SiN Episodes: Emergence

• Platform: PC
• Published by: Steam
• Developed by: Ritual Entertainment
• Release Date: Q1 2006
• Genre: Action
• Multiplayer: No
• Online: No

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SiN Episodes Feature Preview

-- January 12, 2006 by: Chris Remo

1998 was a truly amazing year for PC gaming. For my money, it's the best single year we as gamers have ever seen on any platform, and I doubt we'll ever see anything like it again. I mean, just think about it for a second, think about 1998's amazing PC lineup. If at least a few of these games don't inspire some wistful nostalgia in you, you may very well not be a gamer. Half-Life, Starcraft, Grim Fandango, Baldur's Gate, Thief: The Dark Project, Unreal, Fallout 2, Descent: Freespace, Rainbow Six, Myth II, Falcon 4.0... and SiN. An original first person action game from Ritual Entertainment, SiN was slightly overshadowed by the behemoth that was Valve's Half-Life (but few games wouldn't be) and was hampered by some unsightly bugs. Gamers who did play Sin (which from this point forward I will refer to without the capital N), however, heralded it as ushering in new levels of interactivity to the first person shooter genre, and indeed it's still not commonplace for entries in the genre to feature that same attention to detail. The game's designers made sure that the world was alive; you could actually mess with those computer rather than just shoot them ineffectively.

Since that first game, Ritual hasn't done much with the SiN universe. There was an expansion pack, Wages of Sin, done by developer 2015, but Ritual has mainly worked on various licensed properties. That's changing with Sin Episodes, a series of nine shorter serialized Sin games that will be made available via Valve's Steam digital distribution service. Each installment will most likely feature 4-6 hours of gameplay or so, hopefully delivered every six months. At first it seems like an odd model for a first person shooter, but Ritual plans to take full advantage of the episodic format rather than simply split one huge game up into bits and pieces. The company is putting a lot of confidence in the game. In stark contrast to its licensed work of the past few years, development is fully self-funded, with no publisher issuing directives.

"It feels really good to be working on something that's our own again," said Ritual's chief designer Tom Mustaine when we met up for a long talk at last week's Consumer Electronics Show. "We've been doing other people's stuff for a few years now and we definitely always put lots of energy into it, but with the original Sin and now this we really have a lot of freedom, and it's great."

The near-future world of Sin is one of private security forces that do the job the government can no longer manage to do. The player took the role of John Blade, head of a security force called HARDCORPS, whose investigations into a drug operation and bank heist morph into uncovering a conspiracy involving biotech mega-coporation SinTEK. SinTEK is headed up by the beautiful and brilliant Elexis Sinclaire, whose experiments with human evolution employ some rather questionable ethics. Of course, it falls to the player to take down SinTEK. In Sin Episodes, SinTEK is back in the news and attracting lawsuits and controversy aplenty. Guess who's going to take care of it? You'll be setting out to clean things up with the help of your no-nonsense HARDCORPS teammate Jessica Cannon.

The nine episodes will be split into three trilogies, each with a contained story arc. The whole body of Sin Episodes will also have a broad arc that spans across all the games. The team is making sure, however, that each episode will be a complete package in its own right; if you play episode two, then episode five, you should still be all set.

A lot of effort has gone into living up to the Sin name by making the world as immersive and interactive as possible. Each episode might be only several hours long, but Ritual aims for a much higher content density than most games do, meaning that players will hopefully enjoy spending time in the world to try things out and explore. "Things are destructible, things are all usable," said Mustaine. "We want to make sure that if the player presses 'use' on something, something will happen." To that end, Ritual designers watched testers during development to see how they tried to interact with the world in an attempt to fill in actions they may not have thought of initially. Said Mustaine, "Interactivity is our big bullet point." The physics system used in Valve's Source engine also underwent some tweaking. For example, different types of pressurized canisters will have different reactions to being hit with ammunition, and this will frequently also be affected by where the canister was puctured. The trajectories of objects you throw (by way of Gordon Freeman's patented Look Ma No Hands method) are affected by the angle at which you pick them up.

There are detailed interactive consoles, working appliances, various electronics to be turned on and off, and so on. You can also call a huge list of secret phone numbers from any in-game telephones and hear actual voices on the other end; Ritual accepted submissions for this particular bit and put the good ones in the game. Oh, and "the soda machines harass you too," notes Mustaine.

That whole interactivity thing extends to the overall gameplay as well. The game tracks an absolutely ludicrous number of statistics--your hit percentage, what weapons you use, what part of the body you typically aim for, how you try and outwit the AI, what environmental elements you're using as weapons, and so on. Many of the stats are easily viewable to the player by way of a series of charts and graphs. What they all do is dynamically adjust the difficulty of the game to suit the player's abilities. If you're sinking headshot after headshot, the enemies will decide it's time to start wearing helmets. If you're not fooled by the AI's tricks, you might see more of your enemies drop in from helicopters. This happens seamlessly; the point is to make sure that casual or unskilled players can still play through the game without being frustrated, and really hardcore gamers have enough challenge to keep their interest. Mustaine commented that "we had a hardcore CPL gamer sitting next to a guy who had never played an FPS before and they finished the whole game within 15 minutes of each other." While doing all this, the game will assign you a long nickname based on your in-game habits. One demo that was running described the player as an "elite bunny hopping magnum master." I was assured that there are an enormous amount of combinations.

There are some other interesting interactive features going on that specifically make use of the episodic nature of the game. The game also tracks what enemies the player kills and what enemies he doesn't, which can lead to a unique approach to continuity. If enough players, say 80%, complete a particular task, the designers will take that into account and ensure that the next episode treats that task as having been completed as part of the plot events. This might take the form of an enemy that the player isn't necessarily expected to kill, for example. "We're the only game I know of other than MMOs that does this," said Mustaine.

Continue to page 2 for this article's second episode. Oh, I slay me.

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