It’s been several years since he was mentioned, teased, even shyly given lip service. Today it’s official: Ubisoft announces the return of the Splinter Cell license, which will go through the remake box.
The very first episode of the adventures of Sam Fisher, released on the Xbox of the same name in 2002, will therefore be the subject of a remake in appropriate form. During a new episode exclusively for helmets Oculus Meta allowed the Splinter Cell saga to return to the top of the stage, and eight years after the episode Blacklist was released, Ubisoft Toronto is once again honored to offer the series a second youth.
Stick to the truth
Since a lot of water has flowed under the bridges since the remarkable disappearance of Sam Fisher and no picture is currently available, Ubisoft prefers to rely on nostalgia and reminds in a ten-minute video why Splinter Cell has established itself from its founding work as the new strong license of Publisher. Almost 20 years later and after a long absence, it was necessary from the start to go through the remake box to restart the machine, as part of the already formed team explains:
A remake takes the elements of a remaster and goes a little further. The first Splinter Cell did many amazing and revolutionary things when it hit the market 19 years ago. The “gamer” audience now has an even finer palate, and I think we need to do a remake rather than a remaster. While we’re still in the early stages of development, we’re trying to make sure that the spirit of the early games stays intact and that the Splinter Cell identity is maintained. We’re going to keep its linear feel like the original games and not make it an open world.
The developers at Ubisoft Toronto therefore intend to keep the infiltration aspect that made the salt of Splinter Cell, and wisely break with the overly systematic application of an open world in recent Ubisoft productions:
In a Splinter Cell Map, every square inch is intentional. Every square centimeter is part of a selection or offers a direct selection, a direct branch. This density of play is in the foreground in Splinter Cell and is a parameter that will be very, very important for us. The gaming experience we are striving for has to capture the essence of what players may have felt back then.
Between tradition and modernity?
To restart the Splinter Cell adventure, Ubisoft Toronto is using the Snowdrop engine, the same proprietary engine that will run next-generation Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and the future Star Wars game announced earlier this year.. The remake will therefore have the difficult task of bringing the license into a certain form of modernity, but also of making known to a new audience that has had enough time to take revenge on competitor Hitman:
It has been a long time since the first Splinter Cell, and even the last – enough time to miss out on an entire generation of consoles. Now let’s take the time to figure out what that means for us in terms of light and shadow, and think about animation technology, gameplay, AI, and even audio. We will ask ourselves, “Where does it make sense for us to innovate? What not only fits the legacy, but brings the game to a level that is expected of us” and how can we surprise our players? ? ” We want to offer them something new and at the same time connect them to the feeling they had two decades ago when they played this masterpiece for the first time.
With the base team already in place, Ubisoft Toronto is now officially recruiting to make Splinter Cell Remake, which – hopefully – should be released on next-gen PC and consoles.
