It didn’t follow the core values, in fact it was ”anti-Splinter Cell” with no shadowy stealth, goggles or sweet gadgets. It got a royal rebooting.
”When I got here there was a creative director on the team already,” Ubisoft’s Beland told GamePro in an interview for Splinter Cell: Conviction.
“The original idea for Conviction was to make the anti-Splinter Cell game. It was super interesting, and there was a lot of Bourne Identity influence to it, but the project was taking an awful lot of risks.”
”Taking a known franchise that has some set core values and some set expectations, and saying that you’re going to do a complete one-eighty on it is very, very risky.”
It was just too much of a break from the tried and true formula we’ve seen Sam Fisher put through all these years. The depth of changes scared the Ubi development team.
“If you’re doing a Splinter Cell game, you have to build on the core values. Stealth wasn’t there, it was now stealth in the crowd where Sam would try to blend in with lots of non-player characters that were walking through the environment. It was kind of like the stuff in Assassin’s Creed.”
”The cool gadgets weren’t there either. It was all improvised gadgets and using things you found in the environment as weapons and tools. Even the goggles were gone. The whole theme of light and shadow wasn’t there, either.”
”How do you make a Splinter Cell game without light and shadow?” Realism is important to the Splinter Cell universe says Beland. Simply resetting from a checkpoint breaks too much of the immersion for the player - it’s not the Animus with Altair or Ezio.
”When you’re making a Splinter Cell game though, one of your core values is realism. If you’re in a park and you blow up a propane tank on a hotdog stand and the crowd runs away, you just can’t expect that everyone will come back a minute later.”
”In real life, you know what would happen in a situation like that. People might die, others would run away, and the cops would come and close down the area. The world wouldn’t be able to reset for gameplay reasons,” added the producer.
Splinter Cell: Conviction releases on Xbox 360 this week, and on PC April 30th. Are you looking forward to the new adventures of Sam Fisher?
