Splinter Cell is being remade!

 What's that chill running up my spine?

There's never just one side to a popular genre, unless I guess we're talking about the trailblazing Strand-like genre! (Although that example in particular is likely to remain one-of-a-kind now that PlayStation has gone ahead and trademarked its unique systems.) Which is why someone who loves the stealth side of gaming like me is going to be intimately familiar with both of it's leading faces. Yes, I said both. For whereas Metal Gear is the series that I've chosen to take into my heart, many others credit the best this genre has to offer to another popular title: Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell. A few years back I decided to enrich my personal culture a bit and play through every single entry of the series I could get my hands on (Pandora Tomorrow is still absent from Steam for some reason) and I cottoned onto to the rampant adoration people have with the series. And thus I could feel a shade of the sadness they regularly exposit, considering the series is considered on-ice. Or rather it was.

Having Ubisoft as the holders of your favourite IP is like watching a seagull make away with your freshly cooked packet of chips; you just know you ain't seeing that again. Unless you happen to be in love with their three stooges game series; Assassin's Creed, Watch Dogs and Tom Clancy lite (their bastardised vision of Tom's series') you can fully expect to be out of luck. And in fact, even if you are into one of those series' you may be out of luck anyway. Sam Fisher and his various undercover sneaking exploits across the espionage world were beloved by many back in their prime, and despite sharing the Tom Clancy brand we haven't seen a new title since 2013's Blacklist. Oh, but Ubisoft were more than happy to pick from the bones of the franchise for their little cross-over Clancy-verse moments, slapping the Fourth Echelon name on anything that blinks. Heck, they even roped in the original VA for Sam to do some small recording jobs for Ghost Recon's newest games. To be frank, Ubisoft hasn't shown Splinter Cell much respect, which is why it's with very mixed emotions that I read how Splinter Cell is apparently getting a remake.

I think my concerns start with the base news. A 'Remake'? Why. No seriously, why in the hell would you make a remake of a series which still has so much untold? For god sake, they ended the last game on the same damn cliffhanger that Conviction ended on, straying dangerously close to Metal Gear/ Deus Ex conspiracy theorist territory all the while. Wouldn't it make more sense to pursue some of that? But instead what we're receiving is touted as a remake that hopes to capture that nascent spirit that the early series exhibited. Which again confused me. Are they talking about the earliest games, where everything was strictly linear to such a line that you were explicitly told what weapons to use at what point in a mission? Or are they actually playing to the crowd and saying that they're basing this on the fan favourite entry, Chaos Theory? (A claim also made when the team was marketing Blacklist, it must be remembered.) Does the team know what they're even doing with this remake, because they're not really selling it me.

In my mind, when I allow the cynicism to fully wash over me and candidly ask: why would they even consider a reboot the series, I only land on one viable answer- it's about Sam. Or rather, his voice actor. For years Michael Ironside served as the voice and personality of Sam Fisher, bringing his iconic delivery as a veteran actor to the role. His voice was beloved, his wisdom fit the role and people cried tears of blood when he gave up the role for Blacklist because he could no longer feasibly do the mocap. (Which to this day remains a bizarre excuse. It's a video game, we don't need the mocap to match the voice!) The new guy was fine, but bland. Lacking charm and charisma which failed to distract away from the dialogue which was pretty poor too. Consensus seems to be that Blacklist was written worse than previous entries, but I think that game just marked the first time people realised that Splinter Cell actually never had the best writing in general.

With a reboot the team can successfully recast Sam Fisher and all we fans can do is bite or lips and go "Darn, well I guess that does make sense." I think that tracks, because otherwise there's literally no justification for this reboot decision and I'd have thought that Ubisoft themselves had forgotten how narratively bare the first game actually is. (I assume they're rebooting 1, right? Heck, who knows- after the travesty they created during the Prince of Persia reboot, nothing is beneath them.) This will also give them the chance to try and tie in this new nowhere storyline they've been drip feeding Sam Fisher through his Ghost Recon cameos, although to be honest those are voiced by Ironside so maybe they'll look to drop that altogether too.

Looking at the positives, this will be the first time we can see what a new gen AAA stealth title can look like thanks to the self immolation of Splinter Cell's keymost rival, curtsey of Konami. Who knows how this could innovate AI packages, lighting effects, environmental interaction, the openness of levels and just all that innumerable good stuff which makes the future of gaming seem so bright? Some floating rumours here and there cropped up claiming that this title would be open world, which has thankfully been outright denied at the same time as the project being announced. Of course, that doesn't discount the team taking full advantage of the next gen hardware to create huge sprawling levels with interweaving guard patrol routines and stealth mechanic systems which could all shake hands harmoniously without the memory limit jumping out of the console and literally throttling the user. But that's the best case scenario and we're talking about Ubisoft...

So you know already that this means the Ubisoft higher-ups are making serious discussions about the viability of NFTs being implemented, don't you? And they are coming, don't you worry. Yves 'Le Rat' Guillemot has weighed in on the discussion about NFTs being poorly implemented into Breakpoint by letting everyone know that this is just the beginning, whilst simultaneously vomiting enough toothless marketing gibberish to cotton everyone onto the fact that, guess what, the idiot doesn't even know what NFTs are! Or at least he has no idea what they represent, how they operate and what he can do to utilise them in art! He's so far out of his depth it's laughable, and I'll bet he's just holding onto the craze hoping someone with more talent peeps a head in his office and of-hand mentions an actually viable and clever way they can take actual advantage of this tech, so he can gratefully steal that idea and claim he came up with the whole thing. Instead he want's to use them purely for their digital signature and the second hand market, easily replicable without any blockchain work thanks to the fact we're talking about an online game with data that can be kept server side. Seriously, if there's any greater indication that your CEO is too far out of touch to run the bleeding edge anymore, let this (and the past 10 years of the studio) be your neon-studded red floodlights!

And if the NFT thing has run out of steam by then, it'll be a booster store. Or micro DLC. Or any number of the eye-rollingly cliché dime snatching techniques that the hacks in Ubisoft head office regurgitate with glee. Splinter Cell is walking a tight rope supported by a studio that seems woefully incompetent at any remote form of innovation, dangling over a pit of bad decisions that same studio regularly makes. It makes one not too confident on the eventual quality of this game, even if we are as early in development as the news is claiming. So despite the fact it kills the little kid inside of me who wants to jump up and down so badly, I've got to cut my losses early and say this has a high percentage of being a dud revival of Splinter Cell. If I'm wrong, I'll celebrate- but nowadays betting low is a pretty safe wager to make. But then again we are talking about a game maybe 3 or more years down the line, and who knows what sort of things might have changed by then? Perhaps this upcoming Prince of Persia remake will dictate soundly how well Ubisoft deals with revisiting past glories.