Sin remaster "isn't dead", say Night Dive, but will "go through some changes"
Studio will tackle it at a "later date"
I have an affection for '90s first-person shooter Sin I suspect the game doesn't deserve, because it had a handful of good guns, ATMs you could press the buttons on, and a fight on the rooftop of a train. I am therefore always interested in each seemingly cursed attempt to revive the series.
The latest is Sin: Reloaded, from frequent remaster crew Night Dive Studios. Announced back in 2020 without an update since, Night Dive now say that the project "isn't dead" but will be tackled "at a later date."
"You may have noticed that there have not been any updates on SiN: Reloaded in quite some time and there’s a good reason for that," says the update, which was added today to the top of Reloaded's Steam page and also posted to Twitter.
"As we've been focusing on other projects that exceeded the expected period of development due to reasons that have been stated several times until now, this unfortunately had an impact on some of our other tiles, including SiN.
"That being said the project isn’t dead and we will continue to tackle SiN: Reloaded, but at a later date. The project will also go through some changes which we are not ready to analyze yet, but we would like to thank you for your continued support and patience while we find the best way to bring SiN: Reloaded to a new generation of gamers!"
At a guess, "other projects" here probably refers to Night Dive's ground-up System Shock remake, which went through a protracted development and a couple of iterations. It was eventually released in May this year, with Jeremy Peel calling it "a breathtakingly beautiful and astonishingly faithful remake that proves the enduring power of Looking Glass design" in his System Shock review.
Night Dive have remastered a lot of games in recent years, however. That includes the underwhelming Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition. They also brought the original, unremastered Sin back to Steam with its expansion pack as Sin: Gold.
Released in 1998 by Ritual Entertainment, the original Sin used the Quake 2 engine but otherwise followed in the footsteps of 3D Realms and associated Build engine games. The levels were semi-realistic and decorated with needlessly (but joyfully) interactive objects. It was also bombastic, hyper-violent, clearly inspired by '80s action movies, and had both an annoying sidekick and a ridiculously-proportioned villain.
It also came out two weeks before Half-Life, which is a little like releasing your silent movie two weeks before The Jazz Singer. Ritual went on to make an interesting mixture of flawed, licensed action games like Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K. 2 and Star Trek: Elite Force 2, before returning to Sin for the episodic Sin: Episodes in 2006. Only one terrible episode was ever finished before Ritual were acquired by a mobile game developer.
Is there any way to remaster or remake Sin and have it hold up today? I suspect not, given it barely held up in its own time. I definitely don't think running the texture's through Paint Shop Pro 5's Effects > Sharpen option is the way to do it. And yet, I definitely want Night Dive to make a remaster. I am fickle.