Ubisoft’s original Splinter Cell was essentially a genre of its own when it released back in 2002. The brilliant action-stealth game was inspired by the deep systems-driven gameplay of immersive sims, such as Warren Spector’s Deus Ex and System Shock, although its storytelling methods were much more mainstream.
Speaking to FRVR in the latest episode of the FRVR Podcast, Splinter Cell designer Clint Hocking explained their belief that immersive sims signalled the true potential of games as a medium. “I think we all thought, like, this is what games are going to be, right?” Hocking told us. “This is the future of games.”
To say that immersive sims inspired Splinter Cell is an understatement. From the offset, the action-stealth game was designed with systems in mind. Guards can see and hear the player, the texture of floor you’re walking on designates how much sound you make. While Hocking believes the series’ third game shows the true potential of Splinter Cell as a series, the first game was designed as an immersive sim.
However, as an immersive sim title, Splinter Cell had a unique challenge in its design. As a game designed around a specific story with specific goals, Hocking explained that it was a unique and very difficult challenge to match the games’ unique set of systems to its single-thread narrative.
“I think the first Splinter Cell, we really struggled trying to figure that out,” Hocking said. “In particular, trying to figure out how to make sure the story moves forward in a way that doesn’t feel imposed and that doesn’t, you know, constrain the player action too much. And very often, like, very often, I think we failed a that.”
The original Splinter Cell has a number of what Hocking deigns “very punishing sequences”. While titles like Chaos Theory would work harder to make it so that the player wasn’t constrained into a specific path, the original game has multiple sequences where player freedom is eliminated in favour of story.
Hocking explains that there are “sequences that would really force you to do things in a certain way”. One level that has really stuck with the game designer is the game’s eighth mission, the Chinese Embassy, where players must rapidly rush a door and use their thermal vision to uncover a door code with just seconds on the clock.
The game designer explained that an immersive sim fail state should simply be failing to get into a room, but failing to get into a room in a very specific way. “If you get through the door any other way, you just get a mission failure,” Hocking said. “It’s not that you fail to get through the door. It’s that you failed to use the thermal vision to read the numbers on the keypad to get through the door, which is like kind of really not very immersive sim-y and very, very frustrating.”
This bugbear is one of the main forces behind the design philosophy of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Instead of having fail states due to failing to perform specific actions, the game is more focused on providing multiple opportunities to complete your task.
“On Chaos Theory, we definitely wanted to fix that problem of the original Splinter Cell not really being an immersive sim. If you again, in Splinter Cell, if you know this keypad door thing just drives me crazy And I’ve thought about it every fay for the last 25 years…
“Very early on Chaos Theory, we just made the rule like there is no game over unless you die. Like that’s it. The only way you get game over is if you die. I think there’s maybe one level or one part of one level where we require you to die [or] stay undetected ‘cause it’s a stealth-game-trope-thing.”
Chaos Theory’s design was challenging, and it required the team to design the game and its story in a very different way to the original game’s. “It was extremely challenging,” Hocking said, although players might feel that the game is very similar in a structural way. In the end, Chaos Theory, despite having some difficult levels, is “a lot less punishing and a lot more liberating”, and it is a much better game as a result.
Right now, Ubisoft is working on a remake of the original Splinter Cell. The upcoming stealth game has been in development for a number of years at the time of writing, however, there is currently no known release date.
