Speaking with AusGamers, Ubisoft‘s Kristjan Zadziuk, who is currently working as animation director for Splinter Cell: Blacklist, said that Splinter Cell Conviction was a necessary step towards Blacklist, although the upcoming game is more refined and gives more options.
Well, I think Conviction was a necessary step. I think no matter how much the fans had loved the game, there was always going to be… I mean, the hardcore are always the loudest, right? So I think we knew with Conviction, that we needed to create that step, so we could actually get to Blacklist. There’s mechanics we’ve still got from Conviction — we’ve obviously still got the mark and execute, and that is in Blacklist, but in Blacklist, we’ve evolved it, and we’ve brought in the hand to hand with that, with the new perfectionist mode. We also allow the ability to mark, but we don’t allow the ability to execute.
So we started to use tools that we created in Conviction, and using the dialogue from the fans, we’ve also brought back a lot of the feeling and the feel of the fan favourite, which is Chaos Theory. So we really, truly feel that Blacklist is a nice kind of marrying of those with Conviction. And this again, is probably part of the reason why we went to E3 last year, because we had that, I suppose, an actionyversion of Splinter Cell.
It also seems like Blacklist will have some cutscenes in order to get a “cinematic” feel, in contrast with Conviction which never pulled the player away from gameplay.
We’ve obviously changed from Conviction, where the philosophy was that they never wanted to pull you out of gameplay. With Blacklist, we’ve gone with a more cinematic feel. That is a change in philosophy that is maybe because of the new studio, but also, we found with Conviction, that the pace was sometimes hard to keep up with. If you just use one camera, and you’re never cutting, and you’re trying to make sure that the camera is… it slows things down, and it restricts the amount of stuff you can do.
We’ve managed to cut from different perspectives, and we can tell a story from all of these different angles now, which we couldn’t have done in Conviction. We’ve also got this brand new performance capture studio, which we really wanted to give its legs to. So at some points we’ll have sixteen or seventeen actors on stage at once, and they’ll all kind of be reacting and riffing off each other. That would have been hard to do in Conviction, with one camera move.
I think that where I stand on that, is that I’m a gameplay guy. I’d like to keep it in-game as much as we possibly can, but we also know that sometimes, as you said, to tell the story properly, and to get that point across in the quickest, most efficient way possible, sometimes you have to go a bit more cinematic. I think as long as it’s appropriate, I think that’s ok.
In related news, Splinter Cell: Blacklist has just gone gold. Sam Fisher’s new adventure will hit PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and WiiU on August 20 in North America and August 23 in Europe.
