewsBot]

With another week end comes another Steam news update! We know you're all excited, so please try and contain it.

Preloading of Ritual's Sin Episode 1: Emergence continues, with thousands of gamers waiting patiently for May 10th to come around so they can start playing. It will be worth the wait, but until then we have a couple of screenshots from the game to share. Preload the game and be ready to play with everyone else when the game comes out.

Here at Valve, we've finalized the commentary tracks we'll be releasing along with Half-Life 2: Episode One. When you start up a new game you'll have the option to play with commentary enabled, which means there will be usable nodes in the world for you to learn about what went into building the game. Looks like we'll end up with over 100 total nodes and about one hour of total spoken commentary. The community response to the commentary system in Lost Coast drove a lot of our thinking while creating it, so we hope everyone enjoys it when they are playing Episode One.



Most people have also probably noticed that the Friends system is currently quite functional in Steam, but still in beta. You can try out the beta now; your list of friends will still be there after the beta period has ended.

I did enjoy that commentary in the Lost Coast.

[EdisLeado]

Wow, SiN looks really nice. Is it on the Source engine?

[Gpig]

Yeah it is and the I love the way water looks in source. Anzio I think is the map in DoD that looks fucking awesome with it.

[snkcube]

Man, I really want to try out SiN Episode 1.

[hahnchen]

The Lost Coast commentary was indeed very cool. And Sin should kick some ass.

[mouth]

Is it still 10% off if i pre-order it now? I'd hate to have missed out on that huge bargain. Between the $10 charge being graciously knocked off of free mods if i order a package deal and a whole $2 savings on SiN Episodes, i'm utterly convinced that STEAM and episodic content are good for me, the consumer. It's about god damn time someone cut out the cancerous, unnecessarily greedy publisher. It's not extortion, it's developer liberation.



Questionable pricing + Less content + Inability to easily resell your purchase = VALUE REVOLUTION

[videege]

truth.

[Gpig]

[Zips]

mouth wrote..

Is it still 10% off if i pre-order it now? I'd hate to have missed out on that huge bargain. Between the $10 charge being graciously knocked off of free mods if i order a package deal and a whole $2 savings on SiN Episodes, i'm utterly convinced that STEAM and episodic content are good for me, the consumer. It's about god damn time someone cut out the cancerous, unnecessarily greedy publisher. It's not extortion, it's developer liberation.



Questionable pricing + Less content + Inability to easily resell your purchase = VALUE REVOLUTION

Savings are still savings. If you don't like it, don't buy it and save even more... I doubt any of the communities would mourn the loss.

[spartianII]

WHY THE HELL CANT I ADD PEOPLE TO MY FRIENDS LIST FROM THE PLAYER LIST, THATS ALL I WANT TO KNOW

[mouth]

Zips wrote..

Savings are still savings. If you don't like it, don't buy it and save even more... I doubt any of the communities would mourn the loss.

I was really struggling with that decision.

[entRo]

still seeing lots of HL2 textures in there Zips!

[mr spoon]

Those shots are seriously underwhelming. Maybe I've been looking at too many Crysis screens.

[Zips]

entRo wrote..

still seeing lots of HL2 textures in there Zips!

Uh, where? The water or the sky textures? Talking about the rock/grass ones? It's really hard to make textures that don't look like HL2 ones, but I think these are still different.

[hahnchen]

mr spoon wrote..

Those shots are seriously underwhelming. Maybe I've been looking at too many Crysis screens.

Don't all shots look underwhelming compared to Crysis? Still, I'm not sold on Crysis, I wasn't that impressed with Far Cry's gameplay, and I'm not sure if Crysis will do anything new.