It’s pretty easy to forget just how big of a deal Splinter Cell is when we’re surrounded by annual Assassin’s Creed releases and Metal Gear Solid coverage, but the game that provides one of the most enjoyably pure stealth experiences is also one of Ubisoft’s multi-million dollar landmark franchises.
Last year’s Blacklist saw the team opt to tell a different sort of story, losing veteran-voice Michael Ironside as hero Sam Fisher and instead recruiting younger actor Eric Johnson for the sake of motion-capturing some more intense cutscenes. It definitely peeved off some fans, but overall Blacklist was a return to the more stealth-focussed approach the earlier titles – and crowning achievement Chaos Theory – are still know for, as oppose to the more ragtag approach seen in both Double Agent and Conviction.
Luckily having been confirmed by Ubisoft a next-generation Splinter Cell is on the way, leading to fan-speculation kicking into overdrive as we ponder on everything from whether Ironside can return again – he’s almost 65 – to just how serious the game will take itself, and even if there’s more to be told about Fisher himself. Whatever happens the series itself has rarely faltered on the whole with fans sticking by it every step of the way, regardless of the sporadic direction changes.
10. Deal With Fisher Appropriately
As much as we love Michael Ironside – alongside Solid Snake he’s got the gruff-chops to be picked out on tone alone – he said himself in a Reddit AMA that “nobody wants to see a 65 year-old Sam Fisher bounce around on set [...] stumbling while he kills people” in response to the idea of him getting in any motion-capture suits.
What we propose – which was a popular theory when Ubisoft announced the switch Eric Johnson – is that Fisher retires to a support role, instead offering his advice and personality to a newly-trained recruit. We know there are multiple Splinter Cell agents in the world anyway – some more secretive than others – and if the person in question was trained by Fisher himself Ubi can get away with having some similar animations crossing over.
It would easily make for a more interesting story, solve the huge age problem the series has for when each instalment has taken place, and keep Ironside in the game but out of a mo-cap suit. Everybody wins.
9. Bring Stealth Back Properly
The early noughties were a funky time for video game design. Hot on the heels of the original Metal Gear Solid’s game-changing tactic of evasion and guard-watching, everybody and their granny started implementing stealth into their titles – with only a few doing it any justice.
Splinter Cell was one of a few that did, and being an Xbox exclusive it easily had the right kind of fire to take on Kojima’s ridiculously enjoyable masterpiece. By treating stealth in a far more realistic manner and letting us play the role of a badass skin-suited army-ninja with a penchant for dry humour and choking out terrorists, the very idea of saving the world by leaving a trail of bodies in your wake without the world even knowing your name was revolutionary.
Since then Metal Gear has veered into more action-territory for part four, and with Splinter Cell’s Double Agent, Conviction and even Blacklist the idea of taking on scores of terrorists has become a potential playing style. However Blacklist reintroduced that satisfactory feeling of being one triple green-light death-dealing blur amongst the carnage, making fans of such a once-dominating genre yearn for the king to re-assume his position.
8. Multiple Entry Points – Continue Intelligent Level Design
Apart from one great level set inside multiple floors of the same tight building there was scarce few to recommend inside Conviction, and with Double Agent’s focus on character’s being played off against each other it seemed the original trilogy’s fantastically-replayable environments had been lost.
It was with Blacklist though that suddenly we were scarpering back up stairs, scouting patrols from multiple vantage points and watching out for rogue zip-wires that could cut out sections of the level and allow for a totally different approach altogether. One of the most celebratory things about Blacklist was how well-balanced its different approaches to gameplay were in reaction to the world around you, and for SC 2015 we want to see more of this. Ubi can pull from another one of their titles in Deus Ex to connote that idea of seeing a good handful of potential entry points on your first time through that you’re already aching to replay straight after.
7. Ditch First-Person Shooting – Know Your Audience
We can only assume the strange-feeling first-person parts of Blacklist were intended to be a preparatory for the online Spies vs. Mercs mode, but it didn’t stop them completely derailing the very feeling of stealth that a Splinter Cell title should be about.
Most of us ended up crouch-walking around and popping headshots anyway just out of sheer refusal to play a SC game like Call of Duty, so it’s well worth saying that as much as Ubisoft are known for cross-pollinating their titles with mechanics from others, no Splinter Cell fan wants to take part in any mandatory first-person shooting sections.
In addition long-time fans will remember the initial teaser for what would eventually become Conviction that showed a more downtrodden homeless-looking Sam fighting police in a cafe, whilst also flipping tables as a sort of melee attack. The backlash was so strong that everything relating to that reveal sans just the environment itself was eventually removed, showing that above-all we just want more gameplay that’s routed in avoiding detection and stalking from the shadows, not fighting groups of guys like Batman orShadow of Mordor‘s Talion.
6. More Experimental, Contextual Kills
Something that always feels great in newer stealth titles like Blacklist, Shadow of Mordor or Assassin’s Creed is knowing that regardless of what direction or placement an enemy is to you, a quick reaction can save your hide. The first Splinter Cell introduced the ‘split jump’ that let you scarper up a thin corridor before waiting for your prey below, Chaos Theory the idea of leaping up to pull guys over ledges, and the AC games the idea of pouncing on multiple targets at once. But it’s always been in the combination of your entire repertoire of moves that we’ve had so much fun.
Part of the appeal in the original games was exploring every facet of the levels to experiment with what happened if you did something like throwing a guard off a balcony onto some glass below, or in Chaos Theory in particular just lobbing them off all manner of things to see how the ragdoll physics would cope. Strange? Absolutely, but that sense of experimentation with guard patrols and enemies in general is something that’s almost gone away completely in the last three titles.
With the general direction of level design going the way of allowing greater experimentation, there’s no shortage of unique situations we’re sure to find ourselves in – something that adding more kill-animations to every possible occurrence would make all the more enjoyable.
5. Further Expand Class-Based Multiplayer
It’s up for debate whether or not Blacklist’s Spies vs. Mercs multiplayer-reprisal was as warmly received as the original Pandora Tomorrow was. Part of the reason it soared so highly in the early day was because Xbox Live was so new, we were all introducing ourselves to each other nice n’ kindly, making sure to play every night.
Regardless of what a hovel for abhorrent language and screamed expletives that’s turned into, the very idea of counter-balancing first-person movement-restricted shooting with nimble third-person stealth based on which class you pick is one of the most unique multiplayer modes out there.
As the mode itself has seen various iterations or omissions over the years, we’re just hoping it essentially stays intact for next year’s announcement – bring on more great things like mixed teams, inverted expectations like forcing Mercs to stay still and hack turrets, and scores of gadgets to blow each other up with along the way.
4. Make Stealth The Priority Gameplay Choice
Depending on how much Ubi continue down the action-route it seems they’re a fan of with the likes of Assassin’s Creed’s one-versus-twenty battles, at least make the levels in such a way that stealth can be a primary focus that’s also the most rewarding.
In Blacklist we saw the option to suit Fisher up in more armoured gear along with various rifles and shotguns for the sake of taking on bad guys face-first. Although it could be fun to do this, it seems completely pointless to advance this further – after all there are hundreds of run n’ gun shooters where you can take cover and fill bodies full of lead all day long.
Splinter Cell can accommodate this direction if absolutely necessary, but as with Blacklist, A.I. and damage modifiers should remain in such a way that playing a Splinter Cell game like a Splinter Cell game reaps the richest rewards.
3. Create Awesome Interactive Set-Pieces
Pandora Tomorrow’s train level was a standout moment in a time when developers were still proving themselves with then-new hardware. We knew the Xbox was something of a powerhouse, but seeing an entire level set on a moving train was pretty mind-blowing.
Still today you’ll rarely see developers having the technical prowess to code levels that may crumble and deform as you go – only Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series springs to mind – but they stand out as a great way to do set-pieces; memorable standout moments that retain player agency without making them on-rails.
For the most part we’re all sick of overly-linear cutscenes punctuated by quick-time events that occasionally let up for the sake of holding the right trigger a bit, and considering how many compromising positions a super-spy can get themselves into, we’d love to see Ubisoft’s insanely high budgets being put to better use than just polishing out some character models.
2. A More Involving, In-Depth Campaign
For the most part the Splinter Cell games have always done their own thing on their terms, but one mechanic Ubi put into Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood that’s also in Metal Gear’s Portable Ops and Peace Walker, is the idea of assembling a team of soldiers that can take on other tasks while you handle the big jobs.
If we go off the aforementioned idea that Ironside ends up in a support role, it allows the Fisher character – or you, really – to dictate the direction Fourth Echelon goes in, whilst also championing another main character through a string of main missions. The idea of speccing new recruits in certain ways after you’ve nabbed them out in the field, only to then take control and shepherd their first mission would elevate the entire experience into something very different from what’s gone before.
Overall we need a more involving story, as whilst the by-the-numbers tale Blacklist told was a serviceable one, it just didn’t have the same calibre of sense of purpose previous titles did. Moments like that final gun barrel-to-gun barrel showdown with Shetland from Chaos Theory were great because of the inbuilt emotion we had for both parties – something that was completely missing from the final fight in Blacklist, despite Fisher and Sadiq both being played by regimented actors.
1. Near-Endless Replayability
At the end of the day it’s the core set of gameplay mechanics that’s always made the series so enjoyable over the years. Even in the first couple games we were constantly doing things like taking multiple cracks at the Chinese Embassy levels to see how we could take guards out, or leaving others alive in Pandora Tomorrow’s Kundang Camp airplane hanger just to shoot them whilst hanging upside down from above.
It’s things like this that prove the core gameplay of the series was fun in a purely experimental way, and as Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor proved with its myriad of side-missions that let you tackle swathes of enemies sans any overarching motive other than ‘these dudes need killing’ sometimes when gameplay is that polished, it’s all we need.
Blacklist saw a handful of optional missions available depending on which member of your crew you spoke too, but there just weren’t enough of them. We’re sure next-gen hardware could handle a few procedurally generated in-game assets such as building location and enemy placement within a given level – so why not utilise such a thing to give us randomised objectives, or change up assassination targets?
Even creating something of a mission-builder that the SC community can get stuck into would solve this too, with ranked leaderboards providing the most devoted players with a constant challenge.
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