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Splinter Cell Conviction Director: Splinter Cell Has Been Too Hard

Posted March 22, 2010 by James Brightman

Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell franchise is about to enter its fifth iteration. It remains one of the French publisher's hot properties, but like any game franchise, series fatigue is always a concern. Tomb Raider is probably one of the best examples (before Crystal Dynamics took over for Core and breathed some new life into Lara Croft). With Ubisoft preparing to ship Splinter Cell Conviction in just a few short weeks (April 13) for Xbox 360 and PC, we sat down with Creative Director Max Beland back at GDC to get his take on keeping the franchise fresh. 

Interestingly, Beland says he went through a similar situation with another Tom Clancy series: Rainbow Six. "It was actually a reflection similar to the one we had on Rainbow Six: Vegas, which was basically Rainbow Six 5. When you're working on a big franchise you need to stick to the core values. Otherwise, you kind of get lost and you're not doing the franchise anymore – you're doing something else. So the first thing we did was evaluate, 'What are the values of Splinter Cell?' From there we identified which ones we liked and didn't like and which ones we wanted to monitor," he said. "That gave us something very clear; the more we were talking to gamers and the more we were talking to the internal Ubisoft people, what came out was the fantasy of playing Splinter Cell, the fantasy of light and shadows, the fantasy of gadgets and Sam Fisher, the elite stealth agent. People want to be that guy."

So clearly, the game world and characters are still appealing to people, but the game's difficulty and lack of accessibility has been hampering its success, Beland found. "But what was coming up all the time was, 'Man, that game's hard. I played the first map and I stopped. It was too difficult.' So we had a clear player fantasy that we wanted to continue to deliver, but it was clear that we weren't delivering it properly or well enough since people were not sticking to it. They were not finishing the games we were making and the sales were stagnating. If you look at the sales of Splinter Cell 1 versus Splinter Cell 4, they go a little bit down. So, our fantasy was good but we needed to approach it differently. What we decided to do was change how we thought about the stealth genre in general."

Who doesn't love a good window kill?

He continued, "So instead of making the stealth genre something that's slower... very hit or miss and learn by your mistakes, we decided to turn that inside out. If you're the best elite agent in the world, if you're Sam Fisher, why do you have to hang off a ledge and move at one centimeter per minute? Why are we doing that? So we started asking ourselves all these [sorts of] questions, and we decided that we're going to make you the ultimate predator. Instead of forcing the stealth on the player, where you're seen and the alarm rings and you need to re-try, we're going to do the opposite. We're going to make stealth something you want to use. We want you to be a predator, not a grandmother. Being a grandmother before kind of forced you to be stealth. You need to hide in the shadows because if you're seen, they shoot you and you're dead. But what if we make the shadows something that's interesting and makes you powerful and you use as a tactical tool against your enemies? So that's how we're able to approach our franchise differently while staying true to the values." 

Stay tuned for the full interview with Beland, in which we discuss the evolution of Splinter Cell, platform exclusivity, the impact of motion controls like Natal and more.

James Brightman has been covering the games industry since 2003 and has been an avid gamer ever since the days of Atari and Intellivision. He was previously the EIC of GameDaily Biz.