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2006 · Ritual Entertainment · Biopunk · Cyberpunk

Sin Episodes: Emergence

You are John Blade, commander of HardCorps, an elite security force dedicated to protecting the people of Freeport City. Four years have passed since your first battle with Elexis Sinclaire, a beautiful, brilliant, and ruthless scientist who is out to remake humanity according to her own twisted vision. The law has failed to bring Elexis and her multi-billion dollar empire, SiNTEK, to justice, so Blade is determined to take matters into his own hands. Joining Blade on his mission are JC - a hacker with a secret to keep - and Jessica Cannon, a fiery rookie who can find her way into any secure facility.

Also known as: SiN Episodes
Released: 3 April 2006
Platforms: Windows
Genres: Biopunk Cyberpunk First-person shooter Shooter
Developers: Ritual Entertainment
Publishers: Ritual Entertainment
Modes: Single-player
Perspective: First person
Themes: Action Science fiction
Engine: Source
Country: United States
Age ratings: ESRB M USK 18 PEGI 18
Languages: English French Russian
Time to beat: 3hmain story2hwith extras5hcompletionist

About

Sin Episodes: Emergence is a 2006 first-person shooter developed and published by Ritual Entertainment. It is the first game in a planned series of episodic games for Windows that would have expanded upon the 1998 computer game Sin. A total of nine episodes were planned with only the first one released. It is powered by the Source game engine, the first episode "Emergence" was the first computer game by a major developer to both be produced episodically and delivered over the Internet without the intervention of a publisher. This was accomplished through Valve's Steam content delivery system.

In 2007, Ritual was acquired by casual game developer MumboJumbo, stalling the franchise and leaving the future of the series uncertain. With the sale of Ritual to MumboJumbo and departure of several employees, all future development of Sin Episodes appears to be delayed indefinitely, if not entirely canceled. MumboJumbo has already tasked Ritual to develop "high-quality casual content."

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The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

Normal single player story mode features a dynamic difficulty engine called Personal Challenge System, which gradually makes various aspects of the game harder or easier depending on the player's performance statistics. When starting a new game, the player can choose how much the difficulty is allowed to increase and how quickly it is allowed to decrease. Additionally, the player can enable the HardCORPS mode where all game saving is disabled, so that dying or quitting resets all progress.

Arena Mode is a single player mode and was designed to run a contest at E3 2006 as part of a promotion alongside Vigor Gaming. In this high score mode the objective is to survive as long as possible among the steadily spawning and increasing enemies. There are time limits to the maps and it is possible to survive an entire round. The scoring system is also tied to the Personal Challenge System which runs at a much higher rate than in the main game.

Story

Freeport City is a bustling, futuristic megacity with a population of 27,000,000 and described as a mix of New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo. Areas that are featured in Emergence include the Freeport Docks, Sintek Supremacy Tower, and Radek's hidden drugs lab on board a beached, derelict oil tanker.

Colonel John R. Blade (player): Colonel Blade is the leader of HardCORPS and is "obsessed" with bringing Elexis to justice.

Development

Ritual's original intention was to release an episode every six months that would cost US$19.95 and take around four to six hours to complete. A total of nine episodes were envisioned. Although originally released as a single-player game, various multiplayer modes were planned including co-operative and team based modes.

One of Ritual's main design goals with Sin Episodes was to offer interactivity, character-driven gameplay, emergent AI, and a plot reflecting the choices made by players through an opt-in statistics system that aggregates play data to a database: the intention that future episodes would thus depend on the choices that are made by each player.

Reception

Sin Episodes: Emergence received generally favorable reviews and currently holds the score of 75 on Metacritic. As of January 27, 2007, the game had sold 150,000 units, enough to recoup development costs but not enough to fund a sequel.