As Ubisoft preps the latest Splinter Cell entry for release in a few short months, there has been a flurry of news regarding details on the latest thriller. Sam Fisher will return in Splinter Cell: Blacklist but with a few changes that will surely expand the series. Creative director Maxime Béland (pictured above) has openly stated in an interview that Splinter Cell: Conviction, the most action-orientated entry in the series up till now, was in his words, a “rescue job”. Beland was brought into the Ubisoft family to rescue the series. In the two years after Conviction’s release, Beland and his co-workers listened to the complaints many fans of the series had.
Gamers stated to Beland and his team that they felt Conviction’s single player campaign was “too short, and the scope of the game wasn’t big enough.” In response to this, Blacklist will feature a “much bigger” campaign, plus co-op and the return of the fan favorite “Spies vs. Mercs” mode. “The game will is also being designed to allow for as much player freedom as possible when it comes to choosing between action and stealth approaches” Beland stated.
“We have these three player profiles, player archetypes in our heads,” Béland said. “We have the ghost player, that doesn’t want to kill or get detected. We’ve got our action/tank/killer player on the other end of the spectrum, that just wants to throw frag grenades, blind fire, shoot people in the head. And then in the middle, we have what we call the panther. So we’re building the game with those three archetypes in mind.” He then added, “I’m not going to tell you, but I know exactly how many moments you’re not going to be able to play stealth. We’ve minimized those as much as possible.”
Being a fan of Splinter Cell since its very first teaser trailer released over 10 years ago, I have no doubt that the series rests in good hands with a creative team such as this. Splinter Cell: Blacklist will be hitting American shelves in March of 2013 for the PC, Ps3, and Xbox 360. For more news on this or any other topic, be sure to keep it locked onto Gamers Xtreme, and as always, “Game On!”
