It’s 2002, and I’m renting some game called Splinter Cell from Blockbuster. After spending about an hour deliberating over the moral, emotional, and philosophical repercussions of my choice to ensure I had chosen the right game, I settled on it. The box promised ground-breaking stealth action, and hell I was 11 years old what did I know, the guy had on night vision goggles that’s all I cared about. I fired up the game and was kind of disappointed in the fact that it wasn’t Halo: CE, but as I figured out how things worked I stopped caring about trying to rack up the highest body count and started having a blast sneaking around like a ghost. I loved that series.
Now it’s 2012. I tried to play Splinter Cell: Double Agent, but really wasn’t into it. The series was starting to lose its stealth and starting to focus more on being “bad ass”. I didn’t even bother with Convictions, not because I heard it was short, but because it just looked so mediocre and boring. Now we have this.
It really speaks for itself. I remember being astonished by the trailer for Splinter Cell Blacklist at E3. Not the good kind of astonished. Splinter Cell seems to be one of the latest casualties in the on going war between major developers and the games that made them their money. Some things to take away from the trailer would be the blatant lack of stealth; for instance using an air strike to take out a machine gun mounted on the back of a truck instead of, oh, I don’t know, sneaking around it. Why do you need to use an air strike? Well partly because you have the President’s permission to do anything to “protect our laws” and partly because you just burst out of a tent and shot 4 people in the face. I’m not even going to go into the overt nationalism and blatant propaganda in the game.
This trailer here gives a little bit of hope, but still, the “stealth” in the game is literally just following a path that was laid out and conveniently easy to follow. Like one of the commenters on the video said, why play a game that plays itself? The one bit of stealth was the last part of the first area where Sam sneaks past the guard that was wearing blinders. Hopefully the FOV for the enemies will be widened, however.
These trailers by themselves aren’t so depressing, but their inclusion in a growing set of games that have been over-hauled to “expand the audience” is. I’m going to go play Chaos Theory and cry in the corner.
lyk dis if you a strng acshun hro that dn’t need no stelth
Muh fifth fredoms
That trailer sure looked stealthy. I liked the part where he snuck past guards instead of fighting them.
No stealth, no Michael Ironside, no thanks
lol night vision goggles in broad day light.
I remember briefly playing the original (or maybe the first sequel) when it came out, but wasn’t patient enough with it back then. Can you go into deeper detail about how the first game more successfully worked as a stealth game?
Besides that glaring lack of knowledge on my part, I think it’s interesting that a lot of different genres are blending into action games. Someone did a great video on this site about how horror games are morphing more into “survival” games, something I definitely felt when I was playing through “Alan Wake” recently. Might that be because developers of many games (at least bigger budget titles) feel the need to make them more “cinematic” in terms of cut scenes, scripted events, and high-tension interactivity? I’m interested in Splinter Cell specifically because I do know some of its previous iterations were lauded for their stealth mechanics.
Well in the originals you had night vision goggles, a fiber optic camera to peak under doors, a knife, and you weren’t allowed to kill people during most missions. You were supposed to be a ghost that no one saw. There were levels that allowed you to kill people, but not an entire game like this one.
You also generally relied on darkness to hide you, shooting out light bulbs and hiding in dark places until you could move onwards. You didn’t have some pre-made path for you to stumble upon, you just had to figure out the guard’s sweep patterns and do your best to get through. You had various other gadgets, but nothing like this super-sonic see everybody on the map bs.
It was actual stealth. You sneaked past guards, you didn’t just walk around them. You can grab the original Splinter Cell and Chaos Theory for $10 a piece on Steam if you want. That’s really the best way to differences in the games.
Convictions was actually pretty fun. The only real problem was that it was called Splinter Cell first. It’s a pretty good action/stealth game that feels pretty good. There really isn’t any harm in it’s existence. I’d say Batman is more to blame for the new approach on stealth now.
The thing that baffles me most is how Sam Fisher went from being in his late 40s/early 50s in Chaos Theory, and then slowly unaged through Double Agent and Conviction and now this game, becoming some sort of prime-of-his-life parkour/speed shooting master.
I can’t wait for the game after this one, where Sam Fisher is 21 and doing wall-jumps with a sword and there is like a cloud of that floating text Ubisoft games have been using since Conviction introduced them. Press X to to torture for valuable information!
I assume that the creators are applying Hyper Time.
Is anyone else bothered by the concept that the president “grants” freedoms to us? Funny, I thought our rights were inalienable…
Well the “5th freedom” thing is from the very beginning of the series. The whole idea was for the other freedoms to be inalienable this 5th freedom was granted to certain people to protect the others by any means necessary.
Ahh… thanks. I’ve never played them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVMiyOG-9uM
Oh my God. How retarded the sneak play through is… My grandma would spot that idiot and I am not even talking about the dog…
i liked conviction, despite some of the non stealthy sections. but this :,(