Sin Episodes: Emergence

Up until the 1.4 patch, we only received data from players when they explicitly opened the Stats interface, navigated to the last panel, and pressed "Upload Stats", an undocumented feature. As a result, initially a very small percentage of players actually submitted statistics for us. Further, they could do this at any time; so many players submitted stats at the beginning of the game, rather than at the end of the game. Even so, we received thousands of submissions and we are very thankful for everyone who voluntarily submitted. It has helped us better understand our community's play-styles.

This graph shows the bell curve of time played vs. percentage of players that played for that duration. Again, we see the 4.5 hour mark as being the average time. Here we can see that most people complete the game around 5 hours. There is an upswing after the 12 hour mark; this represents all the folks who take longer and probably the players looking for all the secrets.

Number of secrets found in the game vs. percentage of players who found that many. The number drops off sharply, which we believe indicates that most players do not explicitly look for secrets. In the future we'll be collecting data to determine which secrets were most found and when, so we can get more data towards players' attitudes towards secrets. Up until the 1.4 patch, there was no way to capture every secret in the game due to a bug. This has finally been fixed!

This bar graph shows the percentage of kills for each weapon in our game. The magnum is the clear winner, though that is probably because it is the first weapon you get. We worked very hard to make all the weapons equally beneficial; hopefully in subsequent episodes we'll see these numbers even out even more.

This graph simply shows how many times people died per level. Much like a traditional single-player game, the most deaths come at the end of the game. When we originally built SiN Episodes Emergence, the Personal Challenge System (our dynamic difficulty system) didn't exist. Even though the experience between one player and another can be dramatically different in terms of challenge, for any given player the end of the game is still much more challenging than the beginning.

We were curious to know what challenge level players would choose. The default value, 20, gives what we believe to be a good experience for most casual players. So we left a lot of room for folks to raise the value, and of course room to lower it. We split the 100 possible settings up into 4 buckets, to get the pie-chart you see here.

Our assistance slider was a unique feature that allows you to control how quickly the game helps you out when you get stuck. It really lets you tell the game what kind of experience you want. We had players at Ritual who never ever want help and players who like a really tough challenge but get frustrated quickly. The default value was 50, so we can see that a lot of players chose to get more help when they got stuck. Once again we've split the 100 possible settings up into 4 buckets.

Below are the top 10 scores for HardCORPS mode. These scores are anonymous because our data collection is anonymous. Regrettably the scoring model for HardCORPS mode is a lot different then for Arena Mode; that is why you see much smaller scores here compared to Arena Mode.