Trivia / SiN Episodes: Emergence

• Follow the Leader: Clearly channels elements of Half-Life 2. From making Blade a Heroic Mime, giving him an Action Girl sidekick, physics-based gameplay elements, and even running on the same game engine that Half-Life 2 was built on.
• Franchise Killer: Ultimately ended up being the last installment in the franchise, with its planned episodes being cancelled and Ritual Entertainment shutting down.
• Stillborn Franchise: 8 more episodes were planned after Emergence, but they never came to pass. While Emergence sold well enough to cover its own costs, it wasn't enough to fund further episodes. Ritual Entertainment was bought out by MumboJumbo in 2007 and most of their key staff left the company when Ritual was assigned to mobile game development.
  • Former Ritual QA Manager Michael Russell says, contrary to popular wisdom, that Emergence did in fact sell well enough to fund further episodes. Episode 2 was about 30% completed and progressing well. What tanked the company's finances, instead, was a Quake IV expansion pack that Ritual had been developing - this expansion was not far off of being content and feature-complete before the plug was pulled by Activision, due to the low sales of Quake 4. Had it not been for this setback, SiN Episode 2 - and beyond - could well have seen the light of day.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Blade's Heroic Mime status in Emergence was, according to interviews, a result of Ritual assuming players wanted an unintrusive player character like Gordon Freeman. In an interview, the developers mentioned that they thought Blade worked better like this, but were surprised to learn that not only did fans react negatively to this, but that fan opinion on it was literally split down the middle. Had more episodes been made, Blade would have been voiced again, along with a toggle in the options menu to mute him.
  • Elexis was originally nude during the flashback/hallucination sequences in Emergence, but the increased scrutiny video games were receiving at the time from Moral Guardians thanks to the "Hot Coffee" scandal forced the developers to put her in a bikini.
  • Russell Meakim, a level designer for Ritual that worked on Sin Episode 1, talked in 2014 on the Quake 3 World forums about some of the features that could've made it into Sin Episode 2, had it been completed:
    • An underground cave lab with glowing crystals.
    • An underwater arboretum facility that was inhabited by a large plant monster.
    • New guns and new enemy types.
    • A shanty town built on the water of a dam, under threat of destruction if the dam were to flood.
    • Changes to how the mutagen slow-mo mechanic worked.
    • Interactive objects that required energy to function, and a device for Blade to suck energy from various elements to feed them.
    • Attachable power armour for the grunts that would give them enhanced abilities like boots to speed them up, arms for increased melee damage and the ability to lift heavy objects, and helmets for better accuracy.
  • A playthrough of Emergence uploaded by Michael Russell, aka RomSteady, who was QA Manager for Ritual during SiN Episodes' development, brought forth a veritable treasure trove of 'what-could-have-been' trivia:
    • Blade's fists were implemented in the game as a weapon during development, but problems with working with the Source engine resulted in bullet-like impacts resulting from punching the walls with sparks, debris, smoke and bullet hole decals. This was a result of the team basing the game off of the Source engine, which was made with a game in mind whose only melee weapon was a crowbar, where bullet holes and sparks coming off of things could be passed off as at least somewhat believable when striking a wall with it.
    • Contrary to prior interviews, RomSteady claimed that Blade was never intended to be mute at all, and the voice actor Eric Mills even had taunts and other dialogue recorded, but the team faced difficulties with the engine in getting global sounds to play, which was required for player dialogue, once again because the engine was designed for a game where player-character dialogue was not a priority. This was eventually resolved (and made it into the final game in the form of the codec, which features quick barks from both Blade and his sidekicks), but this was only implemented less than 6 months from the episode's ship date, too late to be fully implemented the way it was done in the first game.
    • The nine-episode series was planned to be presented as a 'trilogy of trilogies' - the first focusing on Radek's story arc, the second on internal-affairs-type drama going on within HardCorps, and the third wrapping up Elexis Sinclaire's story.
    • Emergence was planned to have a much longer stretch of time before the player was given a gun including a driving section and crate maze, but this was cut for pacing.
    • The series was intended to reveal that the rocket that split into four pieces at the conclusion of the first game had split Elexis up into four different versions of herself, each one having a different dominant personality: one digital, one managerial, one sexual and another one. The side emphasising Elexis' sexuality was injected into Blade in the form of the serum given to him at the beginning of the first episode, hence the visions of Elexis in her bikini and so on. The digital version appears in the form of the holograms of Elexis, who are distinct from the Elexis seen in person in the game's intro.
    • Episode two was to open with the player being tasked with tracking down Radek's crashed chopper to search for something that could be used to counteract the chemicals that Jessica was injected with at the conclusion of Emergence.
    • Radek would end up spending some time fighting alongside Blade in an unlikely alliance before being killed off in the third episode.
  • YouTuber Ross Scott alleges that in an email exchange, Sin longtime composer Zak Belica said that he wanted to include music that was more in line with the cyberpunk techno feel of the original game, but was prevented from doing so by management, citing fears that this music would 'alienate customers'. It was also mentioned that Zak had to fight to even get the theme song in for the game for Episode 1, but from Episode 2 onwards, he would have had full creative control for the game's soundtrack.

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