SiN: Episodes Emergence

Return of the SiN

The fine tribesmen of Ritual Entertainment have some really hot stuff cooking for 2006: SiN Episodes will success the late 90s shooter SiN and there is another, still unannounced project. Even though the process on SiN: Episodes Emergence is nearing completition, they had the time to answer a couple of our questions:

First off, how final is the first episode of SiN: Episodes, Emergence, and what can players expect after a five year break from John Blade and Elexis Sinclaire?

SiN Episodes: Emergence is currently on the homestretch. We’ve got all the levels built and playable, and we’re now in the polishing and bug fixing phase of the project.

SiN Episodes is going to expand on SiN’s trademark features like interactivity, vehicles and fun weapons, with everything being wrapped up in a character-driven story.

Cannon, Jessica Cannon

Emergence takes place four years after SiN. Elexis Sinclaire is back and, despite Blade’s efforts, still in control of SinTEK Industries. Blade, frustrated by his failure to bring her down, has grown bitter and sarcastic, and he’ll stop at nothing to destroy Elexis for good this time.

As before, Blade is backed up by his resident tech whiz JC, as well as a new character named Jessica Cannon. Jessica is actually going to go on missions with Blade, and although she sometimes loses control of her temper, she’ll prove to be real asset to HardCorps.

In the first episode, Blade and Jessica are hot on the heels of Viktor Radek, a local crimelord they suspect is running an illegal drug operation in the docks of Freeport. But what’s looking like a routine assignment soon turns out to be way more than they bargained for.

Probably the biggest fuzz the announcement of SiN: Episodes stirred was the concept of episodic gameplay. What exactly made you choose that form and where are the advantages to a normal release of a “complete” game?

By going episodic, we can get a steady stream of content to gamers. Instead of having to wait years and years for a follow-up to your favorite game, you’re only going to have to wait a few months. The modding community also benefits from this by getting a regular influx of new textures, models, and so on, for their projects.

Episodic distribution also has the advantage of coming with a lower price point than traditional games. Instead of having to pay 50 dollars for an 8 – 10 hour game you might not even end up liking, you can get one of our episodes for significantly less than 20 dollars. That gets you 4 – 6 hours of action-packed gameplay for less than the price of a music CD.

Another upside of episodic content is the ability to incorporate community feedback into upcoming episodes, which I’ll get into in a moment.

You also promised you would use some of the suggestions the fans would make in the episodes to follow – of course, within reasonable dimensions. Is that still an aim for Ritual?

Absolutely. There are actually several ways for the fans to influence the game.

Since the development cycle of each episode is so short, we can integrate feedback from the community into the next the episode. This feedback we can gather either via our forums or online surveys, kind of similar to what we’ve done with the multiplayer survey on the SiN Episodes website. If a feature is well-liked by our audience, we’ll expand and build on it, while we can improve or drop aspects that are received negatively.

We will also be using Steam’s ability to track how players respond at certain decision points in the game for something we call Global Action-Based Outcomes. These ABOs are basically events with multiple possible outcomes that are decided by the choices made by the community. So if the majority of players blows up a building in one episode, it won’t be there in the next.

Autor: Lennart Dahmen (ld)
Erstellt am: 08. Februar 2006, 21:34 CET