[Dasilva]

SiN Episodes: Emergence

Game Overview

SiN Episodes is an explosive first person shooter experience that reintroduces and re-imagines the world of SiN for the new millennium. To be released in early 2006, the upcoming SiN Episodes chapter entitled Emergence is the first in a series of episodic adventures powered by the award-winning Source™ engine developed by Valve®. Delivered on Steam™, the online content delivery system, SiN Episodes takes a bold new step into the future of gaming.

SiN Episodes expands on the role of Colonel John R. Blade, a battle worn hero in charge of HardCorps, an elite strike force with a long history of conflict with SinTEK, a powerful multibillion dollar empire headed up by Elexis Sinclaire, a beautiful, brilliant, and ruthless scientist who is out to remake humanity according to her own twisted vision. Joining Blade on his mission are JC, a HardCorps hacker with a secret to keep, and Jessica Cannon, a fiery rookie who can find her way into any secure facility.

SiN Episodes: Emergence features never before seen weapons, characters and environments along with a host of interactive options, paying homage to its predecessors, SiN and its expansion pack, Wages of SiN, which set a new bar for interactivity.

Key Features

A Complex World
Enter the living, breathing world of Freeport City, a futuristic collision of New York, San Francisco and Tokyo. Explore a multitude of real-world environments ranging from the seedy underbelly of the city to the glamorous high-rise buildings of the wealthy elite, as you unravel an intricate story populated with strong characters driven by believable motivations and emotions.

Intense Combat
Face off against ruthless enemies, like jetpack soldiers and mutants that evolve as you fight them. Witness enemies that adapt to your actions and truly work as a team, as they cover each other, and help fallen comrades to get back on their feet.

Outsmart your opponents by using your environment to your advantage as you set up traps using lethal elements of the environment. Location based damage rewards accuracy while melee combat moves enable you to get up close and personal.

Unprecedented Interactivity
Blast your way through highly interactive environments powered by an enhanced version of the Source engine. Characters dynamically react to what you're looking at and the environment. Target and shoot off specific vehicle parts and literally blow cars to pieces. Experience the next level of vehicle combat with a flexible positioning system enabling you to move around the interior with an unprecedented degree of freedom, allowing you to pick the ideal position to attack that enemy position up ahead.

Episodic Delivery
Buy as little or as much of the game as you want, with each installment offering 3 - 6 hours of action-packed gameplay. But tread lightly, as the choices you make may influence future episodes in unforeseen ways.

Each episode will scale with your skill. Think you're a gaming god? Prove it. Dynamic difficulty ensures that the game stays challenging no matter how many times you play, and the comprehensive statistics system will allow you to compare your skills with your friends'.

Screenshots

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I'm going to try and keep you all up to date about the latest SiN news by this thread.

[Dasilva]

GDC 06: SiN Episodes: Emergence Hands-on
Ritual's new SiN is on hand at the Game Developers Conference, and we couldn't resist trying it out.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--Bad timing isn't one of the seven deadly sins, but when it came to the original SiN, it was deadly enough. SiN came out in the shadow of the original Half-Life, and it's taken the franchise roughly eight years to recover from that. Now, developer and publisher Ritual is preparing the return of SiN in the form of SiN Episodes: Emergence. Ironically, Emergence is built upon Valve's Source engine and Ritual will distribute the game online using Valve's Steam service. And by relying on much of the same technology used by Valve for Half-Life 2, this SiN looks to be making a much stronger impression than its predecessor.

Emergence will mark the return of all the key characters from the original game. You play as John Blade, the determined cop out to stop the nefarious plans of Alexis Sinclair, the corporate evildoer out to rule Freeport City. The action involves much running and gunning as you blast bad guys with a variety of weapons while blazing your way through the different levels. Since it's essentially only the first episode, Emergence will contain approximately four to six hours of gameplay.

What's really intriguing about the game is the dynamic difficulty system, which we got to experience first hand. Like most shooters, Emergence will keep track of all your statistics as you play the game, including your hit percentage with various weapons, your number of kills, and so on. However, this data isn't for you to gloss over at the end of the game. Instead, Emergence will dynamically adjust the difficulty level depending on your performance. As Ritual's Tom Mustaine explained to us, if you start getting good at nailing head shots, then the game will subtly adapt to that. Enemies may start appearing with helmets, or they may dodge faster to incoming rounds. The idea is that you'll constantly be faced with a difficult challenge, no matter what your skill level. What's impressive is that Mustaine said they've discovered that with dynamic difficulty turned on, both newcomers and first-person shooter veterans take about the same amount of time to get through the game.

We were brutalized by the dynamic-difficulty system as we blitzed our way through a level of the game using our highly refined shooter skills. At first, it seemed a bit easy to take out the bad guys, but it didn't take long for the game to adapt, and before we knew it, enemies started using different tactics on us, such as utilizing the secondary fire mode on their weapons to really unleash on us. If they do that to you, then you know you're doing well, and the game is trying to compensate for that.

You may have noticed that there are some familiar elements in the game that hearken to Half-Life 2.There's a driving sequence we saw where you ride shotgun while another character maneuvers a car through the level, and at one point you haul through a tunnel where bad guys rope down from the ceiling. Still, Emergence should stand out on its own regards thanks to its colorful design style and its intense and occasionally gory combat. (Just take a shotgun to a guy at point-blank range or watch them burn in agony thanks to a well-thrown grenade).

We're told that Emergence is almost complete at this point, but Ritual still plans to put the game online sometime in May. The company is distributing it online via Steam, but it is contemplating some kind of retail package, as well, though nothing is nailed down at this point. What's interesting is that those who buy Emergence will also get the original SiN through Steam, and it's been cleaned up with all the bugs fixed. This includes multiplayer, which apparently is still popular, even today. Emergence looks like a fresh new start for the franchise, and we're looking forward to seeing it ship soon.

...

[NcroManiac]

I kind of liked the first one, but the new one seems to have the same quirk that dragged the original down: an annoying protagonist.

[jjacob]

Regardless of the protagonist (who mostly is, after all, merely a shell around the player, in this kind of game), I'm quite looking forward to this one. I hope they didn't dumb down the gameplay from the first one, and perhaps even improve on some of the things which made SiN a good shooter (like the security systems which you had to circumvent, the pretty decent AI etc.). From the videos though, it looks like they're trying to merge SiN with Half-Life 2, with mainly run-and-gun gameplay, so here's hoping this game will contain more than just good shooter gameplay. The devs probably thought it'd be a bad idea to show anything other than FPS gameplay, so perhaps, it will.

[Dasilva]

Yeah, SiN had some annoying bugs, but it was a good game in its core. Glad its got a fresh new start.

[insane_cobra]

Well, so much for that.

[Dasilva]

Don't people understand you can't get a million guns in the first episode. They need to keep in mind this is the first episode.

[Spiwak]

I don't think that was a major complaint with the game in the article. His complaint wasn't that it was too short or anything like that, but the writing was just godawful and it tries to be HL2 to a fault.

[Dasilva]

Its still a fantastic game, I'm having a blast.

[jjacob]

Pretty disappointed with this game. It's nothing like the original SiN, and it's extremely linear. There's no stealth like in the original game, blasting cameras has no effect on whether or not you're detected. Enemy AI is non-existant for some reason (perhaps because they're simply triggered by your presence). The "fun physics" are also pretty lame. There are gas cans/bottles lying around everywhere, but they're not really useful for killing enemies, and more often than not end up flying in the opposite direction of which you sent them, in other words, towards the player. Like some said, it tries too much to be like HL2, which is a shame. On top of that, it runs like shite on my reasonably high-end system (whereas HL2 runs beautifully), even on lowest settings. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for perhaps one more episode, but if they screw that up, tough luck.

[RLacey]

I'm really not sure what has happened with Ritual; I didn't mind Star Trek: Elite Force II, but everything they've made since then appears to have been rubbish .

[JemyM]

My greatest issue with the whole thing was the lack of dialogue. Blade is almost non-existant. He doesnt talk, he's just quiet.
JC was missing as well. Only one that had some spotlight was Jessica.

[AdrianWerner]

Hmm..preety nice, nothing that would make my jaw drop, but it's nice by the numbers FPS. Still, looking at previous episodic games the quality of next episode could be much much bigger, so I will give it one more chance

[Kolzig]

I heard that Sin Episodes: Emergence is full of crap. Is it true?
By looking at the reviews and screenshots, I kind of agree with what I've heard.