Ritual Entertainment and Valve announced that SiN Episode 1: Emergence will be available in retail outlets on May 9, 2006. Distributed throughout Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand by Electronic Arts, Emergence is the first in a new series of episodic adventures from Ritual that are powered by the Source game engine technology developed by Valve.
SiN Episode 1: Emergence, available for the PC, will offer explosive first person shooter experiences that reintroduce and re-imagine the world of SiN for the new millennium. Emergence, the first in this series of episodic adventures, expands on the role of Colonel John R. Blade and features never before seen weapons, characters, and environments.
Valve's decision to release the Half-Life 2 expansions in episodes has rekindled interest in episodic releases which, for those of you not clear on the subject, means that the content is not adequate to label the project a full game. According to Ritual's CEO, Steve Nix, the episodic format for Sin was also a result of consultation with Valve, Valve thought it was a cool idea, and we knew they wanted to start doing an episodic format with their games as well. Another benefit of the episodic format is that you can produce content with a reduced budget and can funnel revenue into the next episodes. So sales from Episode 1 will affect the development of Episodes 2, 3, 4 etc.
Provided Ritual can sustain the stream of Sin based episodes and given their competence at producing interesting games, we should expect the Sin games to stay in the limelight for a long while. For a first look at the game have a look at the Sin Episodes: Emergence Movie, offering some in-game footage.
