Sam Fisher’s been off the radar for a little while, Ubisoft having given the old lad some time off whilst they made that bloke in the hood from Assassin’s Creed their stealth-man of the hour. Well, the guy who pays Michael Ironside’s rent is coming back this year, in the long-delayed Conviction. In the CGI and in-game footage below, it’s clear this is an earthier, angrier, more brutal Fisher. Maybe he’s so grumpy because he just heard the Left 4 Dead 2 announcement?
This pre-rendered video sets the scene: Fisher as renegade, seeking revenge for the murder of his daughter, and claiming he’s done with hiding:
Then this in-game footage shows what manner of romp we’re in for: a much more hands-on Sam, eschewing gadgetry for more plausible tools such as mirror shards and, most importantly, those big, beefy hands of his. It’s a mess of familiar, uh, homages: 24, Bourne, Nu-Bond, that Liam Neeson Taken movie, the Manhunt games… Question is, is this Ubisoft actively wanting to take the series in a slightly different direction, or simply a -hey! – conviction that more out-and-out action games bring in the biggest bucks these days?
Looks a lot of fun, in an enormously sadistic way. I do like that he can now hand-shuffle across a ledge at ridiculous speeds. Clearly having a family member murdered makes your arms more powerful.
Splinter Cell: Conviction is due – when else? – this holiday season.
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Which one’s the one with the final level in the hotel with all the guards wearing IR so you have to hide in the light? Because that one was great.
And, for any other faults DA might have had, in contained Ironside’s best performance (in anything).
Has anyone here played da on last gen? Or the actually rather different pc and different developer next gen title? Last gen was montreal, the guys who made scct and the original splinter cell… Nevermind, lets let the ‘treyarch’ dev ruin the reputation of the ‘infinity ward’ developer.
@Funky Badger: You mean NODs not IR. Pandora Tomorrow had a level like that but there was only one guard with a sniper rifle.
It was one of the last two – all the guards had night-sights, so you had to hide in light. Wonderful level – think it was DA, come to think of it.
Also, yeah – finished DA on PS2 and it was great, started again on neXtBox and it was very different, and seemingly more rubbish…
Well jeez, those Special Ops guys would definitely have their laser sights on his HEAD. I mean c’mon… ;)
Displayed mission objectives are already arbitrary and outside of the universe: Might as well make them FLIPPIN’ AWESOME.
@Sigma83
I totally agree. Rather than press select to go to the menu screen, or have a pager pop up, or force the protagonist to ‘think out loud’, this just looks like a very cool way of doing it. Yes, it’s not very diegetic, but do you really care?
HUD of any kind is a nearly necessary evil, we may as well make it as amazing as possible.
The way it’s being displayed in this game makes it look cinematic, obvious without being overly obtrusive, and more importantly, does not ‘pop’ out of the world like normal HUD would. To me, this speaks of the objectives being apparent to Sam Fisher through his investigations and interrogations, rather than being handed over by the developers.
Christ that looks dull. Every tedious cliche going rolled into one uninspiring morass. Yawn.
When they advertised this as a video-game version of The Fugitive, I was totally on board. The Fugitive is one of my favorite movies.
This doesn’t look too bad, but deep in my gut there will be a jones unsatisfied.
Yay! more games!
Meh I’m not a huge stealth gamer, so I could no way call myself a fan of this series. But as someone who played through and enjoyed CT this doesen’t look all that.
I mean Splinter Cell was all about doing things slow and methodically, not shimmying along ledges faster than people can bloody sprint.
Having said that, I doubt if the way the demoer was playing is the way you could play on the PC on the hardest difficulty, with (presumably) no autoaim and little health (and Sam being the worst shot aside from a pre XP JC Denton). He was just trying to make the game look slick for the tards.
I LIKED the ultra-spy gadgets and black stealth-camo-fetish gear. Why take Sam away from his roots, you bad bad people?
“I’m not hiding any more” – Isn’t that essentially like Mario claiming he’s not jumping any more (or at least karting)?
Eh, excitement gone. Nevermind, maybe the multiplayer will be interesting, but hiding was splinter cell, take that away whats left?
OK, I think you guys missed the point of the video.
Let me paraphrase that with this: before seeing the video, having only watched the brief gameplay one from ~2 years ago, I had about the same worries. It seemed incredibly stupid to me to take away what had made the three good Splinter Cells (Original, Chaos Theory, Double Agent old-gen) great — i.e. surgical in-the-dark-sneakiness — and replace it with some weird, Jason Bourne-esque action chase mechanic aping Assassin’s Creed. And, while the developer playing seemed to be rather bad at his own game, there are some clues there that I think indicate Ubi’s done something else.
One of the intended goals of Conviction was to make sure that the gameplay wouldn’t “stop as soon as Sam was caught” — that is, so you wouldn’t have to resort to running back INTO the dark or face insta-death. So they made Sam competent — they gave him that neat auto-attack move and some parkour skills. This is good, but worrisome if not balanced by stealth. The thing is, I think it IS balanced by stealth; notice how the auto-attack thing has a charge time, meaning you can’t just do it in the middle of combat. You need to be HIDDEN in order to do it. Further, there are still plenty of shadows and niches in that video, particularly inside the mansion, and crowd cover is apparently a viable option (as on the market outside, to your right). So, while the developer playing obviously went for ACTION, it’s clear that stealth is still a central part of the game. It’s just not the end of the gameplay.
Watch the video again, see if you catch my meaning. Again, I fostered the same worries, but the potential for what I feel I can do in that level leaves me confident.
Also: story seems like great fun. Looks like Lambert is perma-dead after all. Yay!
EDIT: Ah, I see — this isn’t the full video. Try to find the E3 stream of the Ubisoft conference, where they showed the full demo level. Then you may see what I’m talking about a little better.
@Putty: I hope you are right, and the action-centric “enhancements” are there for an alternate option or when you screw up. I hope you can choose to do nearly everything with stealth and only need to resort to shooting it out when you err. I especially hope that you don’t have to be sadistic. I like the calm, detached Sam, although I’m glad there’s a good story reason for his rage.
But I fear my hopes will be unwarranted. I really think that they think we want more over-the-top action, and from the comments thus far many of us seem to want just that. Just look at the crop of upcoming games which all seem to be trying to outdo each other in, well, over-the-topitude.
CT was a masterpiece, which was why DA hurt so much. It pretty much epitomises “Dodgy console port”. There was NO love at all in it.
Honestly I’m really, really scared about Conviction. DA was like biting enthusiastically into an apple and getting a mouth full of razor blade. So, I’m going to require a demo as proof before I shell out for Conviction.
And for gods sake why wont they stop telling me they will release games in “Fall”. Two words: The World. They can say which quarter, if they MUST be vague.
I don’t understand the complaints.
Taken on it’s own that game looked a LOT of fun.
It actually reminded me of a simpler version of The Mark of Kri. Did anyone play that game?
@FRIENDLYUNIT
Don’t worry, as I already said, this is made by the same studio that made the only two good games in the seires (the origional and CT). The PT and DA bullshit were made by some chinese studio.
OK Putty, I’m trusting you. I just hope that they’re not taking him and making him “darker” in absence of any real inspiration for the series direction.
I, for one, wouldn’t rent an apartment pointed by a huge sign saying “kill everyone inside!!!”
http://e3.gamespot.com/press-conference/ubisoft-e3/
60-75 mins.
I’ve never played any Splinter Cell, I wonder how easy it will be to um… ease into it.
Alot of the time it’s just a question of how easy you want it to be. For example in SC there’s a level where you have to kidnap an CIA bureaucrat, you’re not allowed to kill anyone during the mission but you can knock out as many people as you like. The next level you have to rescue a programmer from the Spetsnaz, you can either sneak around the majority of them or you can kill them all!
Lambert usually gives your ROE and what you’re objectives are. Afterwards it’s really all upto you. But always remember to hide all the bodies.
@Grey_Ghost
Chaos Theory is the easiest game to get into – the feedback from the interface is the best (with the visibility AND audio meters), the game controls much more fluid than the earlier games and the 3-alarms-and-you’re-out gameplay is gone (including a humorous fourth-wall breaking in-game debate about it not being a game), replaced by each alarm resulting in just more and/or tougher (armoured) enemies.
It also just happens to be the best game in the series.
I really liked this trailer, i think its a game i can get into, but the trailer didn’t scream splinter cell to me. The neat thing about Fisher in older splinter cells is he wasn’t a super hero, he was awesome but didn’t get in machine gun battles with mutant aliens while riding burning battleships off waterfalls, he was stealthy and careful.
That said, sitting in a shadow for 3 minutes memorizing a patrol route doesn’t sell trailers, and i assume he gets his wetsuit and gadgets back after the black helicopter guys take him back to Washington.
Interrogate everyone, they are all hilarious. The guy in japan who won’t accept that you are not a ninja, awesome.
I didn’t think Double Agent was as bad as some in this comment thread have made out, inferior to Chaos Theory and more than a touch disjointed sure, but not outright shite (I did play it on 360 mind, so I didn’t have to put up with the porting issues). Although the nay-sayers have spurred me to finally pick up the original Xbox version to see what Ubi Montreal came up with, which should be interesting.
As for Conviction, it looks to be shaping up reasonably well although it’s a shame the beard had to go.